THANKSGIVING 2023 -- JACK, ROSALYN AND THE PEOPLE OF ABRAHAM

It's Thanksgiving 2023.

Actually it's two days after.

I am a little late with the thank yous this year.

Because I was paralyzed.

By this question.

Is the world too far gone for gratitude?

Consider these facts:

Hamas massacred 1,200 innocent civilians over a month ago. Those killed included babies, children and the elderly.  Intercepted communications disclosed killers calling home to announce all "the Jews" they had murdered.  Approximately 250 innocents were taken hostage and removed to the tunnels beneath Gaza from which Hamas operates.  There, it is shielded by the millions of civilians who live above, civilians Hamas regularly sacrifices as it attempts (often successfully, never correctly or morally) to create sympathy or false equivalence when their terrorism is followed by the justifiable Israeli response.

Meanwhile, back here at home, Donald Trump is still the prohibitive front-runner in the race for next year's Republican presidential nomination and the new GOP Speaker of the House is a Christian nationalist who thinks the Bible (or, more accurately, his view of the Bible) trumps (irony intended) the Constitution. Whether Donald Trump has ever read the Bible or even cares about what it means, Christian nationalists have made him their avatar, the sinner who slew Roe v. Wade and will pave America's way to legislating another (either the fourth or fifth; the history is presently up for grabs) Great Awakening.

The union of religion and politics is always fraught. It can breed intolerance. In the history of the world, the number of those killed in the name of one god or another is much too large to count. It is also much too large to justify.  But those who would do so persist.

This week, Thanksgiving was sandwiched between bookends telling us it was not always thus and need not be so now. 

John F. Kennedy was assassinated sixty years ago this past Wednesday.  Earlier in the week, former first lady Rosalyn Carter passed away at the age of 96.  The forever young president and the aged first lady reminded us of what we have lost

On the day Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961, the world was a dangerous place.  The United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a Cold War of  nuclear terror. Half of Europe was controlled by Soviet communists.  Who only four years earlier had violently crushed dissent in Hungary.  The global south was poor. And angry. Uncertain on where it belonged.  Or who it wished to emulate. 

Speaking to this world, Kennedy could have proffered a series of excuses.

Instead, he offered a series of pledges.

To allies, the "loyalty of faithful friends". 

To those in "half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery", "our best efforts to help them help themselves". 

To our "sister republics south of our border", "good words" converted into "good deeds" in a "new alliance for progress". 

To the United Nations, the "last best hope where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace", a pledge "to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective". 

And to our "adversaries", a "request" that "both sides begin anew the quest for peace"

Kennedy knew at least two things as he uttered these pledges.  The first was that his list was long.  "All this," he said, "will not be finished in the first one hundred days". "Nor," he continued, "in the first one thousand days" or "the life of this Administration".  "Nor even perhaps," he concluded, "in our lifetime on this planet." The second was that  waiting would not make things better.  So, he insisted, "let us begin."

In her life, Rosalyn Carter was all about beginnings.  

Her family was poor but she never knew it (though her family had no money, she explained, "neither did anyone else").  Her father died when she was 13. Without bitterness, she said it was the end of her childhood. She helped raise her younger siblings and her mother's dressmaking business. 

She was the first person in her family to graduate from college. 

She married a graduate of the Naval Academy and then managed his peanut farm after he left the service. 

When he ran for the state senate, Governor (twice) and President (twice), she was his most important surrogate. When he was president, she spearheaded efforts to improve mental health care in the United States. After he lost, she began a second life of service, building houses, establishing an institute advocating for unpaid caregivers and continuing her mental health advocacy. 

In his 1961 Inaugural, JFK's most famous line came in his peroration: "And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country."

Rosalyn Carter got the memo.

Yesterday, Israel paused its campaign in Gaza to allow for the release of fifty hostages being held by Hamas and the delivery of desperately needed food, water and fuel for Gaza's civilians.  Many, including President Biden, are being praised for having advocated for the pause and helped with the negotiations that made it and the hostage release possible.

Israel, however, deserves the most praise.

For its courage.

Academics and others can talk about the law of war and the need for restraint and proportionality when civilians are at risk, but Israel's soldiers are on the ground in Gaza putting their lives on the line every minute.  The only reason Gaza's civilians are endangered in this conflict is because Hamas hides behind and under those civilians.  Full stop. It is impossible to avoid civilian casualties under those circumstances and very difficult to apply the legal principles of proportional response in assaying each potential target. Israel, however, is attempting to do so.  Even while Hamas regularly violates the laws to which Israel is being held.

Israel is the only democracy in the middle east.  

Another full stop. 

It is surrounded by those who would eliminate it and Judaism from the face of the earth. It reasonably fears another Holocaust.  And in the face of October 7, it had no choice other than the course upon which it embarked. As a democracy, its government responds to and is bound by the will of its people. And those people have once again risen to the occasion.  "Never again" and "Bring them home" are commitments that co-exist in Israel.  

They do so despite their inherent tension.

But because of the courage of Israel's citizens.

When Kennedy finished his Inaugural Address, he gave us a glimpse of his God.  He said: "With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own."

JFK never made God an excuse or something to hide behind.

Neither did Rosalyn Carter.

Neither is Israel doing so today.

And, despite my fears, their examples prove that  the world today need not be and is not too far gone.

So. . .

This Thanksgiving . . .

At this difficult time . . . 

And in a difficult week . . .

I thank them.