by Joe Scarborough | Dec 31, 2025 | Morning Joe, News, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the Dec. 31 edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
Since an early age, I’ve always been the first person to wake up in my home. My mom joked that her happiest day was “when Joey learned to pour his own cereal so I could sleep past 5 a.m.”
Getting up early on New Year’s morning has always given me time to sit in a quiet house and set aspirations and resolutions for the new year.
As I entered young adulthood, those goals became grand — to write a musical, run for Congress or start a news show. Even my many failed ambitions — making a living as a songwriter or producer — pushed me forward in areas I pursued.
Maybe it was the process of writing those dreams down on a single index card that kept a disorganized kid like myself focused throughout the year.
As I grew older, those grand plans gave way to four simple lines on my cards — a prayer for each child.
Sometimes those prayers would carry through to a second year, but every day, they served as a reminder to both pray and work on whatever challenges my children faced.
As the saying often attributed to St. Ignatius of Loyola puts it: “Pray as if everything depended on God, and work as if everything depended on you.”
My written resolutions helped turn those prayers into action. This year, I will add a line for all those young people struggling through isolating and insecure times. May God grant them all mercy and provide us the tools needed
by Johannah Lowin | Dec 15, 2025 | Morning Joe, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the Dec. 15 edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
“What has been will be again,What has been done will be done again;There is nothing new under the sun.”
—
Ecclesiastes 1:9
“AND THERE WAS LIGHT”: HANUKKAH, AFTER EVERYTHING
There is nothing new under the sun.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose American-Israeli son, Hersh, was murdered in captivity in Gaza, returned to those words this weekend.
In an essay for The Free Press, she describes seeing footage filmed by Hamas during Hanukkah 2023 of her son and five other hostages lighting candles in a makeshift menorah of paper cups.
The experience was “confusing, teasing, sickening, befuddling, cruel, shocking, soothing, and mostly just a mindscrew,” Goldberg-Polin writes. “That was the point.”
There is something particularly unsettling about watching people light Hanukkah candles, a ritual of endurance and hope, when we already know how the story ends.
In the footage, the hostages struggle to keep the fragile flames alive in the airless tunnels — an effort echoing their own fight to survive in what Goldberg-Polin has called “the bowels of hell on earth.”
Within the year, all six were shot and killed.
Last month, I took my 9-year-old son to his school’s production of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” In the annex where they hid from the Nazis for more than two years, Anne and the others light Hanukkah candles and recite the blessings.
Later, we hear voices below, a door opening, the sound of boots on the stairs. My son — aware of what is coming — covers his eyes. But what follows is not shown. The stage goes dark.
The final scene returns to the
