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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Jan. 16, 2008 20 Teves 5769

We're all ears

By Suzanne Fields


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | An inauguration is democracy's version of a coronation. It's democracy that makes the difference. The president wears no crown, carries no scepter, walks unanointed by God. He wears a simple suit, sometimes with an expensive label, but nothing in satin or silk. He takes the oath of office for a mere four years armed only with an understandable hope of doing it again four years hence. In the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower at his inauguration, "The people elect leaders not to rule, but to serve."


Once the president is sworn in, he makes a speech articulating his hopes and dreams for the people who elected him, sometimes telling the rest of the world what they can expect from him, too.


"Ask not what your country can do for you," John F. Kennedy famously said in his inaugural address in 1961, "ask what you can do for your country." What followed is often lost in memory, but no less important, addressed to his fellow citizens of the world: "Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man." The Europeans could usefully hear that again.


I spent the season between November and January reading inaugural addresses. They not only reflect the man himself, but the history of the moment. Some soar with poetic cadences, others are blunt and workmanlike, still others puffed up as with wind. No doubt Barack Obama has read much of that rhetoric as he crafts (with the assistance of a helpful ghost) the words he will speak next Tuesday. But behind each speech is yet another creator, who George Washington called "the Great Author of every public and private good," who conducts the affairs of men with "an Invisible Hand."


We firmly separate the established church and the state, but presidents who swear to uphold the Constitution nearly always call on heavenly intercession. Thomas Jefferson, who was attacked as an infidel and a disciple of Voltaire, a man who would cast Bibles into bonfires, reflected at his second inaugural on his reliance on God, suggesting that America was the new Promised Land: "I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life."


Even presidents characterized by reserve can recover their voices at their inauguration. Calvin Coolidge was known as "Silent Cal," stoic and grave. Once, when a dinner companion said she had made a bet that she could make him say more than two words, he replied: "You lose." But he rose to the inaugural occasion in a speech of 4,078 words.


Such numbers nevertheless pale in length to the longest speech (so far), given by William Henry Harrison, the hapless and hatless president who succumbed to pneumonia after delivering, bareheaded in a snowstorm, an inaugural address lasting nearly two hours. He gave the longest speech but served the shortest term as president. He died 31 days later.


The best inaugural addresses are inspirational, appealing to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." They speak to our commonality, to what we cherish in our government, the triumphant reminders of who we are and how far we have come. "The American sound," Ronald Reagan called it. "It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent and fair." Like Walt Whitman, the Gipper heard America singing.


But these are not upbeat times. Today, the music is muted if not discordant, as we confront our economic woes. We're in a recession, not a Depression, but the recollection of the soothing voice of Franklin Roosevelt reminds us that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The radio on that chilly March day in 1933 — the inauguration was moved forward to January in 1937 — resonated with the power of reassuring warmth only later recognized as illusionary. He prescribed discipline and direction to tackle the problems facing the nation. Alas, it finally took a war to do that.


Barack Obama has hard work ahead. He has earned his reputation as a wordsmith, and he's immodest in his aspirations to make Lincoln his model. He would have to do better than anyone else to approach Lincoln's poetic call for unity even before the Civil War, evoking "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land."


On Tuesday, we'll all be paying close attention to the new president. It's a day you might say we're all Obamaniacs. We'll be all ears.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.


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