John Lewis

 So much has happened since I stopped writing in July that it’s going to take a few weeks to work through the backlog of things regarding which I’d like to express myself. Still, I have to start somewhere. And where I’d like to start this fourteenth year of weekly e-letters and blog posts is with the death of John Lewis, someone for whom I’ve always had the greatest respect. And I’d like particularly to take note of the most remarkable, piece of writing he left behind when he left the world behind for the World of Truth—a letter he wished to be read in the wake of his death.

Much has been written since his passing of his life, and particularly his status as one of the thirteen original “Freedom Riders” in the early 1960s, so I won’t write in that direction here. Nor do I specifically wish to review his lifetime of work for the civil rights of black, and all, Americans—in the course of the years leading up to his election to Congress in 1986 and of his almost thirty-five years as a member of the Georgia congressional delegation. (For readers interested in his early years, I can still recommend his autobiography, Walking with the Wind, which I read when it came out in 1998 and found very interesting and moving. In later years, he wrote three graphic novels collectively entitled March, which books resume his earlier story and bring it up to 2016, and which I am hoping to read this year.)  Instead, I’d like to focus on the remarkable 750 words he left behind as a letter from the grave.

The notion of speaking to the people who survive you on this earth and offering them some final wisdom, some final instructions, or some final words of comfort is not a new idea. The Bible itself presents three specific instances of people transcending their own lifetimes to address a future from which they themselves will be absent. Those three instances are quite different, but each is telling in their own right.

A very moving speech preserved at 2 Samuel 23, for example, contains such a deathbed letter from King David to his own descendants and is basically a sermon about how the future kings of Israel will need to devote themselves to the pursuit of justice and fidelity to God if they are to succeed at governing the nation. (It also bears saying that an entirely different set of deathbed instructions from David appears just a few chapters later, at 1 Kings 2, one in which he basically provides his son and successor Solomon with a hit list of people David himself didn’t get around to making pay for their various acts of perfidy and whom he specifically did not wish to imagine dying peacefully of old age. I suppose you could argue that one is his deathbed letter for the nation and the other, some final specifics for his successor. But I prefer to imagine these two texts as representative of the tension we all feel when we contemplate our legacy, wanting to rise above the details—and the pettiness those details tend to bring in their wake—but also being eager not to leave unaddressed issues we have somehow failed effectively to deal with in the course of our years on earth.)

The second example is Jacob’s deathbed speech, the one in which he promises to reveal what will happen in the end of days, then proceeds one by one to discuss his sons’ best and worst character traits. The clear message—that the future of anyone at all will be a function far more meaningfully of who that person is than of what other people have done to or for that individual—is a profound lesson and one we would still do well to take to heart, even today.

And the third is Moses’s own speech to the nation from the edge of his life, one in which he addresses the tribes of Israel (or at least most of them) serially and makes more or less the same point each time, that the future will never be a function of their will to succeed, nor will it rest with their military power or with their wealth, but will instead be a function of the degree to which they submit to the rule of Heaven and live lives of fidelity to God.

Each is about the future. Each denies the fantasy that we are somehow pawns in a game none of us understands and cannot therefore really affect the future. And each, offering an alternative point of view, can be summarized in one sentence: the future will be a function of our success in the pursuit of justice (David), the future will be a function of our success in living lives of virtue and decency (Jacob), and the future will be a function our success in remaining faithful to God.  And it was those texts in the back of my mind that I sat own to read the letter that John Lewis wrote to the American people from the other side of his personal abyss, from Sheol.

It’s a short letter, complete in 747 words. Framed as his personal call for a national recommitment to the basic tenets of the civil rights in the wake of George Floyd’s death, it is also a kind of interesting philosophical statement about the nature of nations and the relationship of citizens to the larger polities to which they belong. We are citizens of a participatory democracy, he notes, one in which we are all called upon to vote for the people who will represent us in Congress and in the White House. But the real role, Lewis then goes on to say, is not merely to vote—although voting should surely be seen as an almost sacred obligation and not “just” a right or an option—but to find a way to stake out your place on the national agenda of ideas so that you personally become part of the specific agenda that you wish to see addressed by the nation and by its elected leaders. Democracy, he writes, is an act, not a state…”and every generation must do its part of help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world at peace with itself.”

And then he goes to draw a remarkable picture. He talks vertically and horizontally at once, imagining the citizenry as an aggregate of individuals linked intellectually and even morally to the past through the process of internalizing the lessons of history. (The idea is to make the link between generations past and present sufficiently real and meaningful to permit our ancestors speak through us to our descendants—who will obviously also be their own descendants—and thus to grant them standing in the world by allowing ourselves to see the world through their eyes.) But he also talks about reaching out horizontally and feeling a kinship with the other nations of the world, feeling tied to them through a sense of common humanity and shared destiny, and through the sense that, in the end, what binds the peoples of the world together will always be more profound than what separates us. From that sense of being part of the larger world and being part of the ongoing history of a people and a place will come the freedom to speak out, to act boldly, to play a personal role in the redemption of the nation’s soul.

From there, he moves on to call to address those reading his words directly. “I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart,” he wrote, “and stand up for what you truly believe.” In other words, he says that the problem facing the nation is not people being unfaithful to the political programs of others, but being unresponsive to their own finer angels, to the promptings of their own moral hearts, to the agenda of ideas that constitutes their personal contribution to the nation’s internal debate regarding its future. And he reminds his readers that although his was always the way of peace, love, and nonviolence, a commitment to nonviolence doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding what he calls “good trouble, necessary trouble” at all costs: sometimes people who insist on speaking out end up irritating people who don’t wish to hear what they have to say and there are consequences, including unpleasant ones, to be borne.

I was very moved by that idea. Our nation is in a state, it seems, of ongoing, endless turmoil. We move from one crisis to another, barely having the time to catch our collective breath between one event and the next. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed—and particularly as the presidential campaign hits up and the rhetoric becomes even more inflammatory. So to receive this letter from a true civil rights icon—and, at that, one that came from the grave—reminding us to take a deep breath, calling upon us to seek strength in history and comfort in the knowledge that in addition to being citizens of our own country we are also part of the family of humankind, encouraging us to admire people who speak out forcefully and clearly regarding the things they believe, and urging us to feel challenged by such people to join their ranks and to speak out for the things we believe no less forcefully and clearly—that was a remarkable experience. Generally speaking, the dead don’t come to their own shivas to comfort the bereaved they personally have left behind. But this thing, John Lewis too managed to accomplish.

I felt energized and comforted by his word and I encourage you to read them too. Click here and you’ll see what I mean. When people ask what makes America different, part of the answer lies in its cultivation of leaders like John Lewis, citizens who freely put their money where their mouth is, who don’t mind paying with a bit of “good trouble” for the right to speak out, and who manage to remain faithful to a personal agenda—in this case, one related to the search for justice for all—in the course of an entire lifetime. Yehi zikhro varukh—may his memory be a blessing for us all.