I love reading the yearbooks of my rabbinical association, the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Strange, eh? Well, what else is new. They used to be published following the annual convention and contained the minutes of the meetings, lectures, sermons and the like. So I’m looking at the 1926 volume (the convention was held in North Carolina), and I come across a tribute to a man named Zebulon Baird Vance who had been born in that state and served as Governor and one of their representatives in both the US House and Senate. He was elected four times to the Senate.
I realized that today, May 13th, is the 190th anniversary of the birth of Senator Vance. No, he wasn’t Jewish, but he wrote a lecture entitled “The Scattered Nation” in which he paid tribute to our people.
This is a portion of what he wrote according to the yearbook:
“The Jew is beyond doubt the most remarkable man of this world – past or present. Of all the stories of the sons of men, there is none so wild, so wonderful, so full of extreme mutation, so replete with suffering and horror, so abounding in extraordinary providence, so overflowing with scenic romance. There is no man who approaches him in the extent and character of the influence which he has exercised over the human family. His history is the history of our civilization and progress in this world, and our faith and hope in that which is to come. From him have we derived the form and pattern of all that is excellent on earth or in heaven.
Though dead as a nation – as we speak of nations – yet they live. Their ideas fill the world and move the wheels of its progress, even as the sun, when he sinks behind the western hills, yet fills the heavens with the remnants of his glory. As the destruction of matter in one form is made necessary to its resurrection in another, so it would seem that the perishing of the Jewish nationality was in order to the universal acceptance and the everlasting establishment of Jewish ideas.”
Reading a little more about the man, one can see that his perspective on what was important wasn’t always in line with the other leaders of the Confederacy or the Union, for that matter. Many monuments can be found in the State in his honor, and there are numerous towns, counties and buildings also named after him.
It’s always good to read something different, something we might never have heard. And it’s especially good when we read something that reflects the esteem with which someone other than a member of the tribe holds the Jewish people.
(Speaking of nothing, Me: (sobbing my heart out, eyes swollen, nose read)…”I cannot see you anymore…I am not going to let you hurt me like this again! Trainer: “It was a sit up…you did ONE sit up!” How I empathize with “Me”)