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.
[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.