This has been a tough week.

I don’t need to tell you that. You’ve lived through most of it too. But let’s recap, just to be sure we’re all singing from the same Union Prayer Book.

It began with the shootings at Brown University. Two students were killed and nine injured—on the thirteenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre. Whether that timing was coincidence or intent, we will never know. The alleged gunman later shot himself after murdering a former classmate and an MIT professor. It is horrific. It should not be normal. Yet it is.

This year alone, depending on which database you consult, there have been somewhere between 159 and 231 school shootings in the United States. Do you know how many there have been in the rest of the world? Three. Let that sink in.

What makes this even more troubling is the Trump administration’s handling of the case. First, they latched onto a suspect and prematurely announced an arrest—apparently so Kash Patel could look like he was “on the case.” The man turned out to be innocent. Then, when authorities identified the actual perpetrator as a Portuguese immigrant, the administration suspended the visa lottery program.

Let’s drill down on that logic. One hundred fifty-nine school shootings this year. One committed by a legal immigrant. So the response is to shut down an immigration program because it fits a preferred narrative—rather than acknowledge that we lead the world in gun violence and gun deaths and might want to address our gun laws.

It is both depressing and troubling to realize that the current administration and its supporters prefer grim fairy tales to real solutions. Even more depressing is that this surprises no one.

December 28 will mark the one-hundredth anniversary of my father’s birth. He fled to this country to escape the Nazis and antisemitism. He survived, and he thrived—but he never forgot what happened. He begged us not to forget. I’ve tried to honor that by reminding people what happens when any group is scapegoated as the source of the world’s problems.

And yet, this past year, hatred of Jews has clearly been on the rise. According to the ADL, antisemitism is at an all-time high in the United States. This is a complicated issue—too complicated to fully unpack here—but electing a president who dines with Holocaust deniers and openly embraces Christian nationalism does not help. Nor does a media culture that routinely conflates Zionism with Judaism.

Antisemitism has been around since the first circumcision. And sadly, because some people feel a need to hate, it may always be with us.

That reality makes what happened on Bondi Beach all the more disturbing. There were inspiring acts of courage—Ahmed Al Ahmed, who disarmed one of the gunmen while being shot, and Boris and Sofia Gurman, who were killed trying to disarm the other. But Bondi remains a stark reminder of how deeply antisemitism still runs. Sixteen people were killed and forty injured while celebrating Hanukkah—a holiday known as the Festival of Lights because it commemorates a story about light enduring against impossible odds.

Despite worldwide condemnation of the atrocity, it made me question whether light truly does endure. We seem to have learned very little since six million Jews were murdered during World War II. That fact alone should break our hearts.

It begs a very simple question: when the fuck are we going to learn that despising someone because of how they worship, the color of their skin, who they choose to love, or where they come from is a cancer on our humanity? If you feel the need to hate someone because they don’t conform to your worldview, perhaps it is time to realize the person you hate is yourself.

Then there were the horrific murders of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner. Every murder is a tragedy. This one is compounded by the circumstances: a troubled son alleged to be the killer, a daughter discovering the bodies. The pain their family must be experiencing is inconceivable.

But this went beyond a family tragedy. Texting with my sister that day, we both felt the same thing. This didn’t feel like a murder in someone else’s family. It felt personal.

Part of that is because Rob Reiner helped shape our zeitgeist. Stand by Me captured the magic of summer and the bonds of childhood friendship. The Princess Bride was about the fairy tales our parents and grandparents told us so we could fall asleep feeling safe. When Harry Met Sally made us believe in the power of love. A Few Good Men, The American President, and Ghosts of Mississippi were about decency and humanity triumphing over cynicism and hate.

In other words, his films made us feel better about who we were—and hopeful about who we could become.

Rob Reiner, in real life, always appealed to our better angels. Or as Lincoln said in his First Inaugural Address, we are “touched by the better angels of our nature.”

He was never quiet in his opposition to Donald Trump. He believed Trump was morally and mentally unfit. But he believed in us. He believed in the Golden Rule and in the idea that the moral arc of history bends toward justice.

When violence took Charlie Kirk—a man whose views he found abhorrent—Reiner described the murder as an absolute horror. He believed violence is unacceptable regardless of political belief.

Losing the Reiners felt like losing a member of the family. We just didn’t realize he was mishpokah until he was gone.

Which is why, when the pretender-in-chief chose to attack him after his death, it made everything even more depressing.

Donald Trump believes only in avarice and greed. And every day of his presidency, the light and luminosity of the American experiment dims a little more.

And so we’re left with a choice. We can accept this drift toward cruelty and chaos as inevitable, or we can remember that history is not something that merely happens to us—it is something we shape, moment by moment, by what we tolerate and what we refuse to normalize.

Even in dark days we need to preserve the light.