Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (10 page)

Toward the end of World War II, Judge Hand spoke at an “I Am an American Day” ceremony in New York City’s Central Park. Instead of a rousing, patriotic address, he delivered a thoughtful credo that profoundly moved the audience; when his “Spirit of Liberty” speech was widely reprinted, the judge took care to add a footnote crediting historian H. G. Wells for a thought on which he bottomed the line about how Jesus “taught mankind a lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten”; the Wells phrasing was “whose pitiless and difficult doctrine of self-abandonment and self-forgetfulness we can neither disregard nor yet bring ourselves to obey.” Such scrupulous attribution of an idea is rare, but it was characteristic of Judge Hand, who was careful about not stealing anything.

The following year, on May 20, 1945, he spoke again at the same occasion. The two talks fit together nicely in reverse order, and I’ve taken the liberty of so arranging them; the 1944 section begins, “We have gathered here to affirm a faith….”

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WE MEET ONCE
more to attest our loyalty, and pledge our allegiance…. As we renew our mutual fealty, it is fitting that we should pause, and seek to take account of the meaning of our cost and suffering. Was not the issue this: whether mankind should be divided between those who command and those who serve; between those who use others at their will and those who must submit; whether the measure of a
man’s power to shape his own destiny should be the force at his disposal? Our nation was founded upon an answer to those questions, and we have fought this war to make good that answer. For ourselves and for the present, we are safe; our immediate peril is past. But for how long are we safe, and how far have we removed our peril? If our nation could not itself exist half slave and half free, are we sure that it can exist in a world half slave and half free? Is the same conflict less irrepressible when worldwide than it was eighty years ago when it was only nationwide? Right knows no boundaries, and justice no frontiers; the brotherhood of man is not a domestic institution.

No, our job will not end with the sound of the guns. Even in our own interest we must have an eye to the interests of others; a nation which lives only to itself will in the end perish; false to the faith, it will shrivel and pass to that oblivion which is its proper receptacle. We may not stop until we have done our part to fashion a world in which there shall be some share of fellowship; which shall be better than a den of thieves. Let us not disguise the difficulties; and, above all, let us not content ourselves with noble aspirations, counsels of perfection, and self-righteous advice to others. We shall need the wisdom of the serpent; we shall have to be content with short steps; we shall be obliged to give and take: we shall face the strongest passions of mankind—our own not the least; and in the end we shall have fabricated an imperfect instrument. But we shall not have wholly failed; we shall have gone forward, if we bring to our task a pure and chastened spirit, patience, understanding, sympathy, forbearance, generosity, fortitude, and, above all, an inflexible determination. The history of man has just begun: in the aeons which lie before him lie limitless hope or limitless despair. The choice is his; the present choice is ours: it is worth the trial….

We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty—freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning. What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of
men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few—as we have learned to our sorrow.

What, then, is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten—that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be—nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it—yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America so prosperous, and safe, and contented, we shall have failed to grasp its meaning, and shall have been truant to its promise, except as we strive to make it a signal, a beacon, a standard, to which the best hopes of mankind will ever turn. In confidence that you share that belief, I now ask you to raise your hands and repeat with me this pledge:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands—one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Menachem Begin, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor, served as head of Israel’s main opposition party until 1977, when he became prime minister; he shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 with President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt as a result of their peace accords. At the White House ceremony with President Carter on March 26, 1979, Begin began to speak in his customary formal style: “The ancient Jewish people gave the New World a vision of eternal peace, of universal disarmament, of abolishing the teaching and learning of war.” He used both the Hebrew and the Arabic words for peace: “No more war, no more bloodshed, no more bereavement. Peace unto you.
Shalom, salaam
, forever.” Finally, he offered a prayer of thanksgiving, which he “learned as a child in the home of father and mother, who do not exist anymore, because they were among the six million people—men, women and children—who sanctified the Lord’s name with their sacred blood, which reddened the rivers of Europe from the Rhine to the Danube, from the Bug to the Volga, because—only because—they were born Jews; and because they didn’t have a country of their own, or a valiant Jewish army to defend them. And because nobody, nobody, came to their rescue, although they cried out ‘Save us! Save us!’
de profundis
, from the depths of the pit and agony.”

He called that treaty-signing day “the third greatest day” in his life. He said the second was in 1967, when Israeli soldiers turned back a Jordanian attack and unified Jerusalem. The first was the day in 1948 on which Israel became a state.

In his youth, the head of the Irgun Zvai Leumi was a fiery speaker. The emblem of the Irgun was a raised right arm grasping a bayoneted rifle,
with the legend “Only Thus”; the point was that only through military uprising could Jews achieve their homeland.

On May 14, 1948—Begin’s “greatest day”—the less militant Jewish leaders in the Haganah dared to proclaim a provisional Hebrew government. The next night, as Arab forces prepared for attack, Begin went to the secret radio station of the Irgun in Tel Aviv. He wrote later, “I felt no stage-fright. I was among my friends, in ‘my house,’ in the radio station from which the voice of Revolt and Freedom had for years gone forth to every town and village in our land. But the solemnity of the hour overawed me…. My comrades told me that almost every Jewish home with a radio had listened in to my address, and I was thankful that my words had helped to hearten the people.”

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AFTER MANY YEARS
of underground warfare, years of persecution and moral and physical suffering, the rebels against the oppressor stand before you, with a blessing of thanks on their lips and a prayer in their hearts. The blessing is the age-old blessing with which our fathers and our forefathers have always greeted holy days. It was with this blessing that they used to taste any fruit for the first time in the season. Today is truly a holiday, a holy day, and a new fruit is visible before our very eyes. The Hebrew revolt of 1944–48 has been blessed with success—the first Hebrew revolt since the Hasmonean insurrection that has ended in victory. The rule of oppression in our country has been beaten, uprooted; it has crumbled and been dispersed. The state of Israel has arisen in bloody battle. The highway for the mass return to Zion has been cast up.

The foundation has been laid—but only the foundation—for true independence. One phase of the battle for freedom, for the return of the whole people of Israel to its homeland, for the restoration of the whole land of Israel to its God-covenanted owners, has ended. But only one phase….

The state of Israel has arisen. And it has arisen “Only Thus”: through blood, through fire, with an outstretched hand and a mighty arm, with sufferings and with sacrifices. It could not have been otherwise. And yet, even before our state is able to set up its normal national institutions, it is compelled to fight—or to continue to fight satanic enemies and bloodthirsty mercenaries, on land, in the air, and on the sea. In these circumstances, the warning sounded by the philosopher-president Thomas Masaryk to the Czechoslovak nation when it attained its freedom, after three hundred years of slavery, has a special significance for us.

In 1918, when Masaryk stepped out onto the Wilson railway station in Prague, he warned his cheering countrymen, “It is difficult to set up a state; it is even more difficult to keep it going.” In truth, it has been difficult for us to set up our state. Tens of generations, and millions of wanderers, from one land of massacre to another, were needed; it was necessary that there be exile, burning at the stake and torture in the dungeons; we had to suffer agonizing disillusionments; we needed the warnings—though they often went unheeded—of prophets and of seers; we needed the sweat and toil of generations of pioneers and builders; we had to have an uprising of rebels to crush the enemy; we had to have the gallows, the banishments beyond seas, the prisons, and the cages in the deserts—all this was necessary that we might reach the present stage where six hundred thousand Jews are in the homeland, where the direct rule of oppression has been driven out, and Hebrew independence declared in part at least of the country, the whole of which is ours.

It has been difficult to create our state. But it will be still more difficult to keep it going. We are surrounded by enemies who long for our destruction. And that same oppressor, who has been defeated by us directly, is trying indirectly to make us surrender with the aid of mercenaries from the south, the north, and the east. Our one-day-old state is set up in the midst of the flames of battle. And the first pillar of our state must therefore be victory, total victory, in the war which is raging all over the country. For this victory, without which we shall have neither freedom nor life, we need arms—weapons of all sorts, in order to strike the enemies, in order to disperse the invaders, in order to free the entire length and breadth of the country from its would-be destroyers.

But in addition to these arms, each and every one of us has need of another weapon, a spiritual weapon, the weapon of unflinching endurance in face of attacks from the air; in face of grievous casualties; in face of local disasters and temporary defeats; unflinching resistance to threats and cajolery. If, within the coming days and weeks, we can put on this whole armor of an undying nation in resurrection, we shall in the meantime receive the blessed arms with which to drive off the enemy and bring freedom and peace to our nation and country.

But, even after emerging victorious from this campaign—and victorious we shall be—we shall still have to exert superhuman efforts in order to remain independent, in order to free our country. First of all it will be necessary to increase and strengthen the fighting arm of Israel, without which there can be no freedom and no survival for our homeland….

We shall need a wise foreign policy in order to free our country and maintain our state. We must turn our declaration of independence into a
reality. And we must grasp this fact: that so long as even one British or any other foreign soldier treads the soil of our country, our sovereign independence remains nothing but an aspiration, an aspiration for whose fulfillment we must be ready to fight not only on the battlefront but also in the international arena. Secondly, we must establish and maintain the principle of reciprocity in our relations with the nations of the world. There must be no self-denigration. There must be no surrender, and no favoritism. There must be reciprocity. Enmity for enmity. Aid for aid. Friendship must be repaid with friendship….