A Vote Is a Kind of Prayer
Is America’s melting pot in the throes of a meltdown?
November 6, 2024 — Up at 6:30, earlier than usual for me. I needed to pick up where I left off with last night’s unsettling U.S. election coverage. Maybe I’d wake to some encouraging news.
In the days leading up to Election Day, an email with this subject line — Your vote is a prayer — jumps out at me. The email is from Tara Brach, meditation teacher, and her supplication to vote echoes the words of Raphael Warnock.
“A vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and our children,” Warnock said in his first speech on the Senate floor in March 2021 after becoming Georgia’s first black Senator.
Warnock is a Baptist minister. Tara Brach’s teachings are in the Western Buddhist tradition. My faith is Judaism, though I’m drawn to Buddhist ways.
A woman from Ecuador cleans my house. She is a Jehovah’s Witness. She believes in what the Bible says about all that has happened before and all that is still to come. She doesn’t believe in voting.
Our gardener is from Guatemala. One of his arms ends just below his elbow. He is very soft-spoken, even when he tells about the random act of brutality by a merciless gang — just one of the reasons he left behind his family to seek a better life in the United States. It’s a marvel to watch him at work.
Back in 1909, a play about a Russian-Jewish immigrant intent on moving to the United States after his family dies in a violent anti-Semitic riot in Russia, debuted in the U.S. British writer Israel Zangwill titled his play The Melting Pot, not necessarily anticipating how the term would become popularized as a metaphor for the assimilation of immigrants from all over the world into a country that would be built on their backs. Tired men and women, hungry children. Huddled masses yearning to be free.
It’s hardly a stretch these days to see that once welcoming image turned on its head, all the glorious diversity in a pot now poisoned with vitriol.
A lot of frantic texting among friends the morning of November 6th. Disbelief. Despair. Where do we go from here? More than one friend signaled a news blackout. I left a post-it on the kitchen counter for my husband, who gets up later than I do:
Not a good morning for America. But I’m okay. And in the words of Gloria Gaynor, I (we) will survive.
I’m not really okay, but he needs to be reassured that I haven’t gone into a palpitation-inducing anxiety. He worries about my anxiety, especially when it comes to he who shall remain nameless. He whose name I would no longer use as a verb when he first became president.
Warnock’s speech was an appeal to protect voting rights, a struggle that continues as legislative efforts in several states try to limit access to the ballot. In Tara Brach’s email, she writes, “I brought my palms together after sealing the envelope and whispered a prayer. It was a prayer to protect our imperfect democracy, a prayer to protect the most vulnerable among us, a prayer to heal the divides, a prayer for our earth and all living beings.”
Elections are not won on prayers, and yet there’s a kind of poetry here in asking all of us to think in terms of prayer in its secular context of a hope or a wish. There are groups in this country — Blacks, women — for whom the right to vote came much later than it did for the white men who made our laws.
There are people who think of the right to vote as sacred, others who see it as a duty.
Buddhists do not worship a deity. It is a religion based on principles for living a life of openness and compassion.
A Pew Research Center study of religions in America indicates that there are approximately 4.17 million people (0.7 percent) in the U.S. who identify as Buddhist.
The number of practicing Jews is 7.3 million (just under 2 percent).
Both Muslims (3.45 million) and Hindus (2.5 million) amount to under 1 percent each.
Christianity, including its various forms and racial mix, gets the lion’s share with 230 million followers (70 percent).
Some 22 percent of the population considers itself unaffiliated.
Every four years, in November, this melting pot comes together to elect a president, with the hope that whoever gets to sit in the Oval Office will make decisions in the interest of the greater good of our country, and our world.
The price of eggs, our conscience, our biases, the information and disinformation we’re fed, and, yes, prayers and hopes factor into who gets the grand prize. Facts, alas, do not necessarily change people’s minds. Social issues are easily distorted. One person sees cultural diversity as something that makes America truly great. Another person sees diversity as grist for culture wars.
Every year in November we celebrate Thanksgiving, the U.S. holiday appreciated most for its nondenominational status. Okay, the food, too. For what it’s worth, my childhood experience with Thanksgiving was limited to watching the parade on television in our small Brooklyn apartment. No turkey in the oven. No cranberry sauce or mashed potatoes or pumpkin pie.
I do come from a family of assimilated Jews but Thanksgiving just never made it into the annual holiday repertoire. We celebrated the Jewish New Year in September, Chanukah in December, Passover in April. It’s something I never questioned or even felt I was missing out on.
After college, when I moved into Manhattan, it was a dear friend, long gone now, who made Thanksgiving the special holiday it would become for me. When she was suffering with breast cancer, I picked up the torch and kept the holiday alive for friends and family. My husband and I, with our young daughter, had left the city for an exurban town in northern Westchester. Our house was made for entertaining.
Thanksgiving, by definition, is rooted in gratitude and, like all holidays it’s underscored by ritual. When I roll the camera on Thanksgivings past, I see my husband, my daughter, and myself heading from our Upper West Side studio the night before Thanksgiving to West 77th Street to watch the magic of floats being inflated. The next morning, we would awake early and walk over to Central Park West to join the throngs from all over the city, all over the country, maybe even the world here to witness the parade first-hand.
It was a ritual we left behind when we left the city. Rituals stir memories, bring continuity to our lives, hold us together. Sometimes, though, as with the ritual of voting, they expose what tears us apart.
Half the country sank into despair after the election while the other half cheered what they had accomplished (even if the jury is still out on where this is taking us). Yet even those of us among the despondent half found ways to find comfort and gratitude in the words and actions of kindred spirits. Misery does love company.
Voting is the bedrock of democracy, messy as it may be. So is separation of church and state, something I think about a great deal as a Jewish woman. It’s too easy to feel marginalized in a country where the dominant religion is Christianity — unless I do my part, evoke that melting pot I belong to when Election Day rolls around. I relish the ritual, take seriously the responsibility to cast my vote with hope for the world we desire for ourselves and our children.
Buddhist wisdom tells us that nothing in our world, our lives, is really fixed. Things continually change. Today misery, tomorrow a little joy.
And Talmudic wisdom reminds us: We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.
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