Posted on April 22, 2025
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As a parent with young children, if an animated movie is released with enough fanfare then there is a strong likelihood that I’m going to be forced to watch it at some point. There have been many of these movies that I’ve enjoyed and even returned to with my children, and then there have been some for which I was clearly not the target audience. I don’t know how many of you were subjected to watching the emoji movie, but I have that distinct honor. Not to spoil it, although I think they did that themselves, the movie is centered on emojis as characters in a phone. And the focus is on the meh emoji. This face represents inference, a lack of response, a general apathy with what’s going on. Prior to the movie I didn’t realize that emojis have names, but recently I’ve been thinking a lot about that meh emoji.
On Saturday evening, many of us gathered around the Seder table to begin the celebrations of the festival, Passover. We ate the symbolic foods, we drank 4 cups of wine, we told our people story, and we participated in these age-old rituals of celebration and memory. Towards the end of the Seder, we are supposed to open the door of our homes to welcome in Elijah. While we felt safe sending our children to greet our honored guest (who once again rudely stood us up), there have been various moments in Jewish history when opening the door during the Seder was unsafe and definitely not advisable. We closed the door, concluded our Seder, sang almost all of the songs, and we went to bed, feeling safe and content – as I’m sure most of our families did.
On Sunday morning, we awoke to the news that in another part of this country a Jewish family had gone to bed after their Passover Seder celebrations, only to be woken up in the middle of the night because of an intruder setting fire to their home and threatening their safety. Governor Josh Shapiro and his family had participated in a similar celebration to many of us, I wonder if they opened their door to welcome Elijah in and we now unfortunately know that there was someone else waiting outside their home. While of course there is an element of the attack that was targeted at him because he is the Governor and holds that office; it is hard to escape the fact that this was an attack on a Jewish Governor, on his Jewish family, on the night of a Jewish holiday.
As media started to cover the story, although I’m not convinced that it got anywhere near the attention it really deserved. I waited. I was waiting to hear the full-throated condemnations of the attack. I was waiting to hear our leaders reaching out in support of Governor Shapiro, and I was waiting to hear that people actually cared about what had happened. I am still waiting because the response to this terrible incident has been completely insufficient and unacceptable.
And while I am waiting, I am not surprised, even though I remain disappointed. In the divided political climate in which we are living it is sadly unsurprising that politicians have been unwilling to reach across the aisle and do the right thing to check on a colleague, even one that they disagree with. And I feel that even those politicians on the same “side” as Governor Shapiro have been less than full throated in their response and condemnation of what’s happened. I suspect that the Jewish component and the Palestine element our factors in their muted response. In any case, a Governor’s home and family were attacked and instead of universal outrage there was a limited response from politicians, a limited response from the media, and a limited response from society as a whole. Once again it was one of those times when as members of the Jewish community we waited for our friends of other religious traditions to share messages of support and outrage, but by and large there was silence.
This most recent attack is unfortunately symptomatic of America in 2025. 3 ½ months in, if we were looking to characterize this year, I wonder if we might call it the year of meh. There are lots of potential justifications and reasons for why it has become a year of math, but the damage being done is devastating.
For us as a Jewish community, living through a time of meh did not begin in January, we have been experiencing it for many many months. A Jewish business gets vandalised – meh, Jewish students are prevented from getting to class on campus – meh, Jews are assaulted walking down the street in our cities – meh. We know how painful that response has been and how it is harmed our sense of security and safety, our very place in American society. But the epidemic has now spread to include our entire country. An innocent man is wrongly deported – meh, thousands of federal employees lose their jobs in Washington damaging essential services – meh, the health secretary suggests autism is an epidemic and seeks the environmental cause – meh. America in 2025 – meh.
While I learned about the word meh from a movie, it turns out that it didn’t originate there or even with the creation of emojis on the keyboard. The author Ben Zimmer went searching for the origins of this word and shares a theory that the origin of the word meh goes back to Yiddish.[1] In Alexander Harkavy’s Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary of 1928 the definitions were given ‘as an interjection meaning “be it as it may” and an adjective meaning “so-so”’. And in the earlier 1898 version of the dictionary, Harkavy considers it as a “bleating” interjection, associated with the noise a sheep makes. It appears that there is a strong likelihood that the term meh has a Yiddish origin,[2] which on the one hand feels strange as it comes across as such an unJewish response to the state of the world. But perhaps it speaks to a period of time when Jews felt powerless to affect change and so in response to those things that were beyond their control they responded: meh.
Whatever the origins of the word there are understandable reasons for why it feels like it is sweeping the nation in 2025. For one, the last several years have been exhausting. As politics has grown more and more divisive and toxic, having lived through a pandemic, and with unending wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East I think that people are exhausted. This has been a tough period to live through and many of us are feeling burnt out, exhausted, and completely depleted in the face of what has been happening. And then in the last 3 ½ months there has just been so much news too consume, too many things happening all at once in a way that is simply overwhelming. It is hard to know where to begin, what to focus on, how we should be responding. And so in the face of this overwhelm, at a time when we are already exhausted – meh.
But even if the word originates in the Hebrew, this is not an acceptable Jewish response. In his book, “Thunder in the Soul,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes:
There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous. A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an expression becoming the rule and being in turn accepted.[3]
He may have been writing over 50 years ago, but his words ring true for today. For Heschel, the challenge to this approach comes from the Prophets. When they saw injustice they were compelled to call it out, when they saw suffering they were motivated to speak out, when they saw wrong in the world they were driven to fix it. No problem was too small for them, nothing could be ignored, because as Heschel writes: “the prophets passionately proclaim that God himself is concerned with the “transitory social problems,” with the blights of society, with the affairs of the marketplace.”[4]
Meh would not have been a word in the Prophet’s vocabulary. But with a slight change in vowel sounds we get to a word that they would have said a lot, the Hebrew word mah – meaning what. They would have used it to express incredulity at the situation, to share disbelief at what has been accepted, to share their dismay at what has become the norm. Were they around today the Prophets would never respond meh, instead they would be responding with a forceful mah – what?
An innocent man is wrongly deported – what? Thousands of federal employees lose their jobs in Washington damaging essential services – what? The health secretary suggests autism is an epidemic and seeks the environmental cause – what?
We need to move 2025 from being a year of meh to a year of mah. And there are two mah’s, two “what’s” that we need to be constantly asking.
First: Mah Koreh – what is happening? We cannot accept the overwhelm that things are just this way because. We have to ask questions and be curious. We have to seek out the truth behind the headlines, because our media cannot always be trusted. We have to think for ourselves and determine what is right and what is wrong, what is unacceptable, what is unjust, and what must be challenged. I will be honest and share that at times I have been avoiding watching or reading the news because at times it has been too much. And while that might be good for my mental health, there has to be a balance, because if I don’t know what is happening, then I am part of the meh problem. Lack of awareness leads to indifference, because we don’t even know that there is something calling for our response.
And then we must ask: Mah Naaseh – what shall we do? How can we respond. With so much going on in our world, so many issues calling for our attention, we have to accept that we cannot fix or respond to everything. But we can pick our issue, we can find an ally organization and we can do the work on the local level to effect change and make a difference. We also don’t have to wait for an event or action that requires a response, we can instead get involved proactively and preemptively. If you are concerned about the treatment of immigrants, then reach out to Jewish Family Service of MetroWest and see what volunteers they need here in our region. If you are dismayed at the treatment of the LGBTQ+ community, then reach out to Keshet and find out what can be done to ensure that our local communities remain open and welcoming. If you are scared about the erosion of democracy, then I know that Aaron Dorfman and the folks at a More Perfect Union are ready to work with you and support local endeavors to get out the vote and protect our democratic institutions. These are just three examples; I am sure that we could come up with many others.
2025 may have begun as a year of meh, where there has unfortunately been a lack of response to issues and events that have cried out for a reaction. And there are understandable reasons why this has been the case. But while meh might be Yiddish, it is definitely not Jewish. Our Jewish response has always been mah to ask what: what is happening? And what shall we do? It speaks to the fact that we have the power to effect change, that we have the power to make a difference, that we have the power to respond.
We cannot fix everything all at once; but starting with a single issue, on the local level, we can take those first steps in responding. We can make a difference locally and we can pick our issue to effect change. Because the end of the story is not yet written, we do not yet know mah yihiyeh – what will be. But I am certain that together we can make sure that ultimatey, despite the challenges and the bumps along the way, despite the opposition and the injustice, despite the silence and the meh, yihiyeh tov – we will make sure that our future will be good.
Shabbat Shalom.
[1] The theory and subsequent quotes are from his article: A History of Meh, from Leo Rosten to Auden to The Simpsons, available here: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/09/meh-etymology-tracing-the-yiddish-word-from-leo-rosten-to-auden-to-the-simpsons.html
[2] A Guardian article shares a similar theory: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2007/mar/05/newmedia.broadcasting
[3] Thunder in the Soul, p.53
[4] Ibid