In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.
Welcome back.
On this day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln, "signed a commission naming Rabbi Jacob Frankel of Rodeph Shalom Congregation in Philadelphia the first Jewish chaplain of the U.S. Army."
I read that historical tidbit this morning in the TODAY IN HISTORY part of our newspaper. It is always printed below the funnies. I read the funnies first so I might live longer.
This story pleased my soul even more.
It reminded me that the ideals upon which the United States of America are based reflect the kind of thinking that is possible for a society that seeks to live out our God of love’s commandment.
Not at first, of course, for liberty had to work itself out through decades of slavery, war, genocide and Jim Crow, imperialism, and more wars.
However, the idea that all people have an inalienable right to liberty, and religious liberty is included in that, suggests a strong confidence that a society where such liberty reigns will be much better than any other society that has ever or ever will exist.
Gradually, our nation since 1776 has, like a backpacker, hiked through history, shaking off the vile dust of ancient prejudices clinging to its feet by law.
Our laws are becoming more and more just today. Our people, and maybe the world's people, are changing too despite the violence and hatred we see today.
It has always been that way for homo sapiens.
If I may expound on a cliché: the light of love began as a spark among our species, then disparate sparks, and then sparks that joined into flames. Among the flames some were smothered, smoldered, yet the fire remained.
Embedded within an act such as President Lincoln's, a tiny legal shift fanned the flames that flickered towards the future.
I can imagine the grumbling among our more Puritanical brothers and sisters, and other fundamentalists--and nearly everyone was a fundamentalist back then—as well as secular others who were by upbringing intensified bigots.
It is the same grumbling we hear when one mosque goes up on a street that already winds past ten churches.
Indeed, by nature we mistrust the other: the one who does not look like we look or worship like we worship.
Ironically, in the distant past the first of those ten churches on that winding street grumbled as different congregations erected their spires, steeples, or unadorned rooftops.
Our upbringing can nurture that natural mistrust and turn it into hatred.
However, once upon a time, an American president made a decision that demonstrated our American faith in religious liberty as citizens in Antietam murdered one another over competing views of what freedom meant.
Our president's signature fit in nicely with the love our God of love commands of us all.
And what is this love? I cannot express it more practically, that is, as something that can be perfected by daily and conscientious rote, even in the most withering environment, than the following definition:
"Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."
This is not an emotional love, a felt love.
Indeed, this is an exercised love. It has faith that the commitment to love will be furthered over time by our God of love as we love.
Once it was said of us, that everyone would know us by our love.
Then we hated, armed ourselves, and became like everyone else.
Blessings...
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