Word Prompt – LIBERTY – Stephen Flatow

For me, “liberty” comes with a tune.

I am a product of the New York City public schools of the 1950s, specifically PS87 Queens, when the school day regularly included the Pledge of Allegiance and patriotic songs. At “assembly” on Wednesdays we sang, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” “America the Beautiful,” and the national anthem, first and fourth stanzas – not as politics, but as part of learning what it meant to be an American. (The national anthem is kind of like Aleinu as we finish up davening on Shabbat. Everyone knows the first stanza, but the rest…)

When I sang “land where my fathers died,” even though I was only a second generation American, I felt it in my bones. Liberty was not an abstraction. It was the air we were blessed to breathe.

Today’s yeshiva students receive a magnificent education in Torah, Jewish memory and Jewish responsibility. But many do not acquire that same instinctive American civic vocabulary. That is a loss.

I am not proposing a new tractate called Bava Patriotica. But a free country does not stay free by accident. Liberty must be taught, cherished – and occasionally sung slightly off-key.