The Test of Our Nation

There is a little known story about a test of character as chilling as any you will ever hear.  It’s a story about a man who went to Israel with a group of businesspeople and had an audience with Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, the head of a famous rabbinical seminary.  Rabbi Finkel was severely afflicted with Parkinson’s disease.  He sat down at the head of the table, and naturally everyone’s inclination was to look away, not wanting to embarrass him.

“Who can tell me the lesson of the Holocaust?” the rabbi asked.  He banged on the table, “Gentleman, look at me, and look at me right now.”  His speech was affected by his disease even more than his body.  It was hard to look at the rabbi and even harder to listen to him.  “I have only a few minutes for you.  Who can tell me what the lesson of the Holocaust is?”

The rabbi called on one guy who didn’t know what to do.  He felt like a schoolboy.  Finally the guy says, “We must never forget.”  And the rabbi completely dismissed him.  Everyone was slinking under the table and looking away thinking please don’t call on me, please don’t call on me.  He called on another guy who gave a fantastic answer, “We will never, ever again be victims or bystanders.”

The Rabbi said, “You guys just don’t get it.  Okay gentleman, let me tell you the lesson of the Holocaust.  You know that most people were transported in the worst, most inhumane way in cattle cars.  They thought they were going to a work camp.  We know they were going to a death camp.  After hours and hours in this inhumane corral with no light, no bathroom, cold, they arrived at the camps.  

The doors slid wide open and they were blinded by the light.  Men were separated from women, mothers from daughters, fathers from sons.  Those not killed immediately went off to sleep in barracks.  As they went into the area to sleep, only one person was given a blanket for every six.  The person who received the blanket, when he went to bed, had to decide, ‘Am I going to stretch out the blanket as best I can over the five other people who did not get one or am I going to pull it completely over myself to stay warm?’ It was during that defining moment that we learned the true power or the true weakness of a person’s spirit.  The blanket was a kind of mirror to the soul.  That is the lesson of the Holocaust.  Now, take your blanket back to America and spread it over other people.”

Right now, and for weeks or months to come, every American is being tested, examined, challenged to pull ourselves and our country together.  Some of us are shocked by how many people do not agree with us.  This says something about those people, but also about us.  We who are shocked have failed to see beyond our own pristine bubbles of belief.  We have failed to recognize what is now readily apparent, that nearly half the people in our country do not feel understood by the other half.  They do not feel heard.  They do not feel represented.  They do not feel like they matter to the other side and its leaders.  Anyone surprised by how close the election results were needs to sit down right now, eat some humble pie and then get on with the business of what really makes America beautiful. 

In 1942 Rabbi Albert Minda gave the commencement address at West High School in my hometown of Minneapolis—an all-white school full of boys who within months would be marching off to war to fight the Nazis.  Seventy-eight years ago Rabbi Minda asked the graduates, “What makes America beautiful?”

He pointed out that there are more beautiful and more spacious skies elsewhere in the world, and that if you have ever seen the Alps or the Himalayas, you would have to agree that other lands have superior mountains of purple majesty. What about amber waves of grain?  Having just returned from Ukraine in 1942, Minda noted that there were far greater amber waves of grain in the Soviet Union than the plains of our own country. 

“America may be beautiful,” Minda admits, “for her spacious skies, her fields of grain, her fruited plains and her purple mountains’ majesties, but all these do not constitute the uniqueness and distinctiveness of America’s beauty.  America becomes the beautiful when she crowns her good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.”  Brotherhood is America’s unique beauty. 

Let us not sacrifice the next four years and the next generation upon an altar of self-righteous indignation when some humility and empathy would have been in order.  There are a lot of tests in life to be our best or worst selves.  There are a lot of mirrors to the soul.  How we treat the people we love or a stranger; how we treat people who believe and feel differently than we, how we behave when we win and how we behave when we lose.  

Shame on us if we fail the test of our nation, choosing intolerance and the demonizing of the half that disagrees with us.  Instead, let us begin the healing, spread our blanket of compassion over all, and heed these sacred words that are our greatest test and most beautiful legacy.    

O beautiful for spacious skies

For amber waves of grain

For purple mountain majesties

Above thy fruited plain

America, America

God shed his grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea

O beautiful for pilgrim feet

Whose stern, impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat

Across the wilderness

America, America

God mend thine every flaw

Confirm thy soul in self-control

Thy liberty in law

O beautiful for heroes proved

In liberating strife

Who more than self their country loved

And mercy more than life

America, America

May God thy gold refine

Till all success be nobleness

And every gain divine

O beautiful for patriot dream

That sees beyond the years

Thine alabaster cities gleam

Undimmed by human tears

America, America

God shed his grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea