After Hate: Set the Table, Tune the Room, Play the Song

Hate shouts. We answer with a table that glows, a room that listens, a song anyone can sing. The new book is out—and it’s really a collection of rituals for a kinder city.

I wrote a book about ending antisemitism and kept finding myself writing about bread.

Because there’s a moment when you choose to bless the bread and pass it to someone who didn’t expect to be fed by you. That moment is civilization. It’s also good strategy.

The End of Antisemitism: A Field Manual for Accuracy, Courage & Hospitality is out now (Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FYNB643F). It has policy and metrics and templates you can photocopy, yes—but it also has a stubborn faith in beauty. Beauty that holds a room steady enough to say difficult things kindly. Beauty that trains our hands to open.

Here’s the creative heart of it:

• Shabbat as civic technology. Phones down, eyes up, candles in small glass cups. The soundtrack is old and new at once. You don’t need permission to light the room you’re in.

• Music labs where an oud meets a clarinet meets a loop pedal and three voices who didn’t know they could harmonize. Art is how truth makes friends.

• Hospitality labs—seat maps, quiet corners, dietary notes, and the nerve to invite that neighbor you keep meaning to invite. This is urban design at human scale.

• Myth-vs-Text cards that say: “Quote the line.” When we actually read the verse, the stale slur collapses and everyone exhales. How odd and how beautiful that accuracy can sound like music.

I’m not naïve about hurt. I’m saying we can orchestrate a different habit: counterspeech that is gracious and quick, due-process that protects speech and punishes harm, a 12-module education stack that ends in art and not just quizzes. And yes, a festival with cumin and clove and song and laughter you can hear from the street.

If you’ve been wondering what you can do that feels like you, start here: set one table this month. Invite across a difference. Sing one melody you didn’t grow up with. Carry a small card that reminds you to quote the line and look for the horizon. Then do it again next month. Ritual is the mother of culture.

When the city is finally quiet enough to listen, we will hear it: the sound of people making beauty on purpose. That’s how hate gets small.

CTA: Read the book → https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FYNB643F • More projects, mixes, and tables → lurching.net

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