Memorial Day

At last, Memorial Day Weekend is here -- the unofficial start of summer. Time to dust off the old barbecue grill and fire up some hotdogs and hamburgers. Time to relax in a lawn chair by the pool in the warm summer evening breeze. Time to hit our favorite retail chains for mega sales events. Time to watch the Indy 500 -- if that’s your thing. Or, if it’s not -- time to once again fashionably pull off wearing white.

Growing up, my family celebrated Memorial Day as most families do -- kicking off the summer with pool parties and a barbeque. But we also had another annual ritual. Every year, my dad would go into the storage room in our garage and retrieve from the top shelf a clear plastic zippable bag. Inside -- folded into a triangle, with the stars facing up -- was a pristine American flag. This flag was given to our family in honor of my Grandpa Harry, who served in World War Two. On the eve of the war, Harry had been working as a postal worker, so after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Harry enlisted to serve overseas in the military mail -- sorting and delivering letters and postcards between the troops abroad and their loved-ones on the homefront. He himself had loved-ones on the homefront -- including his girlfriend, who would someday be my Grandma Sally. Thankfully, Harry made it home safe from the war -- and as a token of gratitude for his service, the US government gave Harry, and all others like him who served, a giant American flag. And every year on Memorial Day, my family would hang this flag from the awning of our front porch -- in honor of those who served, in gratitude that Harry made it home alive, and in memory of those who didn’t.

Memorial Day has its origins in the years after the Civil War. That conflict claimed the lives of one out of every fifty people then living in the United States. It was in the wake of this national tragedy that the first US military cemeteries were established. In the years after the war, parents, spouses, and children of the dead would pick spring flowers to lay at their loved one’s graves. The custom stuck -- and it eventually became an official federal holiday.

This week, in our annual cycle of Torah reading, Jews around the world begin reading the fourth book of the Torah -- a book that’s referred to in English as the Book of Numbers. The Book of Numbers gets its name from the military census in the book’s first chapter. God instructs Moses to count all the members of the Israelite camp ages 20 and older who are able to bear arms.[1] At the end of the Book of Numbers -- after wandering in the desert for 40 years, after waging war with various foes -- God will instruct Moses to take a second military census. In this way, the Book of Numbers is true to its name: it numbers and counts those ancient Israelites who risked their lives in service of their people.

On three different occasions in American history,[2] the Jewish community has published its own book of numbers, so to speak -- its own list of all the Jewish Americans who risked their lives in service of their country. In three different centuries, after three different wars, three different American Jewish leaders each did the exact same thing: they published a book listing every Jewish veteran. And although these books were all similar in their content, each was unique in its impact.

This evening, in honor of Memorial Day, I’d like to explore these three books, and in so doing, make some observations about American Jewish history.

The first book of numbers: The Revolutionary War.

On the eve of the Revolution, some 2,000 Jews lived in the British colonies. The majority of them were in favor of the Revolution, though of course, there were some loyalists. We know that more than 100 Jewish soldiers fought in the Continental Army. We even have records of one soldier who was granted a weekly leave of absence every Friday night. Some of these soldiers attained fame in their own day: Mordecai Shetall, an officer who was captured and imprisoned aboard a British ship, or Aaron Lopez, a successful merchant who donated 130 of his private shipping vessels to the war effort.

But even with these 100 soldiers and these few famed heroes, the Jewish contribution to the war was relatively minor. No major battle was won or lost on account of the Jews’ participation. In the Revolutionary War, what mattered most was not how Jews served, but rather, the very fact of their service.

The fact of their service would prove important in the early days of the new republic. In those early years of our democracy, the State of Pennsylvania codified in its state constitution a requirement that before any elected official could take office, he must “acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament.” This a religious test would effectively bar Jews from holding public office. A Jewish leader in Philadelphia named Haym Salomon wrote a petition against the state constitution. In his petition, Salomon made the legal case against the religious test, but in addition to the legal arguments, Salomon wrote, “the Jews [of Pennsylvania] have … suffered [with distinction] for their attachment to the Revolution.” He then listed the many ways and the many places in which Jewish soldiers fought and suffered during the war -- the first book of numbers, the first accounting, as historian Arthur Hertzberg has put it, of how “Jewish blood had helped to water the tree of liberty.”[3]

Salomon’s petition was successful. Pennsylvania eventually overturned its religious test for elected officials. Four years later, when the US Constitution was signed in Pennsylvania, that document followed precedent and declared that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

And so we see that the first book of numbers was more than just a book of numbers. Not only did it enumerate the ways in which Jewish soldiers contributed to the war, it also made the case for establishing as law the right of religious freedom.

The second book of numbers: the Civil War.

By the time of the Civil War, the country’s Jewish population had grown from 2,000 people on the eve of the Revolution to 150,000. Like the rest of the country, the Jews were divided -- mostly along geographic lines -- about the war and the issue of slavery. The 10,000 Jewish Americans who fought in the Civil War did so both in blue and in gray uniforms.

There are several important cases of public anti-Semitism during the Civil War, most of them centering around the false claim that Jews didn’t participate in the fighting. There’s the story of when General Grant expelled the Jews from Tennessee,[4] or the story of the New York City draft riots.[5] But for our purposes, the most important of these claims comes from a magazine article. In 1891, three decades after the war, a widely read literary magazine published a soldier’s memoir that read: “I served in the field for [many years] … but I cannot remember meeting one Jew in uniform, or hearing of any Jewish soldier.”

In response to this article, Simon Wolf -- a Jewish communal leader based in the nation’s capital -- published a 600 page book entitled The American Jew as Soldier, Patriot, and Citizen -- the second book of numbers. In impressive detail, Wolf recorded the stories of Jewish heroes from every American war. In so doing, Wolf helped to establish the study of American Jewish history as an academic field. But more importantly, Wolf’s book made a political statement. The magazine article to which Wolf was responding appeared in the 1890s -- as waves of Eastern European Jewish immigrants were arriving on America’s shores. In the book’s introduction, Wolf writes: “Under ordinary [circumstances], such false claims would have merited no reply. But at a time when … public attention centers on the Jewish refugees from Russia, … I feel myself impelled to reply … to these … slurs [against] the Jewish people.”

Wolf’s book stood up not only for those Jews who had served, but also for those Jews who were just arriving in this country and would soon make their mark. And so we see that the second book of numbers was, like the one that came before it, also more than just a book of numbers. It made the case that Jews belonged in this country, whether they’d been here for centuries or they were just arriving.

The third book of numbers: World War Two.

By the eve of the Second World War, the Jewish population in the US had ballooned from 150,000 at the time of the Civil War to nearly 5 million. As the US entered the war, American Jews -- like a my Grandpa Harry -- felt a special urgency to fight to save their European brothers and sisters from the Nazis. More than half-a-million Jewish Americans served in uniform during World War Two -- and countless more did their part on the homefront.

Perhaps the most famous Jew in the military during World War Two was not a soldier at all, but rather, a chaplain. Rabbi Alexander Goode was serving as a chaplain on the US Dorchester when it was sunk by a German submarine. The ship didn’t have enough life vests for everyone on board, and so Rabbi Goode, along with his fellow chaplains on board -- two Protestant ministers and a Catholic priest -- gave up their own life vests when the supply ran out. Survivors of the Dorchester recall that Rabbi Goode and his fellow chaplains were last seen standing on the deck of the sinking boat, huddled arm in arm, reciting prayers together.

After the war, the Jewish Welfare Board published, in eight volumes, its substantial data on Jewish contributions to the war effort -- the third book of numbers. This book of numbers was the most extensive one yet, not only because of the large number of Jews who served in World War Two, but also because of the kinds of records that they collected -- newspaper clippings, postcards, transcripts of telephone calls, casualty reports, cemetery maps, and a variety of other artifacts.

After the war, the troops were welcomed home as heroes. You can see the ethos of the times in the Hollywood movies[6] made after the war -- where, commonly, a ragtag, ethnically diverse group of soldiers proves to their skeptical commander that no matter their background, they’re all Americans. This ethos was expressed in law in the GI Bill -- which provided veterans with college scholarships. Jews, who had only a generation earlier been barred from enrolling at the most prestigious universities, now flocked to the colleges. With higher education came economic success, and shortly thereafter, the move to the suburbs. WRT itself, founded in 1953, is a part of this post-war success story -- American Jewry’s achieving of the American dream. In 1955, an influential essay celebrating religious pluralism in America was published with the title “Protestant, Catholic, Jew.” That title signaled that Jews in America were finally on equal footing with their Christian counterparts.

And so we see that the third book of numbers, like the two that came before it, was also more than just a book of numbers. It made the case that American Jews had finally found their seat at table.

So what do these three books -- similar in content, but different in impact -- have in common? What’s the common theme that makes these books more than just a book of numbers? Whether it was Haym Salomon after the Revolution advocating for religious freedom, or Simon Wolf after the Civil War advocating to welcome refugees, or the Jewish Welfare Board after World War Two advocating for the Jewish seat at the American table -- each of these books of stood up for diversity, for the rights of our minority group. Like the Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan -- or the countless other families of every religious and ethnic stripe whose young people have served in uniform -- we Jews, too, have been proud of our military service. We wear it as a badge of honor -- a reminder not only of our community’s personal sacrifice, but also of the value of diversity. We point to our military service to prove that in America, all groups belong. This, after all, is what makes America unique from other countries -- that we’re united not by blood and soil, but rather, in our equal protection under the law. This is what is meant by American exceptionalism: that our diversity unites us.

This Memorial Day, in addition to our pool parties and our barbeques, let us hope to live up to this ideal. Let us pay honor those who fought and died for the sake of our country. And in particular, let us pay honor to those Jews who fought not only for the sake of our country, but also for the sake of diversity. Somewhere, maybe even on your own front porch, there hangs an American flag -- like the one that was given to my Grandpa Harry. This Memorial Day, let us remember that like that flag, America has always come in many stripes.

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[1] Numbers 1:2-3

[2] This insight comes from Arthur Hertzberg’s landmark book The Jews in America, p. 309. Much of the research for this sermon comes from that book, as well as from Jonathan Sarna’s American Judaism.

[3] See pp. 178-179.

[4] See Sarna’s book When General Grant Expelled the Jews.

[5] See Hertzberg, pp. 135-136.

[6] Consider, for example, John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima.