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n a recent column “One Nation United in Wanting This Election to End” Heather Wilhelm speculates that the record numbers of early and absentee voters in many locales reflects the desire of sane people to stop thinking about the candidates.

Even if Wilhelm is right their respite will be brief. For by the time this issue of Mishpacha is in readers’ hands Americans will find themselves with a new president-elect whom 60 percent of the public believes to be untrustworthy. There is no awakening from this reality.

Each candidate has made only one compelling argument for his/her candidacy: “Look at the other gal/guy.” If Hillary is elected she will likely be recovering from a just recently canceled FBI investigation which is approximately where we left matters when her hubby left office.

Andrew McCarthy a columnist for the National Review who was the lead prosecutor in the first World Trade Center bombing case has advocated that the Clinton Foundation be prosecuted under the RICO statutes as a racketeering operation to trade political access and favor for donations and other lucrative fees and benefits and to circumvent campaign finance laws against foreign donations. Hillary’s private server over which highly classified material was transmitted was a means of furthering the fraud by hiding incriminating evidence from public scrutiny and pesky investigators.

For his part Trump is possibly the least knowledgeable person on the issues facing the United States ever to run for the presidency and blissfully ignorant of that fact.

The widespread distaste for both candidates ensures that post-election America will become even more bitterly divided than it already is — certainly far more so than in 2008 when it was hoped that the election of the first black president would usher in a new area of amity.

WHAT CAN BE DONE to restore some degree of unity to a fractured and angry country? One step would to be to work toward a shared set of “rules of the game” without which none of our national institutions — Congress the courts the press — have any legitimacy in the eyes of over half the public. Let’s take the press as just one example.

The overwhelming majority of Americans of both parties consider the mainstream media both print and electronic to be overwhelmingly pro-Clinton. Such perceptions of a media “mobilized” for a particular candidate were not the norm during the era of the three nightly news shows of my youth. Even the New York Times of those days made an effort to separate its news and editorial divisions.

Donald Trump’s unsavory vocabulary and allegations that he engaged in predatory behavior are legitimate news stories. But they have completely overshadowed no less newsworthy stories. The machinations of the Clinton Foundation could not be completely elided. But they have not been pursued with the avidity shown for far less relevant allegations of Mr. Trump’s boorish character. Once journalists would have been eager to make their reputations by unraveling the intertwined tentacles of the Clinton Foundation Teneo Consulting and Hillary’s State Department. Today they would prefer to uncover a new Trump accuser.

WikiLeaks has provided a stream of daily scandals that have gone grossly underreported and underanalyzed: disparaging comments about Catholics by the Clinton campaign team; advice from Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook not to mention support for Israel in front of any partisan Democratic groups; campaign chairman John Podesta’s agreement that the Iran deal which Hillary ardently supports will likely lead to nuclear war and was an act of appeasement; the wonderment of a top Podesta aide that Hillary ever imagined she could get away with the private server; and the clearing of stories by reporters from prominent news organizations with the Clinton campaign.

A small but welcome step to leveling the playing field would be to get rid of moderators from presidential debates. The temptation for moderators to put their hands on the scale is too great to resist. High school debaters manage to get along with only a timekeeper. They debate one another not with moderators and presidential candidates should do no less.

Unfortunately the notion of rules of the game is foreign to the progressive sensibility. Progressive blogger Matthew Yglesias went so far as to praise Hillary’s cynicism in changing political positions as a virtue. What progressives seek he argues is “a person who cares more about results than process [i.e. procedural norms] who cares more about winning the battle than being well-liked and a person who believes in asking what she can get away with rather than what would look best.”

The basic rule of America’s republican government —that laws are made by the citizens’ elected representatives — is foreign to the progressive mindset always deeply suspicious of “the people.” President Obama famously announced in 2014 that he would not be deterred by Congress’s failure to pass legislation he sought. “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” he said. Executive orders and grants of discretionary authority to administrative agencies buttressed by an acquiescent judiciary are simply ways of evading republican lawmaking and accountability to citizens.

Thus the question of how to restore a modicum of national identity short of enemy attack remains open. And neither candidate has offered any real solutions.

Just One Shabbos

South Africa’s Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein is quite possibly the Jewish world’s greatest optimist. Or put another way the staunchest believer in the power of just one Shabbos to transform Jewish lives.

Ever since he took the phenomenally successful 2013 Shabbos Project in South Africa international he has faced skepticism about the possibility of convincing not-yet-observant Jews — outside the context of South Africa’s tight-knit largely homogenous community — to observe Shabbos in all its halachic details. Yet he continues to insist that the Shabbos Project is not about providing a “Shabbos experience” but about experiencing Shabbos in all its detail.

Recently he sent me a number of letters from those whose lives were upturned by the Shabbos Project. One was from the Phoenix co-chair of the Shabbos Project event which will take place this coming Shabbos Parshas Lech Lecha.

In October 2014 Dr. Lana Wilder was “an unaffiliated nonobservant secular Jew married to an unaffiliated non-Jew.” Yet when she joined hundreds of Jewish women for the challah-baking at the local JCC largely at the urging of her daughter who attends a Jewish school she felt for the first time “the connection I had to the generations of powerful wonderful Jewish women from Sarah Imeinu all the way down to my mother to me to my three amazing daughters.” And at that moment she felt an “obligation to maintain that 5 000-year-old chain connecting my children back through Sinai to Sarah and the other matriarchs.”

That Shabbos she and her husband participated in the entire Shabbos Project experience — communal dinner Shabbat lunch walking to the Orthodox service topped off by an amazing Havdalah concert.

And she and her husband have never looked back. They koshered their kitchen have observed every Shabbos since then and he is now in the homestretch of a full Orthodox conversion. They are unaffiliated no more.

Joy in the Windy City

I woke up at 4:10 a.m. last Thursday morning. I had not set the alarm clock but I was not disappointed to be up so early. I could now check the Cubs score without violating my Yom Kippur kabbalah not to open the computer before davening unless it is still before alos hashachar.

The Chicago Cubs were ahead of the Cleveland Indians 6-3 in the seventh game of the World Series. It was already the sixth inning and the Cubs still had the most overpowering reliever in baseball waiting in the bullpen.

To sit at the computer following the score would clearly violate the spirit if not the letter of my kabbalah. The sunrise minyan was well over an hour away. I figured that the dishes in the sink back exercises and my daily quota of Mishnayos should pretty much fill up the time until minyan. And the game would likely be over by then.

As I stood at the sink instead of savoring the Cubs’ anticipated victory I worried about the potential loss of my favorite all-purpose metaphor: the Cubs’ century-long record of futility. I must have made reference to my lifelong support of the Cubs in half a dozen columns and countless speeches. Always a sure laugh line. What would I do now? (Yes writers actually think like this.)

I broke down and checked the score one more time before davening. Mistake. It was tied. The Indians had scored three runs off the aforementioned reliever with victory only four outs away.

Every long-suffering Cubs fan who remembers the team’s collapse in 2003 after an overenthusiastic fan tipped a foul ball out of the mitt of outfielder Moises Alou with the Cubs holding a three-run lead and only five outs from clinching a World Series berth knew what that portended — certain defeat.

At the haneitz minyan I tried to convince myself that my unprecedentedly large contribution to the tzedakah cup had nothing to do with the Cubs but only with the aggressive manner in which the gabbai shook it and my lack of a smaller coin. Unable to come up with a compelling reason why Hashem should favor the Cubs over the Indians I left them out of my davening. Still I could not entirely avoid periodic thoughts that I had doomed the Cubs by that final forbidden peek at the score just as I had once worried (in a fit of what psychologists term “magical thinking”) that I jinxed the club in 1969 by leaving for Europe when they were seven games up on New York only to return to find the Mets headed for their first World Series triumph.

After davening I scrupulously maintained my kevius — not wishing to risk damaging the Cubs’ cause further just in case it was still relevant.

When I finally checked the computer and learned that the Cubs had somehow overcome the shift in momentum against them and on the Indians’ home field in what some were calling the greatest Game Seven ever none of the tears of joy predicted by my children flowed. At most there was a brief flicker of relief.

And with that lack of excitement came the recognition that I’m no longer the teenager I was in 1969 when the Cubs first broke my heart. One does not remain a youth forever. Nor should one want to.