JRV1329

Come Be a Servant in the House of Our People

#1329 July 5, 2026

Bibi and Trump aren’t wrong on this. We grassroots American Jews have to stand up today for our people’s homeland and us.  The vilification has never been worse.  Here’s two tasks for us to get there from here.

Come Be a Servant in the House of Our People

A fortnight ago in #1327 I recalled what I’d once asked fellow grassroots American Jews who subject themselves to these weekly emails: Where and when, had you had the choice, would you have chosen to live in our people’s long history?  With Abraham, Moses, David, the Maccabees …? I said that I’d gotten just one vote (mine) for Here & Now – a time and place in which a seminal Jewish history course hung in the balance and we collectively could influence its outcome.  Now this week let me put to you what I should have asked next: How would you have seen your own role in that time and place?

As it happens, six decades ago I was at a time and place in which an awesome answer still reverberated from two years before. In 1961 I graduated from a small college, Washington & Lee University, in rural western Virginia (south of Charlottesville, north of Lynchburg and Roanoke), with a degree in accounting (“Jewish Engineering,” without malice the student body called it). I also came away with an abiding affection for three “B’s” – beer, bourbon and the hundreds-of-miles-long beautiful Blue Ridge Parkway connecting Shenandoah National Park in Virginia with Great Smokies National Park in Tennessee.  W&L has a famous fight song, mimicked all over, but its copyrighted title is “The Washington & Lee Swing.” 

W&L’s also famous for every four years holding a mock political convention nominating quite accurately the party out of power’s candidate for President of the United States. In 1956, just two years before I’d arrived, its keynote speaker was Alben W. Barclay, who’d been President Truman’s Vice President. 

“I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord,” Barclay declared, “than sit in the seat of the mighty,” and fell dead upon the spot.

So that’s my plea to my fellow grassroots American Jews at this moment of unprecedented vilification and delegitimization of our people’s historic homeland of Israel, “miraculously” reborn after eighteen hundred years in our own time, as Charles Krauthammer by me correctly put it.  In Alben Barclay’s thundering final words: Be a servant in the House of the Lord. To play an active real role, to be effective, you don’t have to sit in the seat of the mighty.

Two Tasks for Such Servants

There are tons of “reading lists” to inspire and inform folks on all manner of subjects.  One for grassroots American Jews is on my website

It’s culled from my (and the parrot’s) thousand+ private library of non-fiction books about Israel.  To make my list the book has to be gripping informative reading – i.e., inspiring.  I have my favorites divided into a dozen subjects – ancient through modern – so go there and click.

Secondly, I’d have you hone your skills as a Jewish homeland advocate by taking advantage of experts’ efforts to enhance us lay grassroots’ pro-Israel effectiveness. 

Philly ZOA is organizing a course on this for us. 

Interested?  Email me and I’ll put you in direct contact with my friend, Philly ZOA Executive Director Steve Feldman, who’ll give you details and sign you up if you’re still game. 

Bottom Line

This is week 1329 of these weekly emails of mine aimed at enlisting fellow grassroots U.S. Jews in “standing up,” as Bibi urged us last week:

“Stand up for the truth. Stand up for Israel. Stand up for the Jewish people. Stand up for the Jewish future”

and President Trump late last year

“Be proud of who you are.”

Over these now twenty-five and a half years, I have never sensed a more virulent, more internationally widespread vilification, including right here in America, of our people’s Jewish homeland that’s historically, legally, equitably, indispensably ours, than right now.  Be an active servant in the house of our people, and if so moved in the House of the Lord.