Ruth R. Wisse 

A Message from the Blue and White in the Red, White, and Blue

It is a great privilege to be giving the Jefferson Lecture. There have been many far more distinguished speakers in this series, but I think none has been older, and no one more grateful. As an adult immigrant who loved this country from afar long before I became a citizen, I bless the United States for its bounty and for the freedoms it guarantees us. The more I cherish all the good that it does, the less I understand those who take it for granted. This makes me increasingly protective of what can only remain the land of the free if we are determined to conserve it. 

            The Jews are a people much more vulnerable than this great nation, more threated and more endangered in every way but one: its endurance. This country, also known from its flag as the Red, White, and Blue, is about to celebrate its 250th year. In the Hebrew calendar, we are now in year 5,786 since Creation, and in recorded history Jews have endured for well over 3,000 years, many of them spent in violent displacement and exile in foreign lands. I was born Jewish in East Central Europe eighty-nine years ago. Thanks to my parents, I learned that refuge is never permanent unless it is  protected and creatively reinforced. In that spirit I now take this opportunity to offer a grateful Jewish message on staying power, in three parts. 

As a teacher of literature, I’ll begin with a Yiddish poem that surprised me greatly when it was published 50 years ago. Here is the opening stanza, with explanation to follow. 

, װער װעט בלײַבן? װאָס װעט בלײַבן? בלײַבן װעט אַ װינט
בלײַבן װעט די בלינדקײט פֿונעם בלינדן, װאָס פֿאַרשװינדט
בלײַבן װעט אַ סימן פֿונעם ים: אַ שנירל שוים
בלײַבן װעט אַ װאָלקנדל פֿאַרטשעפּעט אויף אַ בוים 

Who will last? And what?  The wind will stay 
and the blind man's blindness when he's gone away,
and a thread of foam-- a sign of the sea—
and a bit of cloud snarled in a tree.

From here the poem, translated by Cynthia Ozick, continues in the same vein to pose the question of mutability that poets never stop addressing. Many know of the British poet Percy  

Bysshe Shelley’s image of the trunkless legs and shattered visage in the desert of what was once the imposing statue of Ozymandias, King of Kings, whose broken pedestal boasts: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Now, of that sneer “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/ Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/ The  lone and level sands stretch far away.” By contrast, John Keats, Shelley’s friend and poetic competitor, is inspired by an ancient, splendidly preserved Grecian Urn to exclaim, “‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,’"—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Each response, that all is vanity (Shelley) and that artistic perfection is timeless (Keats), has its philosophical adherents. 

            The response of our Yiddish poet is something else entirely! After conveying a sense of urgency--Who will remain? What will remain?—his poem offers its reassurance with the very things we associate with impermanence. Wind, blindness, cloud: how can such images of  insubstantiality relieve our anxieties about endurance? 

            I wish the person standing here before you could have been Abraham Sutzkever, the legendary author himself. That being impossible, let me try to summon him up for you. 

            Avrom (Abraham) Sutzkever was born in Polish Lithuania in 1913. A year later at the start of the First World War, his parents fled from the German and Russian warring armies with their three children—he being the youngest. The refuge they found in Omsk Siberia, also brought them hardship and illness. But the boy experienced Siberia as the birthplace of poetry, and that creative awakening would later become the subject of Siberia--his first epic poem. He paints himself at age seven in a wondrous landscape of discovery. When his father dies, the boy follows the hearse/sled to the funeral site, where his impulse is to join his father down in his snowy grave. At that moment, a dove he has been nestling in his bosom flies out to the sun and draws him upward—to life. 

            This mythic description of the boy Abraham evokes the Biblical story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, transposed from the blazing Middle East to the frozen North, from the father prepared to sacrifice a son to the son who must instead sacrifice his father. In place of the sacrificial ram, he is rescued by the dove’s promise of restored life. The Biblical analog is not explicit--it is simply there for those who have the Bible in their blood. For Sutzkever, poetry is the death-defying power that resists being defined by war and sickness and death, the transformative power that human beings wield over circumstance. 

            In 1921, after the end of World War I, Sutzkever’s mother Reyne settled with the children in Vilno, then in Poland, today’s Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. My maternal grandmother had run a large Jewish publishing house in the city, long renowned as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” for its Talmudic learning, and its thriving Jewish culture. When my parents, slightly older than Sutzkever, reminisced about their life there in the 1920s, I felt I’d been born too late. 

            Vilna’s 65,000 Jews made up one-third of the city’s multi-ethnic inhabitants, and they were encouraged to develop their own language and culture by the competitive nationalisms of local Lithuanians and Poles. The city produced five Yiddish dailies, a Jewish Teachers’ Seminary for a network of Jewish schools, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research with subsidiary branches in New York and Argentina, plus a world-touring Yiddish Theater company. Sutzkever’s older brother, active in the Zionist movement, moved to Palestine in the 1930s, helping to ready the homeland for those who would be lucky enough to reach it. In his mid-teens, Avrom himself learned from a soccer buddy how to write poetry, joined the literary and artistic circle Yung Vilna, and began to publish his work--including in American Yiddish journals. 

            What followed, followed. By June 1941, two years after their conquest of Poland, the Germans entered Vilna and made up for lost time by accelerating the killing process. Jews were forced into the ghetto, there to be hounded, starved, humiliated, and murdered. Avrom, by now married to Freydke, joined the underground. He continued writing poems, convinced that if they were good, the Angel of Poetry would protect him with a flaming sword, and if not—he was owed nothing. 

            This imagined power over adversity had its limits. When Freydke gave birth in the ghetto hospital, the Nazis smothered the infant boy, and the couple’s own mothers were killed as part of the ghetto’s liquidation. But Sutzkever and his wife escaped to join anti-Nazi partisan fighters in the forest. One might say that poetry reasserted its miraculous power there when a Lithuanian partisan leader took Sutzkever’s poems to Moscow, to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee that none other than Stalin had established jn order to gain credibility with Americans. The Anti-Fascist Committee sent a small plane to airlift Sutzkever and his wife to Moscow, where he became the first living witness of the khurbn—in Hebrew khurban: this is the same word that Yiddish uses to denote the catastrophic destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, and was then adopted for what in English is known as the Holocaust. 

            At the postwar Nuremberg Trials, Sutzkever was appointed to testify on behalf of Jewry. You can see him on YouTube, declining to sit and insisting that he be allowed to deliver his testimony while upright. Describing one of the Nazis’ periodic mass shootings inside the ghetto he says, “It looks as if a red rain had fallen.” 

            After two years spent in postwar Moscow, Sutzkever was repatriated to Poland, and from there made his way to Paris and then in 1947 to Palestine a half-year before the establishment of the state of Israel. In Tel Aviv he would perform what some jokingly called his greatest miracle –persuading the country’s fledgling government to fund a Yiddish literary magazine which, over the next 50 years, would become the finest publication in the history of Yiddish literature. He traveled to Jewish communities worldwide, but settled in fast-growing Tel Aviv, and there, in the security of the homeland, he began writing what he called Poems from a Diary, lyrics about daily life, recollections and meditations. Composed over several years, these constitute his masterwork, and our poem, to which we now return, comes right at the start of the series: Ver vet blaybn? “Who will last? And what?” 

                You grasp its urgency. Vilna and hundreds of Jewish communities dating back to the founding of Lithuania and Poland were now emptied of Jews. Those still alive after the war were frantic to commemorate their cities, towns, and villages; the New York Public Library alone has digitized over 700 such memorial books. Sutzkever had his own crucial role in salvaging precious manuscripts and documents. But our poem teases the urgent anxiety of such preservation: “The wind will stay/ and the blind man's blindness when he's gone away,/and a thread of foam-- a sign of the sea…” To say “gone with the wind” implies the disappearance of matter; blindness is the absence of sight; Foam is all that is left when the tide has come and gone. How can such insubstantiality answer the desperate need for permanence?  

            The second stanza compounds the paradox. What will last? A single syllable, it promises, will be as generative as B’reishit, “In the Beginning,” the first word of the Hebrew Bible. If you believe that nature has procreative powers, why not believe the same of art and humanity? You want to know what music will resound? A fiddlerose will play and elicit a grateful response from seven blades of grass. 

            Lastly, the concluding stanza looks up from the ground to the heavens for what reassurance they have to offer:

            Of all that northflung starry stuff 
the star descended in the tear will last. 
In its jar a drop of wine stands fast.
Who lasts? God abides--isn't that enough? 

מער פֿון אַלע שטערן אַזש פֿון צפֿון ביז אַהער
בלײַבן װעט דער שטערן, װאָס ער פֿאַלט אין סאַמע טרער
שטענדיק װעט אַ טראָפּן װײַן בלײַבן אין זײַן קרוג
װער װעט בלײַבן? גאָט װעט בלײַבן, איז דיר ניט גענוג 

Folk belief associates a falling star with a person dying on earth. This poem’s only intimation of loss, its only sign of mourning, is the falling star that silently joins in the human sorrow, but its counterpart, the drop of wine standing fast in its jug is a sign of human celebration, both meant to wean us from our craving for material guarantees. The poem’s merest hints of survival remind us of the divine mystery that is also our security. 

 Still, does any of this answer the anxiety of those who needed reassurance that Jewish civilization had not been in vain? 

            I began with this poem from among thousands because of how it took me by surprise. When Sutzkever first visited North America in 1959 he recorded a selection of his poetry, available from the Smithsonian Museum, choosing verses on many themes of resistance and tenacity that he had written during the ghetto years and after. He recited them in a booming voice like the Russian Poet Evgeny Yevtushenko speaking outdoors to a crowd of thousands, and as he himself had once done in Moscow. So I did not expect this reflection, and I could not remember the presence of God having figured at all in Sutzkever’s writing. Yet, though not a prayer or religious testimony in any usual sense, the direction of this poem’s faith is unmistakable. 

            Unlike the biblical Psalmist’s lexicon of praise for the Almighty, this tribute starts at the other end of history, with the angst of a decimated people that asks, “if nothing remains, what was it all for?” Speaking from the aftermath of destruction among those firing such questions, the poet finds his affirmation in negative evidence. He is no less confident than the Psalmist testifying to God’s grandeur, but he begins with the residue, with only the slightest traces of renewal, and, thus armed, he looks past Holocaust memorials and cemeteries and even memorial books, to the source of regeneration. The poem reminds us that God forbids idolatry. Despite its apparent skepticism about individual markersof endurance, the weight falls on the word blaybn—to remain, to abide, to endure. This Abraham who outlived not only the trauma of his testing by God but also the sacrifice of millions of sons and daughters in Europe, was not satisfied with mere survival. To find lastingness, he insisted, you must look to its source. Trust in eternity can be sought only in the Eternal. 

            So, like the good fairy in many a folktale, I bring this as the first message of endurance that is already there in an American form in our currency. May God in Whom we trust become the true coin of this realm.    

Moving on, you might think that the easiest word to translate from the Yiddish must be Got. What could be simpler? Got is God. Not quite. The Yiddish got is actually very far from the Teutonic divinity with the double “t,” (Gott), or from the English “Jehovah” of the King James Bible. Got fun avrom, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob of Yiddish prayer is more intimate than even the Hebrew Elohim and Adonay. But both these--the formal Hebrew and the homier Yiddish--blend together in  the essential Jewish prayer, the Shema. “Hear, O Israel.” 

            I cannot remember exactly when or how I learned that prayer, but even in a nominally observant family like mine, it was imprinted early on. I hope you will not be offended if I begin this, my second message on endurance, by reading the opening of this prayer in English translation: 

Hear, O Israel. The Lord is our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be upon your heart. You shall teach them thoroughly to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for a reminder between your eyes. And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.

I attended a Protestant high school in Canada where we recited the Lord's prayer every morning, so that, too, became engraved in me and I am the better for it. We asked “Our Father, Who art in heaven,” to give us our daily bread, to forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, not to lead us into temptation, but to deliver us from evil. All this sets out a strong God-inspired moral path. The Shema, from the book of Deuteronomy, tells us to love God and follow His commandments. It then pivots, and its ratio of content to transmission is about 1:7. The substance is brief while the instructions are lengthy and intricate. (1)Teach them to your children. Children reciting the Shema are instructed to teach Torah to their own future children. This, rather than an address to the Almighty, is a pedagogic directive for national coherence. (2&3) “When you sit in your home and when you walk outdoors.” Not to be mumbled in private but spoken in public. בְּשִׁבְתְּך בְּבֵיתֶךָ וּבְלֶכְתְּךָ בַדֶּרֶךְ  Some modern Jews, contrary to this explicit injunction to teach this lesson among others, felt more comfortable turning their Jewishness inward.  The 18th-century European Enlightenment made some Jews so embarrassed by their social distinctiveness that one writer suggested: “Be a man in the street and a Jew at home.” But the covenantal people is explicitly directed to live openly as Jews among the nations. And when should you do this teaching? (4&5) When you lie down and when you rise. Many Jews recite the Shema prayer both in the morning and at night, at the most wakeful part of the day and at its summation. The teaching of Torah is always before you, and for that you must be literate. Generations of commentary contributed added substance to that instruction.

            And the charge does not stop there. Something more tangible is needed. (6) You shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for a  reminder between your eyes. Hence the phylacteries, the small black boxes with leather straps that join the head to the heart. The Jewish male begins this daily ritual at thirteen, assuming adult responsibilities at the age of Bar Mitzvah. Jewish manhood starts with binding yourself into the uniform of faith so that prayer becomes also a form of soldiering, demonstratively making the private public, resolutely strapping yourself to God’s law. (7) And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates. Hence the mezuzahs tacked to the doorposts bearing within them the words of the Shema, devices that some Israeli artists are now fashioning out of the steel and aluminum of downed Iranian rockets. 

            Some people who fear coexistence are spooked by these items of observance that make Jewish homes visible. But in my New York apartment building, where there are doors with Christmas wreaths and doors with mezuzahs, friendships among tenants do not necessarily correlate with these markers. That the Nazis identified Jews in order to make sure to destroy them tells us something about the Nazis but nothing whatsoever about the Jews who follow the positive commandment to remind themselves coming and going of who they are and what is expected of them. 

            Jewish signs on doorposts have come to testify to the health of religious freedom in a flourishing democracy. They appear where democracy thrives and are torn down where it fails.   

            I began thinking about the Shema’s ratio of content to reinforcement during my two decades at Harvard when my administrative function required attending meetings of the faculty of Arts and Sciences, the body that determines academic policy for the university. For me, the highlight of those meetings during the 1990s were the tributes commemorating the recent passing of a professor whose biography often included military service. But every year, as the substance of these meetings increasingly reflected the growth of what Lionel Trilling called the “adversarial culture”—i.e., the ascent of grievance over gratitude--I wanted to shout, “Wait a minute. What are we doing to reinforce the most successful government system ever crafted by so few for so many? Let’s remember that our Republic depends for its perpetuation on teachers who instill its God-inspired history and tenets diligently, patiently, and persuasively enough to inspire every new student cohort to do the same.” I wanted to quote, “Speak of it when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise.” The best I ever did, more than once, was to say, “Please remember that Democracy is not transmitted biologically.”  

            The absence of insistent, creative intellectual formation, particularly in the Humanities,  does not just leave a vacuum: it gets filled by adversarial ideas: Marx for Madison, Lenin for Lincoln, and lately the Islamist incursion for the American revolution. If the Pledge of Allegiance was meant to function as a civic equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer, and the teaching of American history and the Constitution to stand in for the Bible, one would have had to take more seriously the ratio of 7:1, reinforcement to content, that cultural transmission requires. Lionel Trilling, the first to be honored with the Jefferson Lecture and a superb teacher of the Western Canon, quickly lost the cultural war to his successor Edward Said, patron saint of the Columbia University encampments. The school and too many like it had given up on transmitting the joys, the blessings of citizenship. Thus, my second message deriving from millennia of textual transmission is: If there is to be enduring government of, by, and for the people, the people would have to be instructed and reminded to respect and confidently to perpetuate their precious inheritance. 

Thirdly, and finally, let me turn as an American to how America, the younger nation, inspired the older. 

            There is little in the history of ideas to compare with the deliberations of the men who in the eighteenth century undertook to form the more perfect Union aspiring to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to themselves and their Posterity.

            True, they had certain advantages, among these a defensible and sparsely populated continent, the model of an already fine-tuned British democratic process, and time to deliberate. But the United States did not simply emerge from the British womb: the Founders produced a remarkable constitution, and what an amazing system of government they crafted—a standard to be studied and adapted wherever possible.

            It was under contrasting conditions that Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel was reestablished in 1948. After two thousand years under foreign occupation--lastly by the Ottomans who lost the land to the British who were dismantling their empire just as the Arabs were launching their imperial ambitions--the Jewish community of Palestine confronted far greater opposition than did other emerging states like India, Iran, or Ireland. Terrorist assault by Al Husseini’s Muslim Brotherhood was now joined by military invasion. Three years earlier, in 1945, the Arab League had organized around the stated goal of preventing a Jewish State by any means possible, including economic boycott (a tool that was still being activated almost a century later.) Poised to attack were five Arab armies with the British trained Jordanian army encircling the Old City of Jerusalem. The Zionist leader, David Ben Gurion was trying to break the siege, recruiting for the effort even arrivals from Hitler’s camps, while trying to resettle tens of thousands of Jewish refugees who had survived the war in Europe and/or been expelled from Arab lands. The United Nations 1947 vote for the partition of Palestine, which was hailed as a victory, actually allotted to the Jews a far smaller and less defensible share of land than that designated by the earlier San Remo Conference of 1920. 

            Internally, Jewish self-government throughout the exile had created the infrastructure for a democratic state, but political factions preceded the establishment of a central government. A joke about intramural fragmentation--that any two Jews would need three synagogues, was manifest in an array of political movements competing with the equally divided religious sectors. This was Ben Gurion’s situation as he composed the Declaration of Independence for the state that would be announced in mid-May 1948 when by agreement the British would terminate their mandate over the country. How wonderfully ironic that the formal withdrawal of the British became the only bloodless part of Israel’s war of Independence.

            In their book Israel's Declaration of Independence, Neil Rogachevsky and Dov Zigler trace the chaotic composition of that document. Among the several people charged with drafting the proposed charter was a thirty-three-year-old Tel Aviv lawyer named Mordechai Beham, who worked as an assistant in the legal department of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine. In pursuit of material, he walked down the street to the home of a retired rabbi who had immigrated from America with a large library. And there, after copying out the American Declaration of Independence and the English Bill of Rights, Beham composed a draft combining [quote] “natural-rights justification of modern political sovereignty grounded in the inherent rights of the individual with arguments drawn from Jewish tradition.”[1] Rogachevsky and Zigler find much to admire in that version which included, verbatim, the full power of an independent state to “levy War, conclude Peace. contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”

            But the document Ben Gurion read aloud on the 5th day of Iyar, 5708 in the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to May 14, 1948, retained very little of Behan’s draft. Instead, it rehearsed the history of the Jews in the Land of Israel, Theodor Herzl’s founding in 1897 of the Zionist movement, the Nazi destruction of European Jewry, and the 1947 UN resolution for the Partition of Palestine. Citing “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state,” the document then declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel to be known as the State of Israel.” 

            The greatest contrast between the two Declarations lies in this: whereas the American one cites all the abuses inflicted on the colonists by the king of Great Britain—abuses that called for a revolution to achieve independence--Israel’s document, after listing all the justifications for independence, veered into reassurances and appeals: an appeal to the United Nations “to assist the Jewish people in the building up of its state and to receive the state of Israel into the comity of nations,” an appeal to the Arab inhabitants of the land to participate in building the state as full and equal citizens, and an appeal to the Jewish people throughout the diaspora to stand by and assist “in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream--the redemption of Israel.” The only reference to the Arab and Muslim leaders who had launched against Israel the most asymmetrical war in history was this: “We extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land.” 

            Today, there are some who fret that Israel did not then proceed immediately to draft a constitution as the American founders did, but we should rather thank the Lord that they did not produce one while in that frame of mind. Let me spell this out.   

            In 1992, while applying for permanent residence in the United States, I began reading the Federalist Papers. I was awed by their authors’ intelligence and their faith in the intelligence of their readers that made possible the system of government they had conceived. I marveled at their sobriety, and at their conservative approach to doing no harm rather than undertaking to “repair the world.” 

            I was particularly struck by their emphasis on defense. Federalist Papers two to five are dedicated to “dangers from foreign force and influence,” and the following five essays deal with anticipated civil warfare and, turning to economics, the expected competition from Spain. The core argument for federation was built on the need for a common defense, with armed force being the guarantor of a sustainable Union. 

            How I wished the early Zionists had been able to think like this as they began reclaiming their homeland. In preparing today’s remarks, it even occurred to me to wonder how different the Arab response would have been had Herzl included in his vision the building of a Jewish army, twenty years before Ze’ev Jabotinsky forced the idea into the Zionist movement. If only, I mused, if only the Jews then had recognized and responded to the declared intentions of Islamist jihad--intentions that even today, after October 7th 2023, some still deny.  

            Fortunately, the Jewish exile that shaped a politics of accommodation, had also given Jews extraordinary powers of adaptation. In 1948, following the example of Moses the lawgiver in passing the torch to Joshua the military leader, the Jews of Israel began developing a fighting force so inspiring, that no one has yet dared to tell its full story. Contrary to an African American spiritual that many of us belted out in our youth, “Gonna lay down my sword and shield…,” Jews had to pick up their sword and shield down by the riverside and with these implements force their enemies to lay down their own arms if there was to be any hope of waging war no more. 

            The IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, became more than a guarantor of survival, and is the country’s main vehicle of democratization, forging a diverse and fractious populace into a confident nation. As the beating heart of that nation, it wages war against depraved adversaries while ennobling the aspects of humanity that were fashioned in the image of God. To be sure, that national confidence has not yet found full expression in Israel’s academic and artistic culture, but many of the country’s defensive apologists still perform their military reserve duty and send their children and grandchildren into combat. The country’s moral confidence is manifest in its defense as it must be in every democracy that is inherently reluctant to send its youth into war.   

            You see where I'm headed with this. It is America I am thinking about, the model of a sustainable democracy of checks and balances, the only country with the power to enforce its moral authority over those who elsewhere rule by threat. Had America not decisively intervened to defeat Germany and Japan, the Jews could not have recovered sovereignty in Israel when and how they did. But one cannot now expect that small country to return the favor by serving as the fighting force of America and the West. How much brighter the world becomes when Liberty’s standard-bearer is equally determined to ensure that our civilization survives.    

            Granted, it is harder for Americans to feel that they are protecting the homeland when they are serving at a base in Iraq or South Korea than it is for Israelis who are serving at no more than an hour’s drive from their parents and children. But the United States is still this planet’s main hope for any semblance of international stability, and that hope depends on the fighting strength of its armed forces and the fighting spirit of its citizenry. Every able adult shares responsibility for a nation’s defense, and for the allegiance, the love of country that propels and ensures that defense.  Jews who represent the principle and practice of coexistence--and who paid the highest price when they’ve tried to endure without self-defense--can testify that soldiering is the mainstay of any society that intends to protect its members. This lesson learned from the United States about the protection of hard-won freedom badly needs reinforcing. This is our country, sweet land of liberty, and of thee we do not sing enough. Though our fathers were not necessarily among its founders, we whose children reap its benefits want to ensure that from every mountainside its freedom will continue to ring!

            Here, under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities, we are reminded that instilling intellectual and moral confidence in our civilization rests with the Humanities. The human life force may be biologically determined; civilization is not. Sutzkever, who survived the sacrifice of his formative world—when that’s what it cost to remain a Jew—reminds us to acknowledge before whom we stand. If that secure knowledge could restore him and resurrect the Jewish people, so can it inspire this nation to reach its 2500th anniversary. 

            May these messages from the Blue and White forever help to strengthen and to secure the Red, White, and Blue.  

[1] Neil Rogachevsky and Dov Zigler, Israel’s Declaration of Independence (Cambridge University Press, 2023)P.49.