Four score and seven years ago

You know the saying that time is a flat circle?

It means that everything repeats; we think that we’re moving forward, but we’re not.

It seems to me that time is a spiral; almost flat, like a Slinky, but not quite. Things repeat, but not exactly.

Every year, Rabbi Joseph Proser presents his extraordinary Presidents Day program at his shul, Temple Emanuel of North Jersey in Franklin Lakes.

Rabbi Prouser has translated Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address into Hebrew and set it to haftarah trope. Over breakfast, in a program open to the community, he reads it.

And the thing is that for some reason that I cannot understand, hearing the Address like that, in Hebrew, in haftarah trope, is powerfully moving. Its short words and terse form propel you forward — I always think of it as galloping. Galloping toward justice. Toward goodness. Toward a better world.

Abraham Lincoln is such a compelling figure. Tall, homely, gawky; brilliant, witty, clever; introspective, melancholic, depressive; intuitive, political, tactical, strategic. Born in a nasty, dark little cabin in the middle of green and blue and beckoning horizons. Profoundly important. Deeply unlucky. Overwhelmingly and recognizably human.

Every year, Rabbi Prouser invites local politicians and other leaders, as well as his community and anyone else who wants to be there, to hear the Address in Hebrew. Ever year, he finds quotes from statesmen that reinforce the themes of freedom, equality, love of country, and decency.

But “I’ve never done this in a more divided political atmosphere than what I’m feeling this year,” he said. “I am finding it very challenging.”

Four score and seven years is 87 years; that’s how long it had been since the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. It’s been 80 years since Auschwitz was liberated. A long time — but still within human memory. It’s been 162 years since the Gettysburg Address, but the feeling in the country now is not dissimilar to the feeling back then. It’s not identical — “certainly there’s not open warfare in the streets, but I think that the country has never been this divided since Lincoln’s time,” Rabbi Prouser said. “The depth of feeling, and the animus that is everywhere now,” aimed at everyone with whom we disagree, “is everywhere.”

Washington is full of monuments; to the visitor, it doesn’t seem like a place to live as much as a place to walk through, learn, and then leave, looking for more comfort than it can offer. (That’s not true for people who live there, of course; it’s just the official parts. But still.)

But the Lincoln Memorial, at least to me, is deeply moving. I can’t be there without crying. There’s something about the majesty of the enormous stone Lincoln and the genuinely human Lincoln who inspired it that somehow give hope.

The words on the wall across from the massive sculpture, from Lincoln’s second inaugural address, end by telling us: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Amen selah.

Temple Emanuel’s Presidents Day program will be on Monday, February 17, at 8:30, over breakfast. It’s free and open to the community. For more information, go to tenfjl.org and scroll down to the section on the program.

—JP

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