[Previous sermon: "An Inconvenient Truth - Yom Kippur Morning 5767, Oct. 2, 2006"] [Next sermon: "December 8, 2006 - Vayishlach"]
Thanksgiving 2006
For years now, Representative Charles Rangel from New York has been promoting the idea of resurrecting the draft, and he plans to reintroduce such legislation again this coming January when the leadership in the House changes. However one might feel about actually doing so, one can't fault Mr Rangel's reasons for a change in policy regarding service to our country. First, a mandatory draft is one solution to replenishing an American army which is in critical condition, barely meeting its yearly quota of 80,000 recruits. Second, a conscripted army might better come to represent a cross section of American society, instead of the army being the best employment opportunity for low income, minority and other disadvantaged young people for whom other career choices are very limited. And third, a draft might force future presidents a wider spectrum of accountability among all Americans when war is contemplated in this country. As the mother of two children, a mandatory draft is a frightening thought to me, especially as the geopolitical scene seems to rest on shakier ground as resources decrease and religious foment increases, and as America commands less and less respect in its diplomatic endeavors in the world community. My personal feelings aside, the military brass themselves do not support a mandatory draft as a useful tool to building a skilled and effective army. Moreover, reports bear out that our volunteer army today in Iraq is a better representation of American society than the conscripted army of 1973 in the Vietnam War, when we know the wealthy and privileged avoided their service with relative ease.
Perhaps what Mr Rangel should look to accomplish instead of renewing the draft is something else altogether, a much loftier goal: to resurrect in America the spirit of service for an exalted mission, to restore a clear set of values for which Americans would be willing to serve and die to protect. Perhaps Mr Rangel is putting his finger on what many of us sense: that our country has lost focus on its spiritual, moral center. Somewhere along the line, the real American dream of democracy, the one that truly understood Jefferson's concepts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, was eclipsed by a consumer driven, rights based, overly individualistic dream which is spiritually limited and a lot less satisfying.
Who wants their children's blood spilled to preserve what seems to be our democracy's most precious edifices Wall Street, Walmart, and McDonald's? How can we truthfully say we are valiantly losing American lives each day in Iraq for the sake of establishing democracy in the Middle East, when at the very same time, we tolerate disenfranchisement of minority communities and unreliable paperless voting machines right here in our own backyard? We say we are sending our precious young people to be maimed and killed in Iraq to promote the ideals of democracy, when at the very same time our democratically elected government thinks it fit to spend our tax dollars paying military contractors working by their side six times what the troops are earning to do the very same work cleaning toilets, providing security, and training Iraqi police.
And our democracy is doing this without any oversight or accountability to the American people. We say we have the goal of spreading democracy into the world by our efforts and losses of life in Iraq. How credible is that notion when our government declared two years ago the situation in Sudan to be a government sponsored genocide, and to date America has done nothing of substance, the killing continues, and the janjaweed are now spreading their terror into neighboring Chad and beyond.
Yesterday, we sat around our dining tables for the American festival called Thanksgiving. Perhaps we paused momentarily to be grateful for all we have. Nice, warm homes, all the food we can eat, our health. Maybe we took note of the appreciated company of family. But let's face it. Thanksgiving is much more about turkey, football and for some of us the Macy's parade.
My three year old vegetarian son was so confused in school this year that he had to ask his teachers if he was going have a Thanksgiving, since he knows we wouldn't be serving him meat. Thanksgiving doesn't stop at consumption of food, either. Once our bellies are as stuffed as butterball turkeys, we, Americans, follow it with a heaping helping of our other favorite pastime, shopping. Around malls, signal light patterns will be adjusted to accommodate the abundance of traffic for this seasonal retail routine. Today, the day after Thanksgiving even has its own name, Black Friday, to signify the hope merchants have of ending the year in the black. To use an appropriate metaphor, Thanksgiving is the kick off to a season of overeating and overspending which we hope will fill us up in the dark days of the winter ahead. Frankly, the whole idea leaves me rather empty.
There is not anything inherently wrong with shopping and feasting. But our very character, as has come to be expressed by our most beloved American rituals, has become consumerism to an excess and to the exclusion of other possible virtues. And we are robbing ourselves and our children of a much greater dream of America that is present at our roots. Philosopher Jacob Needleman, reminds us of this in his book, The American Soul, in which he argues that the core spiritual concepts which informed the thinking of the greatest founders of our country were spiritual truths found within the greatest religious traditions of the world. For example, liberty as articulated in the Constitution was inextricably linked to obligation. We learn the same lesson in our Jewish story of liberation.
The freedom we won from Pharoah's Egyptian bondage is not unbounded freedom. For Jews, freedom from human slavery is the necessary condition to obligate ourselves to a higher power, namely God, whose will guides our actions and our aspirations. The god idea mentioned in the Constitution is the Kantian notion of the naturalistic force that governs the laws of the universe and gives us the power, through our consciences, to discover morality. Hence the project of our country and its governing structures was to arrive at laws and rules to protect the development of each citizen's spiritual conscience. Our democracy was never supposed to allow us to abdicate our responsibility to care for others in the name of pursuing our own individualistic goals.
The inward disposition of a citizen in Jefferson's Americawas to engage in a dialogue of discovering ways to honor the humanity, divinity and individuality of each person within our society. And American government, in the spirit of Thomas Payne and others, was a necessary evil, a boundary on our excesses, to ensure that we cultivated a society in which each and every person could work, gather, study and act upon our spirit of conscience that was embedded in our very humanity. That is what freedom looked like to the architects of America So when the Constitution delineates rights of freedom, such as free speech, inherent in that right is a duty, an inward obligation to those who might listen to us. The right to speak freely is inseparably linked to the obligation to listen to others speak, and let
their words penetrate us.
The beauty of democracy is to be found in the exchange of speech, the flow of ideas, in a philosophical friendship born of mutual respect and obligation. Think about how compelling the pre-election season could have been if we were really speaking to one another with these goals and dreams in the front of our minds. Instead, the name of the game of government today is about power grabbing. Politicians have become simply hired help of moneyed interests. And the political discourse is anything but about articulating moral conscience, and affirming the sacredness of each human being, and building a society in which all may share the gifts of the joy of freedom.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Our country has not always succeeded in living up to the architects' vision. One of those times was during the Civil War years. Frederick Douglass, while hating the institution of slavery and dedicating his life to speaking and writing strenuously in protest of it, even he, still loved America. Because he recognized that the same nation that had made him a slave, was struggling with itself to free the slaves. And because he saw within the structures of our democracy a way to inject his sense of conscience as a corrective, America began to shift and change. We need to rediscover, or as Needleman says, remythologize, the ideals of our American democracy and return our soul back to America.
There is no place which has been more hospitable to us as Jews, which is a testament to our country's strength of character, its belief in its own ideals, including those of tolerance and religious freedom. And America is still the most successful experiment in democracy and the pursuit of a society of conscience. May we be listeners and speakers, in creating this dialogue anew. And raising up among us leaders and visionaries who can carry us into a higher and happier future. Then we will have so much more for which to be thankful.
Rabbi Batsheva Meiri
