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The man is just incredible. His greeting on the first night of Chanukah.
A Chanukah Greeting to the American Jewish Community from Wes Clark
America's Jewish community has much to celebrate this Chanukah. Three hundred and fifty years ago next year, a small contingent of Brazilian Jews landed on the shores of present-day New York City. Given the history of exile and persecution that marked the Jewish Diaspora to that point, these pioneers could only have expected to be tolerated in the New World for a limited time at best. To the contrary, the American chapter in Jewish history has stood out as much for freedom from persecution and successful integration as for a tremendous flowering of religious and communal life.
"To bigotry no sanction and to persecution no assistance." With these words to the Touro Synagogue in 1789, George Washington assured the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island, that religious and ethnic diversity was inherent in the definition of our young nation.
It was to this island of religious freedom and tolerance that my grandparents fled a century ago, when pogroms in Russia threatened their lives and livelihood. In the 1890s, my paternal grandfather, Jacob Kanne, married Ida Goldman, another Russian Jewish immigrant, and they began a new life together in Chicago. My father, Benjamin Kanne, was the eldest of their seven children. He died just before my fourth birthday. After growing up in Little Rock as Wesley Kanne Clark, I first discovered my Jewish heritage as a 24-year-old Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, England.
Thanks in large part to the relationships I have since developed with the Kanne side of my family, I have come to a greater appreciation of the American Jewish experience. The bedrock principles that make America a light unto the nations - the separation of church and state, respect for the rule of law, the conviction that diversity steadily replenishes our human potential as a nation - have made it possible for American Jews, in turn, to play a critical role in virtually every aspect of our nation's history.
According to Talmudic tradition, there was only enough oil in the Temple to keep the menorah burning for one day, yet it burned miraculously for eight days. After 350 years, the lamp of American Judaism is still burning brightly.
In celebration of this exemplary American story, Gert and I send our warm wishes for a happy and healthy Chanukah.
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