D'var Torah

Tishrei/Heshvan 5764

Obligations, Rights, Responsibilities

The house was located at the bottom of the hill on which I lived as a child. A single story white stucco house with an adobe roof, large cacti grew next to the split rail fence that surrounded the house. One of the first homes build in the mid-19th century in what was then the Valencia tract of houses in what was to become Burbank, California, it was the neighborhood polling place. In an election year, several wooden booths were erected – four poles, surrounded by burlap, and with a small desk nailed to one side. On the desk were a stamp pad, and a small wooden stamp with an “X” at the end. Paper ballots were handed to the voters who signed in, entered the booths, stamped the pad, and then inserted their ballots into a wooden box with a small slit. So it was until perhaps the election of Lyndon Johnson when the computer punch card was introduced as the election implement. As a child, my parents took me with them to the polls. I stood with them in line, and I entered with them into the voting booth, and once my mother instructed me how and where the put the “x” on the ballot.

California had a system through which every voter received a copy of the ballot and a booklet detailing all of the items on the ballot, as well as instructions as to how and where to vote. As a family we would look at the materials and we would discuss the issues. My parents took their obligations as citizens seriously and sought to imbue their child with the same sense of obligation.

At the same time, my parents were teaching me of the mitzvah of voting – the commandment to be an active, productive citizen. While native-born, and in my mother’s case already several generations in America (my great-grandmother was born in Boston in the late 1860’s), my parents were not unaware that the gift of the vote was not always extended to Jews. Civil rights have only been extended to Jews in western society from the time of the Great Sanhedrin in Paris in 1804. Universal suffrage in America is relatively recent in our history as a nation; Jews were not granted the right to vote until 1825, civil rights for all American emerged from the protests of the 1950's and 60's. While at least from the time of Jeremiah in the sixty century before the common era, we were commanded to pray for the welfare of the place in which you live, “for in the peace thereof shall you have peace” [29:7], Jews were rarely, if ever citizens in the places in which they lived. Citizenship and the vote were viewed as a sacred gift and responsibility.

While in some countries voting in an election is mandatory and non-voting subject to fine, in these United States withholding of one’s vote is not condemned. After all, one has the right not to vote. From a Jewish perspective, not voting is removing oneself from the community, distancing oneself from the obligation to be a full participant in society. While most of us have already reached the saturation point in a long electioneering process, to vote in the election remains a mitzvah of the first order—not a good deed but a personal obligation. Pray for the peace of the city in which you live, for in the peace thereof shall you have peace.

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