From a Jewish Nightmare to an American Dream

As we approach the venerable holiday of Passover, many of us are feeling as if Jews are living through a collective nightmare. Everywhere we turn the news seems to be getting worse. From that most horrific day on Oct. 7 to a rising tide of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiment across the world to the recent Iranian missile attacks against Israel, it’s disheartening to see once again the special kind of dangers that are reserved for the Jewish people.

Given this present darkness, the obvious thing at our Passover Seders will be to draw attention to that well-known verse in the Haggadah — you know, the one that reminds us how “in every generation they rise against us to destroy us.” This past year has provided as much evidence of this dictum as we’ve seen in decades. So yes, this is a crucial and timeless cautionary note Jews must never forget.

But in the spirit of resilience, I’d like to suggest that we dare add something more hopeful to our Seders this year, something more American, something about transforming nightmares into dreams.

Imagine sitting down at your Seder tables a few hours after hearing that the Civil War had finally come to an end, with 360,000 Union and 260,000 Confederate soldiers dead. That is what American Jews experienced on Monday, April 10, 1865.

Imagine sitting down at your Seder tables a few hours after hearing that the Civil War had finally come to an end, with 360,000 Union and 260,000 Confederate soldiers dead. That is what American Jews experienced on Monday, April 10, 1865, on the eve of the Passover holiday, when news broke that Generals Grant and Lee met in Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, to sign the Confederate surrender.

That fateful day signaled the beginning of the end of slavery and the preservation of the cherished union. Talk about ending a nightmare.

“We can imagine the elegant symmetry that those Jews sympathetic to the Union cause saw in the advent of their Festival of Freedom, commemorating the Israelite exodus from slavery, coinciding with the Confederacy’s defeat,” Rabbi Meir Soloveichik writes in an essay in the “Promise of Liberty” Haggadah. “Thinking of their own relatives, who like other Americans had fought, bled, and died for several terrible years, we can imagine their finding a double meaning at their Seder tables that Monday evening, as they uttered the immortal words of the Haggadah: ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’”

For the Jews of 1865, the American nightmare of the Civil War was also a Jewish nightmare, just as the American liberation was also a Jewish liberation. Imagine how they felt, then, when several days after the end of the war, on the Shabbat of Passover, the news came that President Abraham Lincoln, who was shot the night before, had died at 7:22 a.m.

As cited by Soloveichik, here is how Bertram Korn, in his book “American Jewry and the Civil War,” described the scene:

“Jews were on their way to synagogue or already worshipping when tidings of the assassination reached them … Jews who had not planned on attending services hastened to join their brethren in the sanctuaries where they could find comfort in the hour of grief. The Rabbis put their sermon notes aside and spoke extemporaneously, haltingly, reaching out for the words to express their deep sorrow … Samuel Adler of Temple Emanu-el in New York began to deliver a sermon but he was so overcome that he could not continue. Alfred T. Jones, the Parnas of Beth El-emeth Congregation of Philadelphia, asked [the well-known Jewish scholar and writer] Isaac Leeser to say something to comfort the worshippers; he did, but it was so disconnected that he had to apologize: ‘The dreadful news and its suddenness have in a great measure overcome my usual composure, and my thoughts refuse to arrange themselves in their wonted order.’”

What strikes me is how bonded the Jews were to their leader and their country. As America went, so the Jews went. As America grieved, so the Jews grieved. As America dreamed, so the Jews dreamed.

What strikes me about those words is how bonded the Jews were to their leader and their country. As America went, so the Jews went. As America grieved, so the Jews grieved. As America dreamed, so the Jews dreamed.

This mystic bond between the Jews and America is not a coincidence; it is rooted in sacred texts. As the late British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once wrote:

“It is no accident that the founders of America turned to the Hebrew Bible, or that successive presidents have done likewise, because there is no other text in Western literature that draws on these themes — history, providence, covenant, responsibility, the need to fight for freedom in every generation—together in a vision that is at once political and spiritual … Israel, ancient and modern, and the United States are the two supreme examples of societies constructed in conscious pursuit of an idea.”

As Soloveichik notes, Washington was “telling his fellow citizens that the tales of the Exodus and of America parallel each other: The Jews were not only to be welcomed as equals in America; their story inspired America.”

A letter from George Washington to the Jews of Savannah in 1790 best expresses this bond. In the letter, Soloveichik notes, Washington was “telling his fellow citizens that the tales of the Exodus and of America parallel each other: The Jews were not only to be welcomed as equals in America; their story inspired America. For the first president, God’s blessings bestowed upon the Jews had never been removed — and he hoped that his nascent nation could be similarly blessed.”

Washington had no way of knowing that 75 years after he wrote that letter, a traumatic war that tore his country apart would harken a new birth of freedom that would deliver on the American promise for all its inhabitants.

Of course, it’s hard to see blessings in times of darkness. During the Passover Seders of 1861, 1862, 1863 and 1864, few blessings were visible as American blood flowed like never before. It’s only in 1865 that these blessings finally began to shine through.

The darkness of the Civil War is exponentially worse than anything we are experiencing today, just as the Holocaust is exponentially worse than the horror of Oct. 7. But the principle remains: There are times when hope seems to be in eclipse, when dreams take a back seat to our present-day dramas.

This is one of those times.

The American Dream itself is going through an eclipse. As I wrote recently, “America today is broken, and the more it is broken, the worse it is for the Jews.”

If there is anything we can learn from the Passover of 1865, it is that a broken America is not a hopeless America.

But if there is anything we can learn from the Passover holiday of 1865, it is that a broken America is not a hopeless America. Indeed, given that the American and Jewish stories are so intertwined, the remarkable survival of the Jewish people augurs well for this country.

As American icon and humorist Mark Twain famously wrote:

“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was.”

For me, these are words not of triumph but of resilience, words of hope that permit the flame of our dreams to stay lit.

We’re living at a time when both Jewish dreams and American dreams are under siege. Who’s got time to dream when America is torn apart by tribal divisions and the erosion of trust in our most vital institutions?

Who’s got time to dream when Israeli and American hostages are still held captive in horrid conditions?

Who’s got time to dream when we see that a predatory Iran is launching attacks on Israeli soil? 

Who’s got time to dream when anxiety floods our consciousness?

I got a personal answer the other night from an Israeli woman who is part of a film project connected to the hostages. She told me that after filming, the former hostages danced like crazy. Their hearts were still broken, yes, but their spirit demanded that they dance.

Her answer brought to mind a recent news item about how the Israeli cultural scene is trying to maintain a semblance of normality during the war, with the Israeli Opera, The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Suzanne Dellal Dance Centre and the Tel Aviv Cinematheque all signaling “business as usual.”

Dancing and living and creating and enjoying the fruits of life give meaning to our wars and our fights. It reminds us why we fight in the first place, why we dream.

Dancing and living and creating and enjoying the fruits of life give meaning to our wars and our fights. It reminds us why we fight in the first place, why we dream.

In the midst of a devastating war that crushed his soul, Lincoln must have sensed the special value of dreams when he spoke at the killing fields of Gettysburg about the “great task remaining before us.”

He knew that no nation can survive without redeeming its times of darkness, without giving meaning to its lowest moments. So he called on his nation “that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln knew it wasn’t only the people who must survive but also the transformative ideas and ideals that animated their very existence.

One of those ideals is surely the power of the dream. It’s telling that Lincoln chose a particularly bleak moment, when the despair of death hung in the air, to utter the most elevating and enduring words of his presidency.

Whether here or in Israel, as we continue to face the brokenness of our world, the growing hate against Jews and the bombs of evil that keep falling on Israel, Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg remind us that when all we see is a nightmare, that is precisely the moment to never forget our dreams.

The Jews of 1865 read the same words at their Seders that we will read Monday night. They knew that after “in every generation they rise up to destroy us” came “but the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.”

The Jews of 1865 who had braved the Civil War read the same words at their Seders that we will read Monday night. They knew that after “in every generation they rise up to destroy us” came “but the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.”

That prayer has sustained us for millennia. If we remember to keep our dreams alive even when everything around us tells us not to, we will live up to Twain’s immortal words and remain what we always were.

Chag sameach.