I love the story of America. All of it.
I love the story of people who came to these shores in search of a better life – to be free to practice their religion as they chose, and to live their lives as their conscience would dictate.
I love the story of a people whose extraordinary ingenuity and valor gave birth to a nation grounded in an ideal that all are created equal, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
I love the story of a people who chose to enshrine the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religious expression, freedom to peaceably gather, and freedom to protest and petition the government for redress of grievances.
I love the story of a people who also chose to ensure due process and the fair and impartial administration of the law.
At the same time, I also love the story of a people who committed grievous injustices and horrible sins.
The story of America includes the mass displacement, persecution, and destruction of indigenous peoples.
The story of America includes centuries of astoundingly cruel and inhumane institutionalized human slavery.
The story of America includes decades of racial bigotry and Jim Crow oppression that denied millions of Americans their life, their liberty, and their pursuit of happiness.
The story of America includes persistent discrimination against new immigrants, of religious intolerance, and political persecution, of sexism, and rabid anti-gay discrimination.
So why do I still love the story of America?
Because from these awful stains on our nation’s grand story, rose the remarkable efforts by extraordinary people to make our Union “more perfect.”
The story of America includes the legacies of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. Dubois and Martin Luther King – and countless others who gave their lives in service to “a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”
The story of America includes the legacies of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth – and countless others who fought the repressions of sexism, and who insisted that “we cannot accept any code or creed that uniformly defrauds woman of all her natural rights.”
The story of America includes the legacies of Harvey Milk, Barbara Gittings, Audre Lord, and Larry Kramer – and countless others who fought to ensure that people would be free to love whomever their hearts called them to love, and who taught that “the more people open their hearts to us, the less we will have to fight for our rights.”
The story of America includes the legacies of Uriah Phillips Levy, Louis Brandeis, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and Deborah Lipstadt – and countless others who strove to eradicate the virus of antisemitism from our country, and who fought for a world where “The Jew in the kippah, the Muslim woman in the hijab, the African American student walking across campus, the Latino kids gathered celebrating, or just enjoying themselves in a park, must feel as safe as anyone else.”
These stories show us the promise of America, what we can be as a country, what we should be as a nation.
I want America to be a loving society, a generous society, a society that celebrates not only our independence but also our interdependence, that embraces the idea that we must love our neighbors and also the stranger, those whose roots were planted in American soil generations ago, and those who are just sinking their roots in America today.
I want America to be a nation that values justice and fairness, that protects the vulnerable and raises up the impoverished, in which there is ample opportunity for everyone to grow to become all they might dream to be.
I want America to be a people who values honesty, integrity, compassion, and forbearance, that eschews selfishness and greed, prejudice and bigotry, but raises up shared sacrifice, understanding, curiosity, and human dignity.
I want America to be a country that is a force for good in the world, that understands that this small planet we share is fragile and that all human life is sacred, and that we must do all we can to help as many as possible maximize the experience of what it can mean to be human.
We are a nation that gave the world the telephone and television and cinema, the gift of flight, the microprocessor, and immunotherapy. We created the capacity to leave footprints on the moon, map the human genome, and peer so deep into space that we can see the dawn of time.
A nation that can do all this should also be a nation that gives the world a vision of what a truly good, free, and righteous society can be, “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Dan Levin
Temple Beth El of Boca Raton
