Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (73 page)

“He was trying to say to the Roman emperor,” the rabbi speculated, “that the future peace of the world, the very survival of Roman civilization, depended on a shift in policy—that they had come to the end of what could be done with arms. There was no more land that could be conquered, and all future battles would have to be either stalemates or defeats. Therefore he believed that Rome had to bring to its policy a new idea, the idea of brotherhood with the Parthians and the Saxons and the other tribes.

“Reb Y’Hoshua Ben Chananyah urged the emperor not to arm the barbarians, not to give them technical knowledge which ultimately they would use to destroy Rome, but to give them instead an understanding of what life is all about, which the Jews were trying to spread in the world….

“The emperor could not accept this, because in order to accept it he would have had to change not Roman policy but Roman character. He would have had to persuade the Roman people not to look upon the barbarians as barbarians, but to look upon them as brothers; to give up their own high standard of living in order to lift the so-called barbarians from their savage ways, and that the Romans were unwilling to do. If they could have done it, Rome could have survived to this day.” Rabbi Finkelstein then gave the bridge—“We are living in a world in which the white race is a corporate Hadrian”—that carried his argument to the need for education and an end to racial discrimination.

When President Richard Nixon instituted a series of sermons to be delivered on Sunday mornings in the East Room of the White House, some of his aides felt uncomfortable at possible sectarianism as well as a breach between church and state. “Get the top rabbi,” he directed; Dr. Finkelstein agreed to come and, on June 29, 1969, delivered this sermon. (According to his nephew David Finn, Dr. Finkelstein added impromptu comments, specifically on the creation of the State of Israel, to his prepared sermon.)

***

MR. PRESIDENT, MRS.
Nixon, Mr. Chief Justice, Mrs. Burger, ladies, and gentlemen:

One is frequently asked to define the American way of life, which we struggle so hard to protect and develop. No satisfactory definition describes this way of life to those who have not experienced it. However, there are scenes, distinctive of America, scarcely occurring anywhere else, even in the free world, which may help to make it understood. One is taking place in this room today. Here are gathered leaders of our nation, among others, to pray together, uniting across differences of background and doctrine, before the throne of the Judge of us all. Here the assembly looks to a faith, long subject to disdain, and even persecution, for light to our severely tried generation.

In the face of crisis which seemed insoluble, my great predecessor Solomon Schechter used to say, “You must leave a little bit to God.” He did not mean that we are free from responsibility to alleviate human agony. He tried to express in a single aphorism the insight of Rabbi Tarfon, a sage who flourished in Judea toward the end of the first century, and who taught his disciples, “You are not obliged to complete the task (that is, the task of making the world a better dwelling-place), but neither are you free
to desist from it.” Or, as he put it on another occasion, “Do not flinch from a task which by its nature can never be completed.”

How little the mightiest of us can hope to accomplish, and how much we have to leave to God! And how secure we may be that, no matter what follies we may commit, he will ultimately save us from the worst results of our errors! After all, here we are, all sentient human beings, yet all descended from primeval bits of protoplasm, themselves incredibly combined from inanimate bits of protein. Perhaps some three billion years were required for those primeval cells to become thinking men and women; but that is surely a brief span for a bacterium to graduate into manhood.

The primeval cells had no notion of purpose. Neither did the earthworms, who, in the course of eons, began the adventuresome roads to mammals, primates, and humans, impelled by a force which still eludes our understanding. Heirs to all their strengths and weaknesses, we are their direct descendants, thinking, writing, speaking, speculating, planning, and even from time to time communing with God himself.

Having brought us so far, did this cosmic force desert us, simply because we are sentient human beings, rather than unicellular bacteria and amoebae? Instead, must we not rationally assume that—privileged to think, to have purpose, to work toward goals—the divine power that brought us from such humble origins will continue to guide us, turning our very folly into wisdom?

As men, we alone among animal species have the power to envisage the future and to choose. We can act wisely, and we can also act foolishly. The machinery which constantly saves us from our sins of omission and commission appears most clearly perhaps in the life of society. American history could properly be told in the style of the Book of Judges. Whenever self-induced danger threatened, leaders have been sent to save our country for its intended destiny of service.

Where would we be today, where would be the hope of the free world, where would be the future of civilization, if in the crises at the beginning of the Republic it had lacked the redoubtable figures of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, to mention only a few? That great tragedy the War between the States arose from many failures of human judgment. But—remarkably—the compassion and wisdom of Abraham Lincoln became available just when they were most essential. Where would the Western world (including our own country) have been today, if Winston Churchill had not, through what seemed at the time mere chance, become the articulate leader of Britain, standing
alone between impending barbarism and civilization, guarding us, until we could protect ourselves and others?

Miracles occur not only in historical crises; they are happening every day, all the time, for each of us. Everyone in this room is alive due to uncounted miracles, as commonplace as the rising and setting of the sun.

A student at our seminary once asked whether I really believe in the miracle of the ancient Israelites crossing the Red Sea. (Actually, properly interpreted, Scripture says that they crossed not the Red Sea but a “Sea of Reeds,” which may have been a smaller body of water.) As related in Exodus, the story is about as remarkable as the American defeat of the Japanese navy at Midway, a turning point in the Second World War. I might have mentioned this fact. I might also have mentioned the miracle of the American Constitution, a document drawn up by human beings, but which seems to reflect almost divine wisdom, which has guided us for generations and become a model for many other peoples. I might have mentioned the miracle of the Second World War, during which, in 1940, the Allies seemed hopelessly defeated, and yet emerged victorious in 1945. As he was himself a refugee from oppression, who had fled to Jerusalem before coming to the United States, I might have come very near his own experience by mentioning the miracle of the emergence of the state of Israel, an event unique in the annals of mankind.

However, all these answers only occurred to me on my way home from the seminary. My answer to him was different. I said, “I was not present at the crossing of the Red Sea, so that I cannot add to what is recorded. But I certainly believe in miracles; and one of the miracles in which I most firmly believe is that you and I exist, and that despite the fact that our lives are in dire jeopardy momentarily, and would cease if everything depended on our conscious thought.” I recommended that he read a book by Walter B. Cannon, professor of physiology at Harvard, called
The Wisdom of the Body
. It is learned and wise; though doubtless since its appearance early in the century, others have superseded some of its facts. Professor Cannon shows what miracles go on at every moment within us; what ingenuity beyond the power of the cleverest engineer enables the eye to see, the ear to hear, the hand to touch, and above all the mind to think. How strange it is that no matter how much liquid we drink, our blood never becomes diluted, but is kept in proper balance! How incredible that the single cell from which each of us developed should carry the potential of every quality destined to appear in us, in its proper season; that the cells multiplying from this original one should have separate functions, one becoming a brain cell, another a red blood corpuscle, a third a bone cell—without confusion or error!

Of course, sometimes the miraculous is obscured. There is much that is imperfect in man’s life, both individual and communal. That is what we should expect. Why should it be otherwise? What needs explanation is how much happens to be right, even though the world in each of its parts is far too complex for the wisest of us to comprehend.

Once more, as Solomon Schechter said, “You must leave a little bit to God.” He has been; he is; he will be. We must try to do what we can, and are enjoying a great privilege when we do well and find the path of the right. At such times, we are cooperating with God: in the rabbinic phrase, we become his partners. And he is working through us, and with us. Happy is he, who, like Lincoln, is privileged to save his fellows when they are threatened by their own misdeeds, whose life represents an intervention of the divine into human affairs.

The faith that all will be well enables us to be steadfast in peril, and modest in success; to escape foolish hand-wringing and paralysis, as well as thoughtless panic and fear.

Once more, as Schechter said, “You must leave a little bit to God.” I hope that it is not presumptuous for me, a guest of the president of the United States, to pray that, looking back at our generation, a future historian may say, as I have said of Lincoln, “In a period of great trials and tribulations, the finger of God pointed to Richard Milhous Nixon, giving him the wisdom and the vision to save the world and civilization, opening the way for our country to realize the good that the twentieth century offered mankind.”

Speaking on March 8, 1983, to the National Association of Evangelists meeting in Orlando, Florida, President Reagan delivered a politically controversial sermon on an undeniably moral topic: the sources of evil in the modern world. The address was drafted by Anthony Dolan and delivered with appropriate evangelistic fervor by the president to a group that agreed with him on such issues as prayer in public schools and limitation on abortion, but tended to accept the Soviet position on nuclear disarmament. Liberal historian Henry Steele Commager called this speech the worst ever given by a president, savage criticism that did not trouble the conservative president or his aides a bit. Although the “evil empire” phrase was derided by accommodationists as extreme and simplistic, it set forth with clarity and force the basic Reagan beliefs before the onset of Gorbachevian
perestroika
, and was recalled with respect at the President’s state funeral in 2004. Here is his sermon’s conclusion:

***

DURING MY FIRST
press conference as president, in answer to a direct question, I pointed out that, as good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution.

I think I should point out I was only quoting Lenin, their guiding spirit, who said in 1920 that they repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas or ideas that are outside class conceptions; morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war; and everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.

I think the refusal of many influential people to accept this elementary fact of Soviet doctrine illustrates a historical reluctance to see totalitarian powers for what they are. We saw this phenomenon in the 1930s; we see it too often today. This does not mean we should isolate ourselves and refuse to seek an understanding with them….

Let us pray for the salvation of all those who live in totalitarian darkness, pray they will discover the joy of knowing God.

But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples of the earth—they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

It was C. S. Lewis who, in his unforgettable
Screwtape Letters
, wrote, “The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”

Because these “quiet men” do not “raise their voices,” because they sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace, because, like other dictators before them, they are always making “their final territorial demand,” some would have us accept them at their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses.

But, if history teaches anything, it teaches: simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly—it means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.

So I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority. You know, I have always believed that old Screwtape reserves his best efforts for those of you in the church.

So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation blithely to declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.