A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM

Rosh Hashanah Morning, 5787

Rabbi Barry L. Schwartz

On this Rosh Hashanah, coming as it does on two auspicious anniversaries, the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and the 250th of our nation, my thoughts naturally gravitate to the state of our union.

All of us here, except for our teens and children, lived through 9/11. Among the recollections seared into our memory, one that remains deeply enduring for me is not from ground zero, but from my neighborhood at the time. In the days after the tragedy, home after home began displaying the American flag. Every morning when I went cycling, I could not help but be moved by the sea of flags. House after house, block after block, town after town. What a sense of national unity in those uncertain days.

Alas, we know that these moments of unity are fleeting. We know that as much as we want them to endure, they do not. We know that a quarter century since 9/11, and a quarter millennium since our founding, we are living in highly polarizing times. Sometimes it feels like we can’t agree on anything.

But the extraordinary moments of unity should not be forgotten. They offer us a glimpse of what can be. They offer us a glimpse of our highest ideals. They offer us hope, in the words of Lincoln, that a nation conceived in liberty can have a new birth of freedom.

The question I want to pose on this Rosh Hashanah and this double anniversary is: What might a new birth of freedom mean for us today? How might we move closer to, to borrow from that memorable phrase from our Constitution, a more perfect union?

Maybe the most important lesson from our founders, often obscured, is the distinction between unity and unanimity. When we face our history, we learn that our founders were profoundly divided, not united. Were you one of about forty million Americans, like me, who tuned in to The American Revolution by Ken Burns this past year? “The greatest misconception about the American Revolution is that it was something that unified Americans,” the historian Alan Taylor says in the second episode. “It leaves out the reality that it was a civil war among Americans.”

As a reviewer wrote, “Part of that division involved the bitter and often savage recriminations between pro-independence Americans and those loyal to Britain. But those were not the only Americans at battle. As “The American Revolution” emphasizes, the war was also often a struggle between American colonizers and Native Americans, between enslavers and the enslaved. Some Americans won their sovereignty and freedom. Others—particularly non-European Americans—lost it.”

Yet our founders forged a consensus and a constitution. Central to their vision was a division of powers as the crucial foundation of a democratic republic. And likewise, a bill of rights, which was not part of the original constitution ratified in 1789, but added in 1791. Together their purpose was not only to prevent tyranny, but to respect diversity. We should be eternally grateful for their magnificent accomplishment amidst such disunity by striving to live up to their ideals.

Of course, the founders themselves did not necessarily live up to their own ideals. Another historian in the series, Vincent Brown, explains that you can admire how Thomas Jefferson articulated the cause of human freedom and recognize that he denied freedom to the humans he owned. “I think it’s incumbent on all of us to take those words from Jefferson and make them real in our own lives,” he says, “even if they weren’t real in his.”

So, in this spirit, let’s take a quiz. Let’s fill out a national report card. What grade would you give to the following ten categories of American life? Just call out your answers, not! That would be a bit chaotic. Just think about them… and you can tell me your score after the service. Each of the ten is part of what you might call a stress test of democracy. With “1” be the lowest and “10” being the highest:

1. Cooperating in Congress

2. Safeguarding free speech

3. Respecting political opponents

4. Protecting marginalized groups

5. Protecting voting rights

6. Protecting the independence of universities.

7. Protecting the independence of the Department of Justice

8. Respecting dissenting judges and courts

9. Refraining from deploying the military domestically

10. Refraining from misinformation and deception

Did we pass the stress test? When a patient fails it, further examination of the heart is called for. The sources of stress need to be examined, for they take their toll. The Reverend Cameron Trimble, speaking at the URJ’s Leading Change Summit in May 2022, outlined that in the last 15 years, the kinds of changes that we have lived through include: “financial meltdown, climate breakdown, COVID lockdown, racial throwdown, religious letdown, and technology showdown.”

Yes, these are turbulent times, but we have navigated storms from our founding to this day. In his timely and vital book American Covenant political philosopher Yuval Levin writes that unity really is crucial to our shared public life, but it means the opposite of putting aside our differences to represent our country. Rather, it means channeling those differences constructively for the public good. In Levin’s memorable phrase: “Acting together when we do not think alike.”

Levin quotes his hero, James Madison, who did more to craft our Constitution than any one, that “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at leisure to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.”

But Madison also wrote, “Hearken not to the unnatural voice which tell you that the people of America, knit together as they are by so many cords of affection, can no longer live together as members of the same family… can no longer be fellow citizens of one, great respectable and flourishing [nation].” Levin also quotes the judge who presided over the ceremony when he became an American citizen, who said simply, “From this day on [you] should think about America in the first-person plural: we and our and not them and their”.

“We” of course if the first word of the Constitution, and the first word of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, as in: We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

Levin concludes, “We sometimes disagree intensely, but what we disagree about it how to live out the shared promise of our country together. Those with whom we disagree…are not our enemies; they are our neighbors.”

“Acting together when we do not think alike.”

Our founders did it, and so can we.

We can love our country enough to tell its whole story.

We can love our country enough to forge compromise and consensus.

We can love our country enough to defend the diversity of our democracy.

I close on this Rosh Hashanah with another searing memory, connected to 9/11, but 8 ½ years later: In the wake of our national tragedy one of my bar mitzvah and confirmation students in Cherry Hill felt compelled to serve his country. He enlisted in the Marines, and was sent to Afghanistan. Lance Corporal Jeremy Kane was killed by a road side bomb on Jan. 23, 2010. I officiated at his funeral. What I will never forget is the ride from the synagogue to the cemetery. The streets were lined with people of every age, every color, every political persuasion. Hundreds and hundreds of people. We passed his Cherry Hill East High School; the entire school, students, teachers, staff, all lined up.

Once again, an indelible image of unity.

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us …. that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”