blogs/brentspodek

My wife Alison and I had the incredible honor of being invited to the White House Hannukah reception on December 17. We went as representatives of Beacon Hebrew Alliance, the town of Beacon and of the entire mid-Hudson Valley.

First is a recap of one of the more extraordinary experiences of our lives; further down are some thoughts on what it all means.

The Play by Play

After moving through four separate security checkpoints, and leaving the mini-Beacon Bicycle Menorah made by Ed Benavente and our letter to President and Mrs Obama with Secret Service Agents who assured us it would be delivered to the President, we entered a long hallway on the East Wing of White House. The corridor was filled with lights and wreaths and Marines in dress uniform. The crowd it seemed was a mix of Jewish organizational professionals, community rabbis, American Jewish military officers and other government officials, political donors and the occasional Hollywood superstar.

The White House kitchen had been made kosher for the occasion, and the guests gathered in two rooms filled with incredible food - lamb chops, sushi, chicken and of course, fancy little latkes and sufganiyot. Between those two rooms was the Portrait Hall, where the formal ceremony was to take place.

Alison sat at a table enjoying lamb chops with a family from Miami who was in for the occasion and watched the president on a television screen.

I, and about two hundred other people, crammed into the Portrait Hall and angled for a view of the podium in what can only be described as an extremely well dressed scrum. Imagine if a mosh pit erupted at a Yo Yo Ma recital at Carnegie Hall, and you'll have a sense of things.

Before long, the President emerged to address the crowd and Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, of the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, lit the hanukiah. The President spoke of the normalization of relations with Cuba, which had just been announced a few hours earlier and the release of Alan Gross, the Jewish American who had been held by Cuba for more than five years.  At the end of his formal remarks, he shook hands with with the people aggressive enough to make it to the very front. Sadly, I didn't get to shake his hand, but I was able to talk with Michelle Obama for a second. There was a very large Secret Service agent between us, but I told her that the Jewish community and the entire town of Beacon, NY sends its love. She patted her heart and blew me a kiss and I acquitted myself by not fainting on the spot.

Here are some of my atrocious pictures; if you'd like to actually hear what President Obama said, the official White House video is here.

After dinner with friends, we went to a Hannukah reception hosted by Representative Debbie Wasserman Shultz in the Members Room at the Library of Congress. We saw some incredible books from the Library's Judaica collection, heard from Representative Wasserman Shultz and Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer and had a lovely conversation with an elegant woman whom we only later realized was the Emmy and Tony award winning actress Tova Feldshuh.

All in all, we felt a little like country mice, slack-jawed at being quite literally in the corridors of power. In some ways, the extraordinary thing is not that we were there, but that these parties happened at all.

The Big Picture

The promise of America has always been greater than its realization. From George Washington's slaves through the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two through the recent murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, America has never realized its potential.

Yet the promise of what our country aspires to be remains glorious. However much we have fallen short of our potential, the values enshrined in our founding documents are our guidestar and our salvation.

In 1852, the great American abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that our Constitution is a "glorious liberty document" for the promise of the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that it and the Declaration of Independence held out to all people.

At no other time or place in the long history of the Jewish people have we had the access to the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we enjoy in this country. Perhaps even more extraordinary than the fact that The White House hosts Hanukkah parties is the fact that a rabbi was just approved by the Senate to be the Ambassador for Religious Freedom, the first non-Christian to hold that office.

Even now, when the State of Israel exists, America offers unparalleled opportunity to Jews and to other minorities who at other times, in other places, have been excluded from the "nation" or group the state protected.

As recently as 1973, President Nixon stood in the Oval Office and said "it's about goddamn time that the Jew in America realizes he's an American first and a Jew second." There was a time when to be a "real" American meant suppressing anything that made you other than a straight white heterosexual aspiring to country club perfection. At least in public arenas, that has changed dramatically. As Israeli Ambasador Dermer said later that evening, the glory of America is in the hyphen -- to be American is to be Jewish-American, Italian-American, Chinese-American and so on.

To stand in the White House and see the President of the United States stand with a rabbi and chant Hebrew prayers felt quite literally to be a glorious miracle.

Indeed, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it does bend towards justice. I witnessed it bend a little further with my own eyes, and I pray that in our lives, we can help it bend a little further still.