Dear Friends,
As my mother, kneeling, scrubbed the kitchen floor for the last time, my father replaced the right jamb of the door frame between our family candy store and the adjacent step down into our living quarters. It was moving day. After thirty-three years in business, six days a week and seventeen hours a day, my parents and paternal grandmother determined it was time to go. They had had enough and were eager to move on to the modest lakeside cottage that had been our Sunday retreat throughout the years. While the store had provided a living for our family, they had no attachment to it at all. It had been a long and difficult haul for them. The tedium of life behind the counter against the background of frequent antisemitic jibes and the occasional hold-up at gun-point killed any sentimentality that might have occasioned the move. And so they left almost everything for the new owners, including much of our home furnishings. Only the door jamb was taken. Why the door jamb? It was a sacred pillar on which the physical growth of my sister and I was recorded throughout our childhoods.
Many hours later, as the moving men carried the last boxes from their truck into the cottage, my father, under the direction of my mom, installed the old jamb in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen of the cottage. Running her hand down the panel illustrated with the markings of my sister and my initials with dates and measurements in feet and inches, my mother declared, “We’re home.” Twelve years later, a decade after my father’s sudden death, my mother moved to an apartment about a mile away from my sister. The jamb went with her as a living memorial.
What that jamb represented to my parents is what Presidents Day means to our Nation. Our history as a People is marked by the words of our country’s Matriarchs and Patriarchs and, especially, by those who were elected to the presidency. Understanding that our past points to our future, I offer two quotations from the writings of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln by which to measure the present state of our Union.
From Washington, a warning that was the substance of his “Farewell Address,” September 1792 [edited]: “The United States of Government, which constitutes you one people, is also dear to you. It is justly so; for it is a main Pillar of the Edifice of your real independence; the support of your tranquility at home; your peace abroad; of your safety . . . of that very Liberty, which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee, that, from . . . different quarters, much pains will be taken . . . to weaken in your minds, the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively directed, it is of infinite moment . . . that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immoveable attachment to it . . . watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion, that I can in any event be abandoned, and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our Country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred tie which now link together the various parts.”
Underscoring this point of national unity, 163 years later, Abraham Lincoln delivered his first Inaugural Address five weeks before the outbreak of the Civil War, in which he said: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
I found the door jamb stashed away in the corner of a closet when my niece and I packed up my mother’s apartment ten years ago, just three weeks after the death of her mother, my dear sister, Fern. Looking at it, I recognized that I had not grown taller over the many years since the last measurement taken a day before I left for Israel as a new rabbinical student. I was as tall as I would ever be, and that, with my sister gone, the jamb would only engender anger and re-bereavement. And so I tossed the jamb into the dumpster.
The words of Washington and Lincoln were, too, a base measurement of our Republic in his infancy and adolescence. Do they still relevant for this noble experiment called the United States of America? Have we heeded Washington’s warning? Have we lived up to Lincoln’s ideal? That’s why we must still celebrate their lives, if not to revel in our fulfillment of their words than to see how misguided we have come to be.
With eyes wide open, I am,
Lee
