On Election Day, let us remember the extraordinary privilege of being free

This is November 3 — Election Day. Tonight, millions of Americans will go to sleep celebrating victory, while millions more will go to bed disappointed, frustrated, or even furious.

Some will believe that America has been saved. Others will be convinced that America has taken a disastrous turn. But before we know the results of these midterm elections, before the networks declare their winners, before the speeches of triumph and concession, I want to suggest something that should unite every American, regardless of party, ideology, religion, or political persuasion.

We are among the luckiest human beings who have ever lived.

We live in a country where ordinary citizens can peacefully decide who governs them. Where presidents can be removed without revolutions. Where members of Congress can be dismissed without bloodshed. Where governors can be sent packing without armies marching through the streets. Where a billionaire and a janitor, a celebrity and a schoolteacher, a rabbi and an atheist, each possess precisely the same power when they enter the voting booth.

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One vote.

Think about the breathtaking majesty of that proposition.

Throughout most of human history, power belonged to kings, emperors, conquerors, aristocrats, and dictators. The common person was expected to obey, pay taxes, fight wars, and remain silent.

The idea that an ordinary citizen could participate in choosing the people who govern a nation would have seemed almost fantastical to countless generations.

Yet here in America, we exercise this extraordinary privilege so routinely that we sometimes forget how miraculous it is.

We Americans have inherited freedoms for which countless generations of our ancestors would have surrendered everything. Yet we sometimes treat the right to vote as an inconvenience rather than a miracle.

And I know something about the preciousness of that miracle because of where my family comes from.

My father came from Iran. His family had lived there for approximately two thousand years, part of one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world.

Imagine that. Two millennia of Jewish life in Persia. Generations of fathers and mothers, rabbis and merchants, scholars and laborers, raising families, practicing their faith, and struggling to preserve their identity. They lived under shahs, monarchs, and rulers whose authority was rarely accountable to the ordinary people whose lives they controlled. Like Jewish minorities in so many lands, they experienced periods of relative tolerance alongside discrimination, vulnerability, and persecution.

What would those generations have given to possess the rights I exercise today?

What would they have given to walk into a polling station, cast a secret ballot, criticize their government openly, and know that their vote counted equally with that of their most powerful neighbor? What would they have given to live in a country where a Jewish citizen could not only vote for Congress but actually run for Congress?

My mother’s family came from Poland and Lithuania.

Their history was shaped by the harsh realities of Eastern European Jewish existence: antisemitism, discrimination, exclusion, and the ever-present specter of pogroms.

For generations, Jews in that part of the world faced restrictions and hostility simply because of their religion and ancestry. They knew what it meant to live at the mercy of governments and populations that did not necessarily regard them as equal human beings. And then came the Holocaust, the ultimate demonstration of what can happen when a government abandons the principle that every human life possesses inherent dignity.

What would my maternal ancestors have given for the protections of the American Constitution? For freedom of religion? For freedom of speech? For the right to challenge those in power without fearing imprisonment or death? For the simple dignity of having a voice in their country’s future?

My father’s ancestors in Iran and my mother’s ancestors in Eastern Europe could scarcely have imagined the freedoms that I, their descendant, now enjoy as an American citizen.

And yet we Americans sometimes treat those freedoms as though they were nothing more remarkable than turning on a faucet. We complain about long lines at polling stations. We complain about political advertisements. We complain about candidates, campaigns, and the seemingly endless arguments that accompany elections.

But those arguments, however exhausting, are themselves evidence of our freedom. In a dictatorship, political arguments are often settled by the secret police. In America, they are settled at the ballot box. That distinction is everything.

In 2012, I ran for the United States Congress. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.

I traveled throughout New Jersey’s Ninth Congressional District, meeting voters, listening to their concerns, debating ideas, and attempting to persuade my fellow citizens that I deserved the honor of representing them in Washington.

I was a rabbi, an author, and a son of Jewish immigrants and refugees from societies where political freedom had too often been denied. And here I was, asking the citizens of the United States to elect me to one of the most powerful legislative bodies on earth.

Only in America.

My opponent was Congressman Bill Pascrell Jr., of blessed memory, who has since passed away. He defeated me.

Now, most politicians regard their concession speech as the most miserable speech of their careers. I remember mine very differently. Strangely enough, I consider it one of my favorite speeches I have ever delivered, and certainly one of the most meaningful. Watch it on YouTube.

Why?

Because I understood that something far greater than my personal political ambitions had just taken place. The people had spoken. They had considered the candidates, listened to the arguments, weighed their choices, and rendered their verdict. And I had lost.

In my concession speech, I spoke about bowing to the majesty of the American democratic process. I acknowledged that Bill Pascrell Jr., my opponent, would now be my congressman.

Think about the significance of those words. The man I had spent months campaigning against, the man whose policies I had challenged, the man I had tried to replace, was now my elected representative. And I accepted that outcome.

Not because I suddenly agreed with him on every issue. Not because losing was pleasant. But because democracy demands something greater than personal victory. It demands respect for the sovereignty of the people.

The true majesty of democracy is not merely that we get to choose our leaders. It is that when the people choose someone else, we accept their decision. In 2012, I lost my election for Congress, but I gained an even greater appreciation for the magnificence of American democracy.

I had entered the campaign believing I could serve my community. I emerged from it with an even deeper appreciation for the system that allowed me to try.

Bill Pascrell was my political opponent. But he was never my enemy. He was a fellow American participating in the same extraordinary democratic experiment. And when he won, the proper response was not to question the legitimacy of the electorate merely because it had rejected me. After the campaign, he and I enjoyed a friendly and cordial relationship, and I mourned his passing when he died.

That is what separates a constitutional republic from a dictatorship.

In an authoritarian state, losing power can mean exile, imprisonment, or execution. In America, losing an election means returning to your family, your profession, and your community, while retaining the freedom to criticize the government and campaign again. What an astonishing blessing.

Americans sometimes assume that democracy is the natural condition of humanity. It is not. Freedom remains a precious and frighteningly fragile exception.

According to Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2026 report, only 88 of the world’s 195 countries were classified as Free. Another 48 were Partly Free, while 59 were Not Free. That means approximately 55 percent of the world’s countries were not classified as fully free. Even more sobering, only about 21 percent of the world’s population lives in countries classified as Free.

These classifications measure political rights and civil liberties, not simply whether a country holds elections. Some countries conduct elections while denying citizens a genuinely free choice.

Nearly four out of every five human beings live outside countries classified as fully free. Yet millions of Americans take for granted a democratic privilege that much of humanity can only dream of enjoying.

Consider the implications. Think of the women of Afghanistan, deprived of fundamental freedoms under Taliban rule. Think of the people of Iran, where citizens can vote in certain elections but cannot freely choose their country’s supreme leadership or escape the ideological control of the Islamic Republic. Think of North Korea, where the ruling dynasty exercises nearly absolute power, and dissent can carry terrifying consequences. Think of China, where more than a billion people live without the opportunity to choose their national leaders through genuinely competitive multiparty elections.

Think of political prisoners languishing in cells because they dared to criticize their rulers. Think of journalists silenced, dissidents tortured, religious minorities persecuted, and opposition parties suppressed. And then think of an American citizen complaining that voting is inconvenient.

We should be ashamed of how casually we sometimes regard our freedoms.

Of course, America is imperfect. We have political corruption. We have bitter polarization. We have inequalities, injustices, and serious disagreements about the direction of our country.

Our elections can be contentious. Our political rhetoric can be disgraceful. Our institutions require constant vigilance. But the existence of these problems does not negate the magnificence of our constitutional freedoms. Indeed, the ability to expose, criticize, and correct those problems is precisely what makes democracy so precious.

In America, we can organize demonstrations against our government. We can publish blistering criticisms of our president. We can establish opposition movements, challenge legislation in court, and campaign to remove elected officials. And we can do so without first asking the government’s permission to disagree with it.

That is an inheritance worth defending.

There is a profound Jewish teaching that every human being is created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of God. That means no person possesses greater intrinsic human worth because of wealth, status, ancestry, or political power.

The American democratic ideal reflects something of this revolutionary moral proposition. Every citizen matters. Every voice deserves to be heard. And every eligible citizen, regardless of social standing, possesses an equal vote.

America did not always fulfill that promise. Slavery, racial discrimination, the disenfranchisement of Black Americans, and the long denial of women’s suffrage represent grave betrayals of our founding ideals. But the greatness of the American experiment lies partly in its capacity for moral correction.

The abolitionists challenged slavery. The suffragists demanded the vote. The civil rights movement fought to make constitutional promises a living reality.

They did not struggle because democracy was worthless. They struggled because democracy was worth perfecting. And we dishonor their sacrifices when we become indifferent to the freedoms they fought to secure.

Voting is not merely an opportunity to advance our preferred political agenda. It is an act of citizenship, a declaration that we accept responsibility for the future of our republic.

It is also an act of humility. Because the ballot box reminds every president, senator, governor, and congressman that political power is borrowed, not owned. No elected official possesses a divine right to govern. Power belongs ultimately to the people, who may grant it and who may withdraw it.

Democracy teaches the most powerful people in America a lesson that dictators never learn: Political power is not their personal property. It belongs to the people, who can take it away with a pencil, a ballot, and a peaceful election.

By the time this election is over, some Americans will be celebrating while others will be mourning their political losses. But I hope that all of us, regardless of the outcome, will remember something infinitely more important than which party controls Congress.

We are Americans. We are heirs to a magnificent, imperfect, indispensable democratic experiment. We possess freedoms for which our ancestors prayed, struggled, suffered, and sometimes died.

My father’s family in Iran could only dream of such freedoms. My mother’s family in Poland and Lithuania knew the terrible consequences of their absence. And I, their descendant, was privileged to run for the United States Congress, lose an election, and publicly acknowledge that the man who defeated me would now represent me.

That was not humiliation. That was democracy. And it was glorious.

Today, I will respect the winners, sympathize with the losers, and celebrate the system that allows both to participate. Because the greatest victory in an American election is not necessarily the triumph of a Republican or a Democrat. It is the peaceful triumph of the people’s will.

The greatest winner on Election Day is not necessarily a Republican or a Democrat. It is the American people, who possess the extraordinary power to choose their leaders and peacefully remove them from office. May God bless the United States of America, the freedom we so often take for granted, and the extraordinary privilege of choosing those who govern us. And may we never forget that millions of people throughout the world would give almost anything to possess the simple, sacred right that we exercised today.

The right to vote.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach of Englewood is the author of 30 books, including “Holocaust Holiday: One Family’s Descent into Genocide Memory Hell.” Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.