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 this 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. . .

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