Elections end, but certain images remain. During the New York City Mayoral race, one aspect of it stayed with me: rabbis campaigning for Zohran Mamdani.
Throughout the campaign, I, like many, had Mamdani’s victory photos and videos in my social feed — the handful of rabbis rallying for him, their arms raised, their smiles wide.
My reaction to these images and videos was visceral — not academic disagreement or even emotional frustration, but something deeper. Now, with the results in, that feeling has hardened into something sharper and sadder.
The intensity of my reaction surprised me. I kept asking myself what, exactly, provoked it. Was it their politics? Their slogans? Their naiveté? And then it hit me—it is their smiles.
At every Passover Seder, Jews meet the Four Sons — archetypes meant to teach Jewish children how to engage with our tradition. One of them, the Wicked Son, helped me understand what I was seeing then — and what I see now, the day after the results came in.
The Four Sons each ask questions about Passover. The Wicked Son asks: “What does this service mean to you?” Not “us”—you. With that single word, he cuts himself off from the community. The Haggadah’s response is unsparing: “It is because of what God did for me—not you—when I came out of Egypt.” Had the Wicked Son been there in Egypt, the text teaches, he would not have been redeemed.
What connects the Wicked Son to these campaign photos and videos is not the politics, but the manner—the spirit of separation. The rabbis’ smiles are broad, untroubled, pleased with themselves—a giddiness detached from the concerns they know others in their community have been feeling. There was no trace of seriousness or humility, no hint of concern for the fear and anxiety that has gripped the community over the past months. Only the sheen of self-satisfaction.
This isn’t political difference; this isn’t internal dissent within the Jewish community. It is the spirit of the Rasha—the Wicked Child of our tradition.
Some will say these rabbis were simply standing up for their notion of justice. But even justice, in our tradition, demands humility. Dissent can be courageous or cruel, undertaken with gravity or with glee, in communal solidarity or in separation. The manner matters. Their wickedness lies not in holding unpopular views, but in the joy they displayed while their community trembled. They knew many Jews felt fear, vulnerability, even betrayal—and they smiled anyway.
Judaism has never feared debate. We thrive on argument, challenge, and moral struggle. But Jewish argument in our tradition has always carried an assumption of shared fate. These rabbis—by their demeanor, by their public delight—rejected that. They smiled as if they no longer belonged to the same story as the rest of us.
They know what their candidate had said, his calls to boycott Israel, his threat to arrest Israel’s prime minister, his acceptance of “globalize the Intifada,” his endorsement of blood-libel accusations against the Jewish state. They knew how deeply these words cut other Jews—and they smiled anyway.
I believe a rabbi’s duty is not to mirror the world’s applause but to stand, even in dissent, with moral seriousness and empathy for their own people. That empathy was nowhere to be seen.
Our tradition tells us to include even the Wicked Child at the Seder table. But it also commands us to name wickedness when we see it—not to condemn the person, but to defend the community’s integrity.
The election is over but the smiles remain. And what they reveal is something more corrosive than politics: the ease with which some spiritual leaders can separate themselves from their own people—and enjoy it.
That is the wickedness. And we should say so plainly.
Todd L. Pittinsky is a professor of Technology, AI, and Society at Stony Brook University (SUNY). His forthcoming book is Antisemitism Online: An Ancient Hatred in the Modern World (Oxford University Press). He blogs semi-regularly at The Times of Israel Marketplace of Ideas.
