About a year and a half ago when our son Ari was playing high school football a team mate got hurt on a play bad enough to merit an ambulance ride to the local hospital.
The team took a knee while he was being carted off and the coach suggested they pray for their friend’s well being.
Our son was picked to say the prayer.
So far nothing in this story is remarkable.
And most of readers would not find it remarkable if we added the facts that Ari was the sole Jew on his team and in his school and also an orthodox Jew who went everyday to high school wearing a yarmulka and prayer fringes.
Now that is truly remarkable.
It is so remarkable that when we tell that story to friends or family on either coast or abroad especially to our European family and friends they simply don’t believe us or at the very best think we are exaggerating.
You dear readers know we aren’t and are probably wondering why we are making such a big fuss about it right now.
Well we will tell you.
Thursday late morning we got a phone call from a former teacher of our other son Chalom. She called us to express her outrage at President Obama’s speech about Israel going back to the 1967 suicide borders.
She wasn’t the only one.
Since that speech we have been approached by friends and acquaintances and complete strangers all expressing the same sentiments.
We don’t think that much of ourselves or even of our children to believe that it was our influence that somehow changed peoples mind about Israel. We know there was nothing to change.
Whether we or our children deserved it or not we find ourselves the most convenient recipients of the good will the people of the American hold for Israel. It is a humbling experience and one we treasure.
It is not that we or our children have never felt the sting of anti-Semitism but those incidents are few, far between and so universally condemned as to affirm rather than deny how truly different the people here are from any place else in the world.
We will leave the why the people of middle America are so different, so remarkable to sociologist or perhaps theologians.
The fact is that they and not just in regards to Israel.
On every moral issue over at least the past century and a half middle America and middle Americans have been light years ahead of politicians in the halls of power and professors in the ivory towers of academia.
Issues and ideas can be debated ad nauseam, but right is still right and wrong is still wrong.
Thus we come to this conclusion, that while President Obama can talk and talk and talk about his vision his answer to the Arab/Israeli problem we know the American people won’t buy it.
Lost in the President’s perception of the conflict is a fundamental understanding of right and wrong.
And that is something our truly remarkable friends and neighbors will never lose.
So thank you, it is a privilege and an honor to live amongst you.