What Our Flag Still Says: Memorial Day 2020

What Our Flag Still Says

Memorial Day 2020 

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

In the Torah’s stories of the death of Abraham and, later, his son Isaac, I always find myself  both confused and amazed by the description of how their children came together to bury their father.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, and yet it does. Abraham’s two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, were never very close. At least 13 years of age separated them, and there are intimations that Ishmael may have been abusive toward his younger half-brother. The troubling relationship between the two continued—even to this day. The Torah describes Ishmael as the ancestor of the Arab peoples, and while the Jews and Arabs may be distantly related, in modern times there is little love lost between the two nations.

Still, when Abraham dies, Ishmael and Isaac come together to bury their father.

Jacob and Esau—Isaac and Rebecca’s sons—may have been closer in age (they were, in fact, twins), the hatred between them is the background for famous incidents of cheating, manipulation, and murderous oaths. Hundreds of years after the Torah’s story of their rivalry was told, the ancient Rabbis made Esau (and his descendants, the Edumites) symbol of Israel’s most vicious and murderous enemies.

But in the Torah, when Isaac dies, Esau and Jacob overcome their hatred for one another and come together to bury their father.

A similar (although not quite as deadly) division exists in America today. Though at times hateful and violent, and widely exacerbated by the social media, two vocal and hate-filled camps stand across from each other, each throwing epithets at each other, each calling the other by names, labels and words that if our parents heard us utter, they would make us wash our mouths out with soap.

One would think we are at the outset of yet another Civil War.

What we seem to have forgotten is not what comes between us, but rather, what connects us.

Americans can’t claim the complex and deep-rooted history that Jews and Arabs share. Modern American history only goes back 500 years. And there are other differences: Americans, although often speaking of “our forefathers,” do not share ancestries. Among us are people who have come from all over the world. The Pilgrims who, according to our origin stories, landed at Plymouth in 1620, were not the only newcomers to the New World. There were also French and Spaniards, Portuguese and Dutch, among others. By religion, they were Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, not counting the religions held by the slaves they brought with them from Africa and elsewhere.

And of course, before any of them, there were the Native Americans, each with their language, culture and customs.

Yet history brought us all together in an amazingly short time. Somehow, all interwove into a colorful tapestry of cultures that learned to coexist; that lived side by side; that intermarried or held fast to their cultural roots; that at times fought against each other, but at other times traded, ate and drank together, and by some mysterious force became one Union.

Memorial Day, better than any other day in the year, recalls to us what made us one nation. In Arlington, VA, and in every other state of the Union as well as in 16 foreign countries, the neatly aligned graves of fallen American soldiers, stretching for seemingly miles in every direction, decorated with crosses, stars of David and other religious emblems, all serve to remind us of how we became the American People. Not peoples—one people.

For some of us, this long weekend is an excuse to go shopping for sales and markdowns. For others, it’s an opportunity to enjoy the beginning of summer with barbecues and picnics, or to take in the beauty of the land through hikes and nature walks. For all of us, however, Memorial Day is there to provide us with the most important reason and purpose of our existence.

The cultural, economic and military strength of the United States is there not by accident or coincidence. The American success story was paid for by the lives of the soldiers who fought in its wars. Close to 7000 died in the American Revolutionary War. 500,000 in the Civil War. Another half a million died in World War II.

Close to a million and a half Americans paid with their lives for our freedoms today.

But we must never for a moment lose sight of the fact that each of them—those marked by a headstone, a flag, by a name engraved in a wall, or designated as “unknown,” as well as those who are still MIA’s—was a human being, born of a mother and father. Each had a family, a lover, children, and a circle friends. Each was a unique human being with desires, talents, and a life story that never reached its natural conclusion.

Simply put, we are here today because they are not.

Of course, we could just go on bickering. We could protest over rights—and wrongs. We could live each moment in pursuit of our own happiness, strive toward goals we set for ourselves, and stridently abuse those who disagree with us or stand in our way.

Or we could repeat—a hundred times over, until we memorize them—the words spoken by President Lincoln as he stood over the graves of the fallen at Gettysburg: “It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Despite an occasional dearth of toilet paper or disinfectant wipes, on the whole we Americans today are far better off than most of the rest of the world’s population. Though in the throes of a dreaded pandemic that is taking a tragic toll of life and health from among many of us, we are by and large living the good life.

Yet we are facing today challenges not unequal to those faced by our ancestors: Civil rights, justice and injustice, ignorance, poverty and dangerous disease. Perhaps, if we take some time from this long weekend to assess where we came from, and how far—and at what cost—we have come to reach this point, we might also discover the factors that united us in the past, and which still unite us today.

The ideals for which America stands, upon which it was founded, and for which so many paid with their lives, are best represented by our flag. Its colors as well as the stars and stripes are so much than simply geometric design: they stand for our diversity, for the uniqueness of each one of us, for the basic human rights of each individual member of our culture and society. They stand for the sacrifices made by our fathers and mothers. They represent our unity and collective identity, as well as our promise and purpose as a nation.

At no point may we lose sight of what America is, and how it got to be that. The Biblical stories that are part of our tradition carry lessons and admonitions no less valid today than they were thousands of years ago: That we remember why we are here, for what reasons this country was established, and at what cost it still stands.

May this Memorial Day be meaningful for us all. May we remember and honor those who gave their lives so that we might live in freedom today. May we never lose sight of the path yet ahead of us.

God bless America, make it strong, and keep us all in health, safety and peace.

© 2020 by Boaz D. Heilman