Shabbat shalom.
Oy vey iz mir, what a week.
My heart goes out to the family of Charlie Kirk. Although he was a “steadfast friend of Israel”, he was better known as a man of far right conservative opinions, a flame thrower in the culture wars, and very popular with the younger generations. He was a modern day younger version of Rush Limbaugh. I was no steadfast friend of Mr. Kirk or most of his opinions. I did not follow him, or his somewhat amazing career, but his influence in the MAGA world was said to be unrivaled.
Unfortunately, political violence is having its renaissance. In a world lurching toward illiberalism, assassinations, shootings, and bombings aren’t aberrations anymore, they’re mile markers on the bumpy road back to barbarism. From America to Israel to Europe, the political arena is becoming a shooting gallery, and the rest of us are left to wonder whether we’re citizens of democracies or extras in a new Mad Max sequel.
This week also marked the anniversary of 9/11, which for me is not an abstraction. My cousin, Robin Kaplan, was on one of the planes that hit the World Trade Towers that morning. Her loss is a personal reminder that political violence is never just an event on TV – it shatters families, hollows out communities, and leaves scars that don’t fade with time.
And yet, here we are, two decades later, watching violence metastasize again. If political violence is the disease, then social media is the super-spreader that if unchecked, could create a new strain of violence that ends who knows where. Most social media has devolved into platforms for nazi porn, and in-between a few good recipes, now feeds up snuff material featuring the brutal death of not only real human beings, but of civil society itself. Every algorithm-juiced outrage cycle ratchets up our collective temperature, and what we used to call “public discourse” has now curdled into a mosh pit of rage. Which brings me to a modest proposal: TURN IT OFF! Not forever, not in some performative “I deleted Twitter/X, now I’m pure” way, but enough to lower what I call our SQ – our Stupidity Quotient.
We all know IQ, the supposed measure of brainpower. SQ, by contrast, is the measure of how much collective dumbness a culture tolerates, amplifies, and eventually normalizes. And make no mistake: our SQ is red-lining. Look no further than the reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Within minutes, conspiracy merchants were shrieking that the “Deep State” staged it. Meme warriors on the left celebrated with photoshopped shooting-range targets. On the right, influencers claimed the real scandal wasn’t the murder itself, but that Democrats weren’t condemning it fast enough. And the numerology freaks (God help us) were already decoding the shooting’s timestamp as evidence of divine judgment or an Antifa ritual. That’s not political discourse; that’s stupidity, weaponized and crowd-sourced.
And the SQ didn’t stop there. A Nasdaq sustainability strategist was fired for social-media posts celebrating Kirk’s murder. A Carolina Panthers staffer lost his job for suggesting the victim’s rhetoric “deserved” retaliation. MSNBC cut ties with Matthew Dowd for remarks that linked incendiary speech to the violence itself. Even Stephen King had to walk back a viral post falsely claiming Kirk had advocated “stoning gays.” Each of these wasn’t just a career implosion; it was another datapoint in how a culture drunk on SQ can’t distinguish between critique, cruelty, and conspiracy.
So yes, by all means, rage against assassinations, shootings, and bombings. But if you want to stop fueling the fire, step one is simple: log off, cool down, and find ways (real, embodied, human ways), to lower the SQ.
Which brings me to a counterweight in these dark days: random acts of kindness.
The week’s news reads like a blood-stained scroll. Charlie Kirk cut down. Another school shooting in Colorado makes barely a blip in the national attention span, because what’s another few dead kids in a land where firearms outnumber people? Israel takes out Hamas negotiators in Qatar with a precision strike that looks, from one angle, like cold strategy and, from another, like a plotline from Fauda that escaped the writers’ room. The world is a slaughterhouse this week.
So let’s talk about kindness. Not because it cancels out the horrors, but because without a counterweight, we risk sinking into the pit.
Jews, of course, have a long, messy tradition of kindness. Not always pretty, not always perfect, but defiantly human in a world hell-bent on smashing the human out of us. Take the concept of chesed which means, “loving-kindness”. It isn’t an optional extra, like sprinkles on a sundae. It’s one of the bedrocks. And in moments when the world is busy reenacting a Quentin Tarantino fever dream, chesed is how Jews remind ourselves that survival isn’t enough. You’ve got to survive with soul.
Consider the Jewish humanitarian groups who’ve stepped outside the Jewish world entirely. In 2025, Jewish aid networks helped fund food convoys for Sudanese refugees fleeing ethnic slaughter, and Israeli medical NGOs sent teams to earthquake-ravaged Turkey, setting up mobile clinics in villages where the government had all but vanished. These aren’t grand geopolitical gestures; they’re acts of defiance against despair.
Sometimes the kindness is laced with irony. In Gaza, even now, Israeli medics have treated Palestinian children while under rocket fire. It’s the maddening paradox of this war: the same IDF that bombs a weapons depot in the morning may be operating a field hospital in the afternoon.
Then there are quieter, stranger stories. The Chabad rabbi in Kathmandu who runs a soup kitchen for stranded Israeli backpackers, or the Jewish doctor in Florida who, after a hurricane, drove around neighborhoods with his pickup truck turned into a mobile pharmacy, handing out insulin from an ice chest. No cameras, no press releases. Just chesed.
But maybe my favorite Jewish kindness stories are the kind of weird ones. Like the elderly Jew in Chicago who, after being mugged, refused to press charges and instead showed up at the kid’s sentencing with a job offer at his hardware store. Or the Hasid in Brooklyn who noticed a homeless man outside his building every Friday and started slipping a bottle of grape juice and a challah into his bag. The homeless man, not Jewish, began to call it “my Sabbath starter kit.”
And here’s the good news: it isn’t just Jews. Globally, researchers have tracked what they call the “benevolence bump”, a surge in kindness that spiked during COVID-19 and, against all cynical expectations, never faded. Helping strangers is still about ten percent higher than before the pandemic. It turns out that even after years of doomscrolling, our species hasn’t completely forgotten how to hold the door open, hand a meal to someone who’s hungry, or slip a few bills into a stranger’s GoFundMe.
Here’s the thing: random acts of kindness don’t stop bullets, drones, or fanatic ideologies. They don’t resurrect a dead cousin or erase the sight of blood gushing from an assassin’s bullet or bring hostages home. But they are a middle finger to despair. In a week where the news cycle feels like it was programmed by Hieronymus Bosch on meth, kindness is the Jewish way of saying: you don’t get my soul along with my suffering.
That’s the juxtaposition I keep coming back to. Random acts of madness such as assassinations, shootings, and bombings, are loud, dramatic, and headline-grabbing. Random acts of kindness are quiet, often invisible, occasionally ridiculous. But they accumulate. They build an alternate record of what it means to be human, Jewishly or otherwise.
So yes, the world is a mess this week. It probably will be next week too. But somewhere a rabbi is ladling soup, a Jewish grandma is covering the medical bill for a stranger, and some kid in Tel Aviv is giving his seat on the bus to an old man. None of those will trend on Twitter/X. But they are the yeast that makes the bread rise.
And maybe, just maybe, every time someone commits a little act of chesed, like slipping bread to a stranger, sheltering a refugee or immigrant, or forgiving a thief, they’re not only keeping the world upright, they’re dialing down our SQ. Because nothing lowers the Stupidity Quotient of a culture faster than kindness, performed without hashtags, without headlines, and without expectation of return. Lowering the SQ won’t come from politicians or pundits. It’ll come from us, handing out bread instead of bile.
So do a mitzvah this week. Shut off your social media feeds and commit a random act of kindness.
And please be safe out there.
Brad out.
This post is dedicated to Robin Kaplan, and for every life shattered by senseless violence.
Jew News Review 