My friends, this morning I want to talk to you about this great country of ours, this United States of America, and our presence here for 350 years, which we celebrate just this year.
350 years ago, in 1654, 23 Jews escaping from the Portuguese reconquista of Pernambuco - or eastern Brazil - from the Dutch, arrived on the French frigate St. Catherine in the New Amsterdam settlement in the colony of New Netherland. There they sought to settle. The Dutch had conquered Recife, but lost it a few years later to the Portuguese reconquista, leaving the 23 Jews adrift and stateless.
The Dutch governor of New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant, refused to admit the Jews and built a wall to temporarily ghettoize them, while he wrote to the Board of Investors of the Dutch West India Company to seek resolution on whether to permit the entry of Jews into America. The Dutch West India Company Board, on which several prominent Jews of Amsterdam sat, one year later ordered Stuyvesant to tear down that wall and let the Jews live with full rights to buy land, to trade, and to serve in the militia. By the way, the place where that ghetto wall stood became known as Wall Street.
From that moment in 1655, when Asher Levy won the right to serve in the militia and buy his own house, it became abundantly clear that this would be for us a new land, a new opportunity, a new home, and a radical new challenge.
We became integrated into the American religious mainstream. In 1776 Haim Solomon helped to finance the American Revolution. In 1730, Shearith Israel was established in New York City as the first synagogue in America. In 1790 president George Washington wrote his famous letter to the members of Touro Synagogue assuring them that their rights as a Jewish community in America were secure, and that their right to religious freedom was guaranteed by the United States government "which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."
Through the years we American Jews, even in our early nascent beginning, became aware of our right to protest and our connection to the Jews in the rest of the world. In 1840 President Martin Van Buren ordered the United States Counsel in Egypt to protest the Damascus blood libel. The libel claimed that Syrian Jews had killed two men and had used their blood to make Passover matzah. In a groundbreaking effort in that year of 1840, 15,000 American Jews protested in six American cities on behalf of their Syrian brethren. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee would not be established until 1914, asserting protective influence and support for world Jewish communities all over the globe, not just in the tiny Zionist enclave of Palestine. But by the middle of the nineteenth century our sense of connection and dedication to the interests of the Jews of the world was already palpable.
Just a few years later, in 1843, the American fraternal organization B'nai B'rith, was created in New York by twelve German Jews. Its goal was to preserve Jewish life on the basis of "peoplehood" rather than "religion." And a few years after that, in 1852, the first in a vast network of Jewish community hospitals was established in New York City, renamed, in 1866, Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City.
In 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November, Rabbi Morris Raphall became the first Jewish clergyman to deliver a prayer at an opening session of Congress.
Yes, along the way of our many accomplishments, we were not able to eliminate the scourge of anti-Semitism in America. It has existed throughout American history, and it exists today.
In 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant issued his famous Order Number 11, expelling all Jews from the area under the control of the United States Army's Department of Tennessee. Grant contented - with some apparent justification- that Jewish merchants were speculating on the volatile price of cotton. After meeting with the delegation of Jews protesting Grant's discriminatory order, President Abraham Lincoln directed that Order Number 11 be rescinded.
Without question, anti-Semitism continued to be major force in our life here.
In 1913, 14-year-old Mary Phagan was found murdered in the basement of the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia. Factory superintendent Leo Frank, raised and educated in the north, was arrested for the crime. He was convicted and was sentenced to death. His sentence was commute by Georgia Governor John Slaton - but a mob of distinguished citizens kidnapped Leo Frank and lynched him in the streets of Atlanta. In the wake of the Frank trial, B'nai B'rith created the Anti Defamation League, at the impetus of one Sigmund Livingston of Bloomington, Illinois - a member of my former congregation. In 1986, Frank was given a full pardon by the Georgia Parole Board.
The Ford Motor Company was boycotted for years by the Jews of America because Henry Ford published The Dearborn Independent with its insulting quotations from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Religious quotas continued at some of America's great universities like Princeton, Harvard and Northwestern, well into the 1960s. In 1921, when Justice Louis Brandeis was sworn into membership as the first Jew on the United States Supreme Court - he was appointed by President Wilson - his colleague Justice William McReynolds was widely reported to have sat and read the Washington Star newspaper in open anti-Semitic disdain for the integration of the court.
These circumstances have not been isolated. We have endured much anti-Semitism over the years - Henry Ford was followed by the closed commercial banking industry, tight restrictions on admission to medical school and hospital privileges, engineering, country clubs and, of course, Pat Buchanan, Jessie Jackson and Louis Farrakhan.
But our achievement on these shores has continued, not only as a matter of substantial numbers but substantial institutions and legacies.
The Reform Movement of Judaism, though beginning with fits and starts in Germany and Poland as early as the 1820's, bloomed in America after its German ethnic unity was violated and the tidal wave of Jewish immigration from 1885 forward brought millions, literally, of Jews here.
In 1875, Isaac Mayer Wise established Hebrew Union College two years after establishing the Union of American Hebrew Congregations - which was to be an umbrella over all American Jews. Wise had come to American from Germany in 1854 and had moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. His first ordination banquet in Cincinnati, in 1883, was without the routine Jewish dietary regulation (which Wise himself observed in his own home) and caused an abrupt rupture in the unity which Wise craved. The establishment of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York soon followed in 1887, and when the already internationally acclaimed Solomon Schechter came from England to America in 1902, to establish great Jewish scholarship here, there was no question but that he would take the helm of the new seminary in New York, The Jewish Theological Seminary.
Yes, there were non-religious Jews here as well. In 1892, the Workmen's Circle was founded in New York City to promote Yiddish culture and Socialist political ideals among Jewish workers. Its assertion of secular Jewishness built around a culture united by the Yiddish language, was an alternative to Jewish religious identity and sustained millions, including my own grandparents, through the middle of the twentieth century.
In 1885, Kauffman Kohler, then president of Hebrew Union College, and less than a dozen Reform rabbis published the Pittsburgh Platform, which set out eight points of what Reform Judaism "means and aims at." That platform abandoned any fidelity to Jewish ritual observance except for Shabbat and rejected any identification of the Jews as a people, insisting that we were rather Americans of Israelite religious persuasion. But by 1937 the Columbus Platform essentially abandoned the Pittsburgh predecessor, including for the first time positive statements about Jewish Peoplehood and Zionism, the movement of national Jewish renewal with its focus on the establishment of a Jewish state in what was then called Palestine. American Zionism had been promoted by Justice Brandeis and by two titanic Reform rabbis - one a Republican from Cleveland, Abba Hillel Silver and another, a liberal Democrat from New York, Stephen Samuel Wise.
JTS continued to grow and flourish on New York's west side, and was matched by the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, an Orthodox center of Jewish scholarship and rabbinical training, established in 1897 as a bastion of American orthodoxy, which had still not found its voice in this new world. In 1941 Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveichik became the Rav at that seminary, and in the 1950s the great Rabbi Samuel Belkin established YU as a center for modern orthodox thought, which stands to this day as a citadel against revanchist, anti-intellectual orthodoxy.
Zionism was rejected by American Reform leaders as well as Orthodox leaders here. It attracted the vast middle of the American Jewish community, however, as well as some of the political leaders with the deepest insight. Woodrow Wilson, for example, in 1918 approved of the Balfour Declaration, issued by the British in 1917 favoring the establishment of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Oddly, the Jewish-owned New York Times opposed Wilson and Zionism then, calling for a homeland in Africa for the Jews, asserting that it would be wrong to unsettle Turkish imposed stability in Palestine.
By 1940, we Jews constituted 3.7 percent of the American population - this would be the highest percentage we would ever be in America. And this would be a percentage which would steadily decline from 1940 to this very day. As the overall population of the United States has increased, we have shrunk in real numbers and as a percentage in the American salad bowl. We Jews are now less than 2 percent of the population here.
And during the terrible days of the Shoah, we had our brush with the horror of American indifference to our status and to our plight. Despite President Roosevelt's 1942 speech to a rally in New York, attended by some 20,000 people in Madison Square Garden, when he made his first mention of the crimes committed against the Jews and declared the American people "will hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability and a day of reckoning which will surely come" - despite this promise, the United States State Department Undersecretary Breckenridge Long, a confirmed Jew-hater, frustrated every attempt at American response to the crisis at hand. During the dark days of the Shoah, Congress refused to pass a bill allowing French Jews to immigrate to America. Congress refused to give President Roosevelt a third war powers bill which would have given him the power to suspend immigration laws. An article in Newsweek reported that "the ugly truth is that anti-Semitism was a definite factor in the bitter opposition to the President's request . . . ." President Roosevelt himself opposed a bill introduced in 1943 by Representative Samuel Dickstein of New York, which would have allowed refugees into America who "would not endanger public safety."
Yes, we have had dark days and harsh moments. But other modern events have certified our acceptance in America as uniquely-honored and distinguished citizens of this great commonwealth. On October 6, 1965, Los Angeles Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax refused to pitch in the first game of the World Series, against the Minnesota Twins in Minneapolis. There had been great Jewish athletes prior to Koufax - the victory in 1934 of Maxie Bayer - of the world Heavyweight boxing title, knocking out Primo Carnera of Italy comes to mind; and Hank Greenberg, first basemen for the Detroit Tigers, who also chose not to play on Yom Kippur in 1934, despite the fact that his team was in the midst of a tough pennant race. But the decision of Koufax made the world take notice. We were not ashamed; we were not intimidated; we would not surrender our uniqueness. It was a moment of pride which stood as a platform for the most explosive moment in American Jewish pride and distinction, Israel's victory in the June 1967 Six Day War.
The vast expansion and huge investment in the Ramah network of camps in the Conservative moment and the UAHC network of camps in the Reform movement - including Esiner Camp just down the road in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, is directly attributable to Israel's victory in 1967. This would forever change our landscape, permitting us to learn from black American that to be different was not to be un-American and that it was cool - even beautiful - to stand out.
It is the Japanese who have the expression that a nail that sticks out needs to be hammered back in. Not here, where ethnic pride and unique religious heritage could be integrated into the quilt of American national unity.
American Jews became friends and advisors to presidents: Louis Brandeis, Eddie Jacobsen, Max Fisher, Henry Kissinger, Malcolm Hoenlein, Michael Miller, even Samuel Gompers - the founder of the American labor movement - these were powerful well-placed Jews in high places.
In our own age, in our own time, we have seen the rise of Jewish empire builders, American Rothschilds: Ivan Boesky, Sandy Weil, Robert Wexner, Michael Steinhardt. And we have also seen something that none of our brothers and sisters for the last 350 years could ever have imagined, could ever have dreamed, could ever have spoken without a snicker. That was the nomination, without any religious objection, of an Orthodox Jew to run for Vice-President of the United States on a major party ticket. You know, the American information super highway is vast, and is a marketplace of bigotry unimagined in its scope. There was not a whisper of anti-Semitic reservation to the Vice Presidential candidacy and then the Presidential candidacy of Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. We American Jews stood on a very high and distinguished plateau indeed. To me, this was the greatest day - Lieberman's nomination by Vice President Al Gore to run for Vice President on the Democratic ticket in the year 2000 - the greatest day in American Jewish history.
But what of all of this? Is this but a history lesson, a litany of accomplishments, a long tale of achievements, which itself is vastly abbreviated and could be and has been the subject of volumes now collecting dust on many library shelves?
No, that is not why I have reviewed our American Jewish odyssey for all of you this morning.
It is to simply to ask the questions: how has America changed us and how have we changed America.
And I propose to answer these two questions very simply, very succinctly, and I hope very thoughtfully.
How has America changed us?
America has given us confidence in democracy, which was never a particularly Jewish idea or ideal. The Torah does not value democracy as much as it values righteousness. It would prefer a righteous despot to a tyrannical majority. But American has proven to us that democracy is indeed the world's best hope. Though there were suggestions of other arrangements, in the 1930's and 1940's when the Jewish Agency was considering what form of self government the dream of a new state would take, there was no question that its basis and foundation would be in mimicry of the American experiment. America taught us to have confidence in democracy.
And America taught us to have confidence in the religious expression of Judaism to survive and even thrive without the resort of the coercive power of the state. It is this country which taught us that we can, if we are sufficiently committed and are willing to sufficiently sacrifice and dedicate our resources and our souls, we are capable of asserting and maintaining and passing down as a legacy the honest religious expression of Judaism, without apology, without resort to state political power. That is a new lesson for us. And it is America which has taught it.
The third great lesson that we have learned from America is that Christianity is the old enemy. It is not Christianity which threatens us any longer- indeed, some have said that Christianity is killing us with kindness, is hugging us to death. No, Christianity is our old enemy, in the old world, and what some have called the old Europe, has now been supplanted by a Godless secular leviathan which threatens to make religion itself the new fanaticism and make all religious people into weird atavistic hotheads. We have learned that Christianity is the old enemy, not today's enemy. And it is America which has taught us that lesson.
And finally, the fourth great lesson we have earned from America is that Judaism and the Jewish People will only survive outside of the ghetto if it really matters to us and to our children. It will not survive because of God's promise to us, but because of our promise to God and to our ancestors and to each other. When you say Sh'ma Yisrael, say it loud and with gusto; say it and mean it. If we intend to be here forever, it is up to us to make it so. That is a simple but powerful truth. And it has been taught to us by this great country.
And what have we taught America? What has America learned from us?
Just this: we have taught America the promise of its own founding documents, that we are - all of us - created by God, that we should be evaluated on the basis of the our skill, our ambition, our intensity, our determination, our fortitude, our intelligence - and not by the color of our skin, not by the name of the church or synagogue or mosque we attend, not by any other value or factor but our merit. That is why, except for the short boot strap it provided, any program which challenged the primacy American meritocracy was received by us with distaste. Because American meritocracy - what we Jews have taught America - is the greatest virtue of democracy.
And we have taught America that untethered morality is nothing but popular tyranny. The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia quotes our Hebrew Bible; the Ten Commandments are sculpted and featured on the outside of the United State Supreme Court building; the Judeo-Christian tradition which seeks to elevate the dignity of human beings and the right of all of us to life and liberty is our legacy to this American culture. It is something that we can proudly claim as a central teaching of Judaism and the Jewish people to those men who assembled in Philadelphia in 1775.
And we have taught America that minorities matter. It is our Mishnah which was the first legal compendium to preserve minority opinions - not the decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Minorities matter. The minority can be right and often is; the test of a democracy is the status of it minorities. Minorities matter. That is the great lesson of American democracy, and it has been taught by us to America.
And finally, we have taught America and Americans the deep emotional power of a system of faith which is not merely judgmental. We have taught America and Americans of the majesty of a system of faith which nurtures, which does not merely judge but loves; which does not merely establish ritual formality, but is there at times of joy, there at times of sadness; there at times of tragedy, there at times of unrestrained celebration. We have taught America - yes, I am proud to say this - we Jews have taught America the power of forgiveness, the power of renewal, the power - the sheer emotional power of a nation of refugees from slavery. It was a Jewish poet whose words became emblazoned on that statue in New York harbor. Emma Lazarus gave The New Colossus - the formal name of that statue - its character as the defining object of the American national enterprise; the power of a nation of refugees from slavery.
Listen to her words:
Give me your tired, your poor;
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.;
The wretched refuse of your teeming shores.
Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door.
God bless America, whose citizens are said by our founding document to be endowed by our Creator with rights, with liberties, with purpose. This is our country, and except for Zion, we belong no where else.
Amen.