God Can Still Roll Boulders
Jesus is empowering us to tell the truth
Judas betrayed Jesus.
Brutus betrayed Julius Caesar.
Trump, the Muscovite candidate, has betrayed the United States.
Someday, Trump and Putin will join Judas and Brutus in the lowest concentric circle in Dante’s Inferno.
And, someday, Trump, who fomented a coup against our country on Jan. 6, 2021, and who essentially betrays our nation every day, will indeed replace Benedict Arnold as the name most synonymous with American treachery, as I wrote many years ago for the HuffPost.
Maundy Thursday, the night of the ultimate betrayal, has arrived.
For Christians and others who believe in God, Maundy Thursday is the day that Jesus had His final meal with His disciples, the Last Supper, which, according to tradition, was a Passover Seder.
Last night was in fact the first night of Passover, a holiday that commemorates the miracle in which God delivered Moses and the Israelites from the tyranny of Pharaoh, who was enslaving them.
We are living at a time when we have another wannabe tyrant, as evil as any from antiquity, as corrupt as Pontius Pilate, as fraudulent and hypocritical as Caiaphas, as jealous and hateful as Herod, and as treacherous as Judas, all of whom contributed to the betrayal, the false imprisonment and crucifixion of Jesus.
Moses, who led the Israelites during the Exodus, lived somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago.
And Jesus died for our sins roughly 2,000 years ago before He was resurrected.
I am not a pastor or a high priest and would not claim to be anything other than a believer.
Of course, irrespective of whether we believe in God, we can all agree that the truth matters.
To repeat, we are living at a time when we have a dictator manqué, who wishes he were Putin or Hitler, who is threatening to pull us out of NATO, an alliance he has already damaged, and who has savaged our standing in the world with his extrajudicial killings of fishermen in the Caribbean and an illegal war against Iran.
In the extrajudicial killings and the war against Iran, he has almost assuredly committed war crimes by targeting civilians and/or civilian infrastructure.
He is a pathological liar and a sociopath, someone who shows no remorse for violent actions that he plans.
Of all of his acts of evil, the most brutal may be that he is committing an assault on the truth itself, a point that I have made for years, going back to “Exit, Trump, Pursued by a Bear,” a HuffPost piece that I wrote in December 2016.
Indeed, in my first post on Substack in June 2025, “No Kings, No Tyrants,” I reinforced what I had written years ago when I pointed out that Trump’s assault on the truth is one of the gravest threats we face to our democracy, to our freedom of speech, to our freedom of the press, to all the rights we hold dear.
Too many law firms, universities, newspapers and TV stations and entertainment conglomerates have given into Trump’s bullying.
Some papers, magazines and news networks have not abdicated their roles as stewards of the Fourth Estate.
But, as I have warned for sometime, if the Ellisons do get approval from Warner Brothers Discovery’s shareholders, the Ellisons, friends of Trump, who run Paramount Skydance, could take over CNN, a property of Warner Brothers, and turn the 24-hour news network into Trump TV.
CNN would then become Russia TV, as I wrote back in December 2025 in my three-part Substack series on the possible merger.
We have to hope that Warner Brothers shareholders will reject a merger with Paramount.
Were we to lose CNN to Trump and Putin, we will lose a voice of truth, one that has long stood up for freedom of the press around the world.
The truth, of course, has always mattered.
This is true not only in a secular sense, but also in a religious one.
I respect all religious traditions. Without trying to exclude anyone, I might add that, for those who believe in God, who believe in Jesus, it is well understood that He is the way, the truth and the life.
Yes, God shines a light on the truth, and He lives a life that exemplifies this.
As I often point out, I recognize that not everyone believes in God.
But we have to stop all the lies. We have to stand up to the Baalist, or bullyist, and tell the truth about his evil.
People in his cabinet and members of the Congress and the High Court as well as some in the media have to stop enabling him.
They have to stop being cowards, and they need to shine a light on the truth, on the corruption, the evil at the core of this man, an evil that is infecting our country, our democracy, our world.
I might be no more than a voice in the wilderness.
But I have been warning us about this evil man for more than 10 years.
There are some, like Robert Reich, who will rightly say that we have had problems in our country that predate Trump, such as economic inequities which have been building for decades since the failed supply-side policies of the Reagan administration.
That is true, but Ronald Reagan, for all of his imperfections, may have done more than any U.S. president with the possible exception of Harry Truman in standing up to the Soviet Union and ultimately bankrupting it and winning the Cold War.
Other commentators will point out that Citizens United, an atrocious Supreme Court decision, which also predates Trump, wreaked havoc with our democracy by allowing corporations to spend almost unlimited amounts of money in elections.
This point is also true.
We do have a Supreme Court, which has made many horrible decisions in recent decades, including Citizens United and others more recent, such as rulings to overturn Roe v. Wade, to set back affirmative action, to gut parts of the Voting Rights Act, and to grant presidents near-blanket immunity for “official” acts.
Yes, we have problems in our country that preceded Trump and that involve branches of government other than the executive branch.
But we have never had a chief executive as evil, as malignant, as corrupt, as Trump, who has waltzed us into an illegal war, without consulting our allies, the U.N., or the Congress, a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution. He brags about targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran, and in so doing he may very well be committing war crimes, such as when the U.S. military recently destroyed a bridge in the Tehran area.
Trump has always postured that he is a tough guy, but he has no endurance.
He is a small man, who has never had an ethical compass, and who has no impulse control.
He has no understanding of strategy, and he has never learned that one of the secrets to life and to growth as a human being is to delay gratification if we are ever to achieve anything worthwhile on this planet.
In an April Fools’ Day speech, he fooled no one when he once again claimed to have obliterated Iran and then boasted hideously of sending that nation back “to the Stone Age.”
Of course, Trump’s boasts ring hollow. He is losing this war, as Tehran continues to launch missiles and drones at Israel and Gulf nations.
Separate from conducting his unconscionable war against Iran, one that endangers our country, as well as Iranian citizens and other civilians in the region, Trump also issued an executive order to bar children, born in the U.S. to possibly undocumented immigrants, from being citizens.
He issued this executive order, even though all people, born in our country, are automatically U.S. citizens, irrespective of the citizenship status of their parents, a right enshrined in our Constitution. Most of the Supreme Court justices, who are hearing a case on this matter, appear to agree with the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, based on oral questioning earlier this week.
One can only hope that Pam Bondi, who was just fired today, or some other potential whistle-blower will tell the truth concerning the Epstein files and other high crimes and misdemeanors committed by the disgraced, twice-impeached denizen of the White House.
Maybe, if Bondi and others shine a light on the truth about Trump’s evil, we will finally be able to hold a new trial, where we present all of the evidence, where our Congressmen and Senators show a vestige of dignity and courage, like that of Lowell Weicker, Howard Baker and Barry Goldwater, who told Nixon that he would be convicted of impeachment if he did not resign during Watergate.
Republicans need to show the patriotism and honor of men like Weicker, Baker and Goldwater.
It should not take a lot of courage to do the right thing.
It is what God wants us to do.
It is in fact what God demands.
We should want to tell the truth on this Maundy Thursday and every day.
At the Last Supper, Jesus originated the Eucharist, the Sacrament of Holy Communion, when He offered His disciples His body and His blood through the bread and wine at the Seder.
He was, of course, betrayed by Judas Iscariot.
The Gospels, as we know, teach us that Jesus was crucified on the cross on Good Friday and that He was resurrected on the third day, on Easter Sunday.
As for Passover and the Exodus, which took place centuries before Jesus, God taught the Israelites to welcome the stranger, for we too were once strangers in a strange land.
Similarly, on Maundy Thursday, Jesus, the Son of God, taught us to love one another, to love our neighbors and strangers.
Not one of us is perfect.
Again, I recognize that not everyone believes in God.
And those people who do believe in God call Him by many different names, not only Yahweh or Jesus.
Whatever our beliefs, we all do know the difference between right and wrong.
And we all must tell the truth.
God will always be able to roll boulders, to walk on water, to part the Red Sea and to perform miracles, whatever our beliefs.
I should note, though, that in the view of Kabbalists, Jewish mystics, God has stepped back from performing many of the overt miracles that we witnessed thousands of years ago.
Some mystics believe that God in our era wants to show what He can do in a different way, by empowering us to do the right thing, to do His will, and to illuminate the truth.
We can do it.
Happy holidays! And chag sameach!