When my people celebrate redemption from slavery, we sit around the table and say, “Dayenu.” Dayenu—it would have been enough. The recounting of blessings is long—if we had been freed from slavery and not had the sea divided for us, not crossed to dry land, not been led to Mount Sinai. Etc., etc. You get the idea–every miracle would have been enough, every reason to be grateful enough and yet we were grateful that there were still more miracles to come.
For COVID Passover. with only two of us at the table, we named more personal miracles—the health of friends and family, satisfying work, the love and companionship we share. Dayenu. If we had been given only one of these it would have been enough. But we were grateful, too, that the blessings continued.
And in W. S. Merwin’s glorious poem, “Thanks,” he begins a litany of gratitude with “night falling” and “with our mouths full of food.” But then it gets complicated. Then “back from a mugging” and “after funerals” “we go on saying thank you.” And finally “with the animals dying around us” and “with nobody listening” still “we are saying thank you/ thank you we are saying and waving/ dark though it is.” Dark though it is.
And so we come to Juneteenth and I am looking at this celebration with these echoes of gratitude. It is not my celebration except as I celebrate every attempt to create a better, more just America. This is not mine to revel in, only to support and, on behalf of my country and my fellow inhabitants, to stand in amazed gratitude that in Texas on June 19, 1865 those enslaved for 2 ½ years after the Emancipation Proclamation—not to mention after 246 years of brutal enslavement–reacted in celebration of what they were reclaiming, rather than in bitter regret at what they had been so long denied. (Maybe the enslaved people already knew about their freedom, but needed the word to go officially to enslavers: no more. My people look always for midrash, the possible stories behind the stories.)
So there was January 1, 1863, the moment of the Emancipation Proclamation. and then there was Juneteenth—dayenu. And there was the brief optimism at the end of the Civil War, when in an astonishingly short time, the formerly enslaved people created schools and businesses and became elected representatives of the public. Dayenu That was followed by Jim Crow and the KKK, but still the descendants of the formerly enslaved volunteered to defend America in its wars—dayenu—even when they returned home to injustice. They fought and died for the right to vote and, when they could, turned out in impressive numbers—dayenu—although they are now watching that right being eroded in state after state. And it has been the descendants of the formerly enslaved people who have stood up time and again for justice for themselves and for others who have been denied it. They have been the true believers in what we like to think of as the promise of America.
And so it is Juneteenth across the country—dayenu. But not yet enough.