On the final night of the Chanukah holiday, I took my family to synagogue in our New York City neighborhood. Security was heightened, as a police van with flashing lights patrolled in front, and a congregant who serves with the police department stood in the back center of the synagogue.

It was a beautiful event -- the Chanukah lights were kindled and the choir sang, followed by the evening prayer, after which everyone parted ways and exchanged greetings. We proceeded home, where we lit Chanukah candles in our dining room, enjoyed a nice holiday dinner, and then supervised our children doing their homework and studied Torah with them. All was good.

As usual, I then went out to study Talmud at a yeshiva, but as I made my way through a major thoroughfare, I had to carefully dash around a deranged homeless man who was pacing back and forth as he mumbled to himself and smoked a marijuana joint. Not pleasant.

As I was about to turn onto another street, I had to nimbly circumvent four more homeless people, who were smoking something far more pungent and who looked as if they were handling drugs or something else they sought to conceal, and whose strong odor and bags of filthy personal belongings could send anyone into a coughing fit. While I felt very bad for these people, they are a public safety hazard -- and they are now all over the place, with the homeless population of New York City skyrocketing under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Not to mention a precipitous decline in quality of life, a spike in subway and street crime, and heretofore unheard-of public dishonoring and abusing of police officers, with the perpetrators egged on by rowdy hordes.

As I approached the yeshiva, thinking on the way about the anti-Semitic violence and New York’s major problems, I came to realize that the number of NYPD special patrols assigned to synagogues is by far outweighed by the atmosphere of lawlessness that is prevailing all around the city, as police are ordered not to arrest, offenses are decriminalized, perpetrators are set free on the spot without bail, and productive, law-abiding residents are driven out. This is all the direct product of Mayor de Blasio’s “progressive” policies.

In fact, as just reported today, bail reform supported by de Blasio has resulted in the immediate release of several of the vicious hooligans who committed recent anti-Semitic attacks last week.

Creating an environment in which criminality thrives while providing those most targeted by crime with added protection is no better than setting a pack of wild dogs free and giving people cans of pepper spray. Rather than focus on defense in the face of a swarm of crime that has been unleased on the population, de Blasio needs to concentrate on the root of the matter by instilling fear of the law in the minds of potential criminals, cracking down and restoring the character of policing and the severity of punishment that prevailed under his predecessors, before he came on the scene and changed things for the worse (“criminal justice reform”).

But de Blasio will never do this. It is against his nature and very being, his raison d’etre. De Blasio, whose campaign for mayor was based on a concocted class-warfare story dubbed as the Big Apple’s alleged “Tale of two cities” and whose policies have been driven by a quest to place the perceived lower class above the purported upper class, has done everything in his power to reverse all safety measures of his predecessors, delusional in his conviction that being soft on crime would enable the lower elements of society to thrive. The result has been a monumental failure, with homelessness and violence spinning out of control. Any thinking person would dramatically shift course, but this is de Blasio’s “progressive” life mission; it is his firm ideology and his Kool-Aid, and he will not change -- no matter what.

As a person of faith, I believe with conviction that whatever happens is God’s will and His message to humanity –- but God also wants His creatures to use the brains that He gave them, so that they should act wisely and in good judgment. In the case of New York City’s leadership, that concept apparently flew by unnoticed.

Avrohom Gordimer is chairman of the Rabbinic Circle at Coalition for Jewish Values, and he serves on the editorial board of Jewish Action magazine, is a staff writer for the Cross-Currents website, and is a frequent contributor to Israel National News and a host of other publications.  He is also a member of the Rabbinical Council of America and the New York Bar.  By day, he works as an account executive at a large Jewish organization based in Manhattan.