In their Zelenskyy meeting, Trump and Vance laid waste to a cherished Yiddish value
Under the current administration, common sense — or sechel — is under attack
Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. Photo by Getty Images
Robert Zaretsky March 1, 2025
Whenever my late uncle, Abraham Marks, was asked how business was, he invariably replied, “I make a living.” In fact, as a macher in New York’s shmatta district, Uncle Abe made a very good living. What was the key to success? Far gelt bakumt men alts, nor keyn sechel nit, he would no less invariably answer: “Money gives you most everything except common sense.”
By “common sense,” my uncle meant the shared knowledge we have of our shared reality. But by common sense, I think Abe also meant “common decency.” Abe insisted upon the importance of not just the first meaning — collected experience and plain reason to navigate the marketplace — but also the second and equally important meaning: the presence and practice of normative values. These ranged from treating employees fairly to dealing civilly with customers. For Abe, common sense and common decency had much in common; it is reasonable to be respectful.
Of course, long before the extraordinary events that occurred yesterday in the White House, my uncle’s worldview was embattled. Now, however, it seems ready to be embalmed. It pays to watch not just the final minutes of the meeting between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the tag team of Donald Trump and JD Vance, but instead the meeting in its entirety. Over the course of those 50 minutes, we witness not just the utter collapse of common sense, but also of common decency. Watch the indifference marking Trump’s coppery and floppy face as Zelenskyy shared with him photos of malnourished soldiers and maimed children. Or compare the regard for his fellow Ukrainians voiced by Zelenskyy in coherent and urgent words and the regard uniquely for himself vented by Trump in disordered and capricious words.
It is too soon to measure the full consequences that will follow this catastrophic encounter. For now, we can only marvel over the failure of the leaders of the Republican Party to resist the realignment between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and the failure of the leaders of the European Union to respond meaningfully to this new world order. Still, while there is no reason to hope that Republicans will one day prefer the sacrifice of official perks and privileges to the sacrifice of their souls, there is no reason — yet — to despair that Europeans will find the will and means to unite in opposition to the burgeoning of this new barbarism.
It is not too soon, however, to weigh the failure of words to measure the momentousness of this meeting. Many headlines are peppered with adjectives like “fiery” and “tense” — the sort of language we would expect in the closing minutes of a close football match. Other headlines go as far as “shouting match” and “blow up” — the sort of description that, while not fitting for a ballgame, is an even poorer fit for what took place in the Oval Office. Even words like “surreal” and “unreal,” used in captions and by commentators, fail to do justice to the event. It was, after all, all too real.
And yet, it seems that after Trump there can be no reality, if only in the way we once believed. The impact of his language, rooted in its inversion of values and subversion of facts, threatens the very basis of our common sense and common decency. This assault on the reality of our world has consequences for language, just as the violence done to language reverberates in the world. “Every destruction begins with the destruction of language,” the late novelist Amos Oz observed, “when you call things by names which are not their own.”
During this pause between what happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow, we need to remember Oz’s warning. This means, most obviously, that we insist Zelenskyy is not a dictator and Ukraine did not start this war, just as it means that we insist Putin is a dictator and did start the war; and that Trump is not a neutral “arbitrator” between Russia and Ukraine, but instead is Putin’s willing collaborator in the defeat and destruction of an independent and democratic Ukraine.
But there is something more, something deeper that we must not forget. At the end of the day, all we have are words — words rooted in what my uncle meant by sechel — to prevent the end of the world.
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