‘Am I Worthy of Those Sacrifices?’

I am lying in bed, catching in my last waking moments, a cable show. Talking heads. One of them is David Duke who, having just lost an election, proudly proclaims that his vision of an ideal America is pure white, pure Christian. In that instant I feel, strangely, no revulsion, no anger even. It is that shudder that comes over me from time to time.

As a Jew, if Duke ruled this land, I would be gone. My wife shakes her head, turns again to her book, while a luncheon conversation of more than 20 years ago with a friend comes to mind. It is a beautiful spring day and we are dining outdoors. He is a good and dear man, someone of my generation and sensibilities.

“Marty,” I say to him, surprised, actually, by the question that is beginning to form, “Why is that we are so ambitious, so driven, so hungry for something?” I expect no answer, or perhaps at best, a comment lodged in psychoanalytic theory about unhappy, insecure childhoods breeding ambition as compensation for the absence of love. But his answer is political, ideological, lodged in history.

“Because we fear,” he replies, as if he has this answer permanently at his beck and call, “that if we are not successful, they will send us back.” Why do his words hit me so strongly? Send me back where? To Chicago, my birthplace? To Kiev, Odessa, Krakow, London, the birthplaces of my parents and grandparents? But it is true. Deep inside somewhere in those mysterious caves of the soul, I have always felt that I am here on some loan arrangement. I don’t own my citizenship; it is a lease, and they can pull it at any time for, well, failure to comply with some covenant or other. But surely everyone feels this way. The specter of one’s finitude necessarily assigns us all to leases. Ownership of life is pure illusion, a Faustian fantasy.

No, Marty has spoken to something else. He has tapped at that sense many minority people feel that we are on trial--probation perhaps--and that our periodic successes and failures are somehow weighed by unseen authorities with the power to send us back. It is a sentiment I dislike, but it crops up during national elections when I examine a candidate’s position on Israel. Of course I want that state protected and honored. But a candidate’s position on Israel is code for his position on the Jews here in America. Can I trust this man or woman not to send me back? Will this man or woman find that my life has been worthy of me staying and having the lease extended?

Which brings me to the movie “Saving Private Ryan.” It is not the gory, raw opening minutes of the film I reflect on, although I cringe at the thought of being in one of those landing vessels whose gates suddenly open, exposing me to German cannon. I have always shuddered at the scenes of the Normandy invasion, just as I barely can watch any depiction of the Holocaust.

For me, the memorable moment of “Saving Private Ryan” will always be the final minutes in which Ryan, now in his 70s, returns to the cemetery where his saviors are buried and asks his wife whether she believes his life has been worthy, worthy that is, of dead men’s deeds.

It is the question of my life, just as it is the lingering sentiment of my life, and it must be the same for Steven Spielberg and Marty as well. But for the grace of God, I might have been one of the 6 million. Pure unadulterated good fortune made it so I never knew that experience. The same luck of the draw accounts for why I never jumped into the freezing water from a landing craft heading toward Omaha Beach. But thousands did. I have seen them do it a million times in documentary films, and I have seen the graves. I have seen the acres upon acres of crosses and stars where they all lie, the ones who literally died so I might write these words, and wonder about that lease. Sentimental thoughts, corny thoughts even, from a man who battles cynicism and disenchantment with his country more often than not, and perpetually wonders about the concept of a moral war.

But sentimentality aside, I do not practice a religion where I believe that a God died for me, for my transgressions, for my mere humanness. I do, however, practice a religion that some men would banish had they the power, and some men sought to banish when they had the power. But they did not succeed and the acres upon acres of crosses and stars tell all that history need tell. Sentimental perhaps, but these are the people who have, all these years, safeguarded my lease. Younger than my own children, many of them, but all of them I would ask, as did the elderly Ryan, has my life been worthy of your sacrifice? Is it morally just and proper that I am here and you are not? Is it morally just and proper that I have not yet been sent back? Can I rest assured that you rest in peace?