My Son and Joe

The night Vice President Gore picked Sen. Joe Lieberman as his running mate, I committed a cardinal sin of parenthood. I roused my 9-year-old son from bed and brought him over to the TV.

“This is a night I want you to remember for the rest of your life,” I told him, as the evening news went over the announcement from every angle. “This is the night that every Jewish mother could finally turn to her son or daughter and say, ‘you too could one day become president of the United States.'”

After explaining who Lieberman was and why this day was so historic, my son’s only question was, “So why isn’t he wearing a yarmulke?”

All right. That’s another story.

But that’s not the point. My son didn’t even realize that he was not supposed to aspire to the presidency until that night. He lives in a time and place where adults, and children, all around him are able to do just about anything they set their sights on. It’s true that most of his baseball heroes are not Jewish, but he knows the name of every Jewish player who ever lived and just assumes that most Jews just choose not to enter the Major Leagues.

But all the professions are open to him; any school he could dream of going to would take him, provided he had the grades; any artistic or creative talent he had could be duly cultivated and developed. He did not know that there were any limitations to his dreams.

But I did. Oh, it’s not that I actively harbored a hope that my son would one day become president of the United States. I’m not sure I would wish that job on anyone, let alone a child of mine. But somehow, I knew that as free and tolerated as we are in this country, there were unwritten rules, unmarked borders past which we dared not go.

And suddenly, when I saw Joe Lieberman standing up there beside the scion of one of Washington’s elite political dynasties, I felt that we had crossed one of the final frontiers.

Now, others may see me as naive. Certainly members of my parents’ generation – my parents included – are still wary about the selection of Lieberman. All the latent anti-Semitism in this country, they argue, is going to come out in this election, in ugly charges during the campaign and, most persuasively, at the voting booth in November. Some of this has already begun to surface, and more is likely. They are also concerned that should things go badly for a Gore-Lieberman administration, somehow, the Jews will be blamed.

I do not discount this view, especially since it is shaped, at least in part, by the experiences of my parents’ generation. The Holocaust will forever stand as testament to the ability of a “civilized” and “progressive” society to turn against Jews in the most horrific ways. The Shoah is also the strongest argument against getting too comfortable in the Diaspora.

Even in America, just a generation ago, Jews were inclined not to be too Jewish in public. Observant men, as a rule, did not wear kippot in the street, and even traditional families – like Lieberman’s – sent their children to public schools and gave them names that helped them blend in with the rest of America. Ultimately, this is not our country and these are not our people.

I understand all of this. And yet. And yet there’s Joe Lieberman nominated for vice president. I am a member of a different generation and I have never experienced anti-Semitism first-hand.

So I can hope and I can believe. And I can’t help but look at the nomination of Lieberman as one of the proudest days ever for Jews in America. Here was a Jew – an observant Jew, no less – who, without compromising his principles, has led a life of exemplary public service and was chosen to help lead a national ticket purely on the basis of his accomplishments.

And I actually know people who know the person who may become vice president of the United States! They’ve davened with him in shul, or sent their kids to the same camp as he sent his, or joined him in walking to Capitol Hill to cast an important vote on Shabbos. It’s like the ultimate game of Jewish geography.

The point is he’s one of us. What he juggles in the Senate is a more public and high-stakes version of what many of us do every day in our own, more private lives. Wouldn’t it be an amazing feeling to know that every time you head out the door of your office early on a Friday in the winter, you’d know the vice president of the United States was doing the same thing?

His commitment to public service came out of his commitment to Judaism, and his religious observance informs his public service, most notably in his moral critique of President Clinton in the wake of the Lewinsky affair that has earned him national recognition. He is, in my opinion, a walking kiddush Hashem, someone who brings dignity and glory to the name of God and our way of life. And besides inspiring us in our Jewish observance, he may also inspire more of us to participate in public life, which too few of us really do.

Not every Jew will agree with his politics, and, in the end, of course, the Gore-Lieberman ticket may very well lose. But one of the two major parties in this country has put him forward as the man to help lead this country at the start of the new century. And now I can honestly turn to my son and say – there is nothing to which you cannot aspire.