So Barack Obama is the president.  It’s a rather weighted thought: it’s very final, very concrete.  It’s been written in stone.  January has come and gone, and we have a new head of state.

Having a new president is really a much bigger deal than you can comprehend in a minute or two.   People think, “Oh yeah, president, that’s a big job, that must be hard,” but it doesn’t really always click exactly how much impact this one person has on your life.

Or that’s how it used to be, anyway.  After eight years of Bush, the country is suddenly much more aware of how much of a mess the president can make of things.  People are scared of another Bush, and that’s essentially why McCain lost.  He seems too much like Bush, even though they’re not really all that much alike.  He’s old, he’s white, he’s a Republican, he’s associated with the Christian right – McCain was screwed from the outset.

And on the other side of things, Barack Obama’s like the freaking anti-Bush.  He’s young, he’s black, he’s a democrat, he’s highly liberal on social issues – people who didn’t like Bush almost had an obligation to vote for him.

Barack Obama has done something that hasn’t been done in American politics in a very long time, maybe not since FDR.  He truly energized the voting populace.  He rallied young Americans who might not have cared enough to vote otherwise.  He has brought the country to a level of hope that it hasn’t been anywhere near for a lot more than just the Bush years.  And now he’s won.  He has a chance to make real changes, like he’s promised.  He’s got the chance to lift the country off its knees.

But he has a chance do something other than that as well.  Things don’t always go peachy, especially not in the world of American politics.  If Obama can’t deliver on the promises he’s made, then I can foresee an America in the not so distant future that truly has no hope.  The Senator from Illinois has brought the nation to a great height, but in doing so, he risks a very dangerous drop.  If he fails in his attempt, or if his ideas just don’t work, or he’s corrupted by the powers that be, or if he was just another politician to begin with, and things don’t change the way he’s gotten people to believe, then we’re looking at a very gloomy American future.  Every one of us must be aware of the reality of the situation, and not let ourselves be given hope that can be crushed very easily.  We are on a very thin line right now in America, between strained civilization and utter chaos, and every American should remember where that line lies.

All this is not to say that I have no faith in Obama’s ability to lead the nation.  He seems to be a capable and sincere person, and while I take issues with many policies of his, you can’t have everything, least of all a perfect president.  I hope that he will get the country back on its feet.

But we would all do well to consider what will happen if he doesn’t.

Then they usually ask why I believe in God in the first place. Without waiting for an answer, they typically enumerate several dozen reasons why they don’t believe, and why I shouldn’t either, and why all religion is bad and evil and contributes no good to the world besides latkes. Their monologue tends to end with a demanding stare, as though I have been denying them a straight answer to their question all this time, rather than them not allowing me to give them one.

As it turns out, my answer won’t sway many minds at all, not least because I don’t try to prove to anyone the existence of God, simply because it’s not possible. God’s reality cannot be proved or disproved by any means, and attempting to do so is a gigantic waste of energy. If you spend your time trying to answer foolish questions, all your answers will be foolish.

Which is essentially why most people tend to walk away from these conversations with me with a feeling of disappointment, as though they were expecting me to offer them proof that the King of Kings is really up there. Maybe they wanted me to give them a little two-way radio that only religious people have, so that they too could achieve that spiritual high that they feel they so desperately need in their lives?

The sad truth is that there are no such two-way radios. Religious people are religious because of faith, nothing more, a gut instinct and a certain kind of appreciation of the world around them that seems to escape people without religious conviction. If it was something I could pass on to those around me, I certainly would, but faith necessitates a personal journey.

My answer to these questions is always the same: I believe in God because the universe does not make sense to me any other way, and the Torah is the only thing that seems to be capable of giving rhyme and reason to my life. The Torah makes more sense than anything else that I have ever learned.

My beliefs may not meet military mustard when put to a scientific test, but scientific tests are essentially irrelevant to the way I think about the world. Nothing will ever keep me from believing in God, and no matter how unscientific my reasons for it are, that is the way it will always be.

Yesterday I finally stopped wondering. Dan in Real Life is easily and beyond a shadow of a doubt the best film I’ve seen in the past year, and Carell’s casting in the title role is the icing on the cake (If you’re like me, you indulge in the shameless use of idioms and cliches. It’s the last one, I promise.).

Carell is brilliantly cast by director Peter Hedges as Dan Burns, the widower father of three girls, aged 9, 14, and 17. When four years after his wife’s death, Dan is still depressed and has found no one new, nor seems to be looking, his mother advises him to take a drive to the docks during a family reunion he is attending with his daughters, with the hope that he will benefit from some space.

While at the docks, he meets a beautiful and intelligent woman named Marie, and for the first time since his wife’s death, he feels attracted to someone. He talks with her over coffee for a while, and even manages to get her number, despite her rather sudden departure upon receiving a phone call from her boyfriend. However, he gets a nasty shock when he arrives back at his parents’ house where the reunion is being held, and discovers that his new fantasy’s love interest is none other than his younger brother Mitch. The rest of the film chronicles the various awkward situations that befall Dan and Marie over the course of the reunion.

Now, if you’ve seen any of the last thousand or so movies made by Hollywood, you may find it difficult to believe that this film was a studio production. I largely ruined the film for myself by waiting for product placement to make its inevitable appearance, but it never did. Dan in Real Life touched me in a way few films have in a very long time. It’s got a near-flawless script, excellent direction, and a perfect cast, and together, this makes one hell of a movie.

It takes a lot for me to give a film five stars, but Dan in Real Life qualifies. So see it. It’ll be one of the best 95 minutes you’ve ever spent in a theater, I can guarantee it. Dan’s painful relationships with his three daughters, further aggravated by his inability to stop thinking about Marie, made me cry. And I haven’t cried at a movie since I was 8 years old, so I think it’s an accurate assumption that there weren’t many a dry eye in the theater.

You know those movie ads in the paper that quote some reporter saying a movie is “THE #1 MOVIE IN AMERICA!!!?” That label needs to be on the poster for Dan in Real life, because it actually is the best movie in America this year. This isn’t an opinion; this is a fact. This has been proven by science.

Dan in Real Life is likely the best movie you will have seen in the past few years, and probably for a year to come as well. And so, ending on this happy note, I’d like to put forth my hope that this will not be the last smart role for the genius that is Steve Carell.

But if you live in San Francisco, or Berkeley, or Marin, or Oakland, such things are not commonplace. In fact, it’s extremely rare to see even just a small, black, crocheted kipah on a man’s head as he passes you by on Market Street.

So it’s understandably a source of interest when you’re on the Muni and an Orthodox Jew, complete with tzitzis (fringes) and yarmulke, steps on and sits besides you. It’s probably even weirder if the Jew happens to be daavening at the moment.

We all know the feeling. We’re in a public place of some kind, and someone with an odd appearance enters the stage. They could be a Muslim wearing a turban, or a heavily pierced man, or even just someone who is unfortunately obese. We were all taught from a young age that it’s impolite to stare, but we can’t help it. We feel drawn to the oddity. It sucks us in; we can’t help but ogle, as if at some kind of creeping, crawling, insect. And it never once occurs to us how the person being stared at must feel.

This happens to me all the time, although I’m not always the starer. I’m actually about half the time the object of the staring.

But it no longer puts me off when I’m sitting on the subway reading a book, and I get that feeling you get when people are looking at you. It no longer surprises me. I can hardly expect people not to stare, after all, how many Orthodox Jews are there in the Bay Area?

There’s the occasional muttered slur, the easily detectable discomfort of the person next to whom I’m sitting. But I’ve discovered from experience that it’s better not to get involved.

But this past week, as I returned to my home after getting off the 43, I passed a Sikh family sitting on a bus stop. All seven heads turned 180 degrees in a very Looney Toones-esque fashion. As soon as I was a few yards away (maybe they thought I was out of earshot, or maybe they didn’t really care), they started jabbering away in Hindi, in loud, excited voices.

I don’t know what they were saying; I don’t speak any Hindi. But this much was clear: They were definitely talking about the Jew in the tzitzis and yarmulke.

Normally I’d say they couldn’t be accused of anything besides a lack of manners. But in this case, it was a family of Sikhs, all seven of whom wore religious garb. The men had turbans, the women had saris…the whole deal.

With this family, it seems all too likely that they’ve been subject to plenty of staring as well. So I thought, what right do you have to subject me to the discomfort that you likely experience just as much as I do? It’s no longer an issue of where your manners have gone, I just want to know what’s become of your pride.

I was ticked, and it didn’t help that the stares continued all the way home, from every damned pedestrian I passed, including the little boy who opened his mouth and quickly got a hand in his face from his mother.

It’s a crime we’re all guilty of, every last one of us. But that doesn’t make it any more excusable.

Looks can kill, and we are all murderers. We all talk about the need for people to stop placing such a big social emphasis on people’s differences, and we are all hypocrites. The social emphasis will lift when we let go of it. And frankly, I do not see it being lifted. I don’t care how accepting everyone says San Francisco is; as long as I can’t sit on a bus without being stared at, it’s just as bigoted as any one of the Southern Towns that our locals sneer at. We in the Bay Area brag about how liberal we are; about how no one is rejected or turned away, about how everyone is given his or her fair chance, but it’s all garbage in the end. When you take away Haight Street and the Castro, San Francisco ceases to be that little accepting hippie town, and becomes just another zealous American dump. We say that a black man is equal to a white man in the Bay Area, we say that there’s not anti-Latino prejudice, we say there’s no anti-Islam, and we say there’s no antisemitism. But we’re kidding ourselves, and the price of our voluntary blindness and unwillingness to open our eyes is the once great city that we live in.