Affirming our identity

Rabbi Mark Wm. Gross

Feb. 6, as the first Sunday of the month, is marked in the United States as “Four Chaplains Sunday,” commemorating the heroic death of four U.S. Army chaplains in the line of duty 79 years ago.

First meeting when they came to train military chaplains, Pastors George Fox and Clark Poling, Father John Washington and Rabbi Alexander Goode became fast friends. All four men were on board the same troop transport when it was torpedoed by a U-boat just before 1 a.m. the morning of Feb. 3. In the ensuing 25 minutes before Dorchester sank, the four chaplains worked together to establish some kind of order to the evacuation of panicky survivors.

The chaplains organized the loading of the lifeboats; they distributed life jackets (including their own) to those without one; they administered last rites to the dying injured; they offered encouragement to those floating in the icy water; and ultimately, they went down with the ship, locked arm-in-arm and singing a hymn together. As one tough petty officer tearfully reported to naval authorities, “It was the finest thing I ever hope to see, in this world or the next.”

The sacrifice of the Four Chaplains has been remembered and recognized over the years. They were posthumously awarded the D.S.C. and Purple Heart by President Roosevelt in 1944. President Truman marked Memorial Day of 1958 with the Four Chaplains commemorative stamp. As President Eisenhower’s last act in office in January of 1961, he presented the families of the four men with a special Chaplain’s Medal for Heroism. There are Four Chaplain memorial chapels and plaques (and, for that matter, bridges and football fields) all over the United States, including a monument in North Dakota bearing the inscription: “‘Love your neighbor,’ even if he does not go to the church where you worship.”

That admonition is significant, since in the decades prior to World War II, far too many Americans had been unabashed in their suspicion of and active dislike for people different than themselves. Various bigotries and prejudices, racial and religious alike, were exacerbated by the Great Depression, in which half the population of the country was unor under-employed.

Yet we managed to put aside all that divisiveness in wartime. Films from the 1940s summarized the unity of America by depicting guys named McNamara and Smith and Ramirez and Epstein all hunkered down together in the same shell crater. (Or my personal favorite: 1940’s “The Fighting Sixty-Ninth,” in which Father Duffy, an Irish Catholic priest portrayed by the great Pat O’Brien, recites the Sh’ma in Hebrew to comfort a dying Jewish doughboy.)

The problems we continue to face as a nation (ongoing pandemic, inflation, global supply problems and under-employment) may very well be considered the moral equivalent of a war — one that we must fight together. And, as it happens, our greatest strength as a nation is the diversity making us strong as a corporate whole that can, in fact, respond together. Our Jewish community is an integral component in that endeavor, with individual rabbis participating in local interfaith alliances and our Federation participating in a regional Catholic-Jewish partnership with the Diocese of Venice.

Your local churches may not be observing Four Chaplains Sunday, nor may your own synagogue be incorporating an appropriate remembrance on the Qaddish list the prior Shabbat, but I invite you to devote a thought this month to the “pluribus” that gives our “unum” meaning … and, perhaps, to think about long-range planning with our interfaith partners to make the 80th annual memorialization of The Four Chaplains in 2023 into a shared interfaith occasion marking our truest strength as a nation.

Rabbi Mark Wm. Gross serves at Jewish Congregation of Marco Island.