“If you dream it, is it your will?” by Dan Grossman

Stephen Miller with Shutterstock-AI generated sushi

If you dream it, is it your will?

I found myself eating Trump branded, gold-dust flaked sushi across from Stephen Miller, who’s been in the news a lot lately. Just two bald dudes, him and me, shooting the shit. About what, you may ask?  The subject wasn’t his neo-Nazi views on immigration, I don’t think. Nor was it about the spray-on-triangle-of-hair he wore on his scalp for a minute back in 2017. That is, until it became an internet joke. Speaking of jokes, Miller’s been memed a lot lately. Considering the triangle relationship between Elon Musk, him, and his wife. I was about to bring that up when he asked me a question. “How do you consider yourself a Jew in good standing?” He smiled crookedly. I countered, “How do you like being the most despised man in America?  I forget what our responses were.  But I might have asked something like, “Considered a Jew in good standing by who?” And he might have asked something like, “Despised by who?” That is to say, the phrasing of our questions pointed at the culture divide between us. It was a culture divide I started to feel every time I went to Shabbat services and my rabbi urged us to pray for the IDF and Netanyahu. I might have mentioned this to Miller. Which would explain his eye-roll. I might have looked at his sushi roll, seeing it transform into a migrant child’s liver.  Which my subconscious is unavailable to comment on at the moment. I suppose you might accuse me of abusing my poetic license by revealing that. But what if it’s the truth? You might counter by saying I’m buying into the anti-Semitic history of blood libel. You might accuse me of washing my hands, like Pontius Pilate, of my authorial agency here. But what is “here”? In the subconscious, notions of place are as malleable as those encountered in Theodor Herzel’s first novel Old New Land.  In which he imagines Israel as a socialist paradise with no hatred between Arab and Jew. I was thinking of this book—and what Herzl might think of Miller’s ethnic cleansing strategy—as I left the sushi bar. I wound up at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.  I walked up to it. I proceeded to bash my head against the ancient stones repeatedly. I wanted to see if they were good for anything.

— Dan Grossman