John Witherspoon and the Book of Life

Originally delivered on Rosh Hashana 5781 at the Jewish Center in Princeton, NJ.

This summer I started taking my three kids on an afternoon Shabbat walk. We weren’t walking to shul anymore, and we needed a reason to stretch our legs. Their favorite destination became Carnegie Lake, where we discovered a couple hidden treehouses overlooking the water.

One Shabbat, I decided to take them on a more unusual walk. The idea for the walk occurred to me a few weeks prior, while we were watching Hamilton on Disney. I wanted to make the story of the founding of the United States come alive, so I decided to bring them on a short adventure to…the cemetery. You can probably guess why. Just a few hundred yards from where we live, lies one of the key characters of Hamilton, one of our country’s founding fathers, Aaron Burr.

As a parenting intervention, the walk was basically a bust. Here’s one direct quote overheard at the cemetery gate: “Really, Aba? You dragged us on an adventure to the cemetery? Can we go home now?”

The stories of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr and the other personalities that made it into the musical are part of a much larger reckoning that we are going through as an American society. One of those personalities whose life and legacy resonates deeply for our own town of Princeton is John Witherspoon.

John Witherspoon was the sixth president of Princeton University and a Founding Father of the United States. He has been lying in his grave for 226 years, just a few yards away from Aaron Burr. But this summer he was the talk of the town and of the talk of the university.

Professor Martha Sandweiss launched the Princeton and Slavery project. For the past few years, I had the privilege of sharing a pre-fast meal on Erev Yom Kippur with Professor Sandweiss at the home of a mutual friend. Each year she would recount with excitement the findings of their research. One of the personalities her team researched closely was John Witherspoon.

Witherspoon’s leadership is certainly notable. He took over the College of New Jersey, later to be called Princeton University, when it was a small school focused on training minsters. The college was saddled with debt, and was known for its weak instruction and tiny library. Witherspoon transformed the college into a leadership academy for a new country. The roster of students he taught is almost mind-boggling: they include James Madison, Aaron Burr, three Supreme Court Justices, 10 cabinet officers, 12 members of the Continental Congress, 28 US senators, and 49 Congressmen.

But on the issue of slavery, an accounting of Witherspoon’s life comes up decidedly mixed.

On the side of the ledger that we would celebrate would be written:

· When Witherspoon was a pastor in Scotland, he gave religious instruction to a slave named James Montgomery and baptized him.

· While he was president of the college, he privately tutored two free African men, and late in his life took on a third.

· He was the only clergyman and college president to sign the Declaration of Independence, which declared that all men are created equal.

But on the other side of the ledger would be written:

· Witherspoon helped draft and signed the Articles of Confederation, which codified slavery as a national institution.

· He chaired a committee for the State of New Jersey to consider abolition, and voted against it, arguing that slavery was already dying out, and thus paving the way for slavery to be practiced in NJ for 75 more years until the end of the Civil War.

· Late in life he built a country home on Cherry Hill Road, called Tusculum. To help manage his property and farm, he purchased two slaves.[1]

As part of the Princeton and Slavery project, a playwright named Nathan Alan Davis wrote a short play about Witherspoon and slavery. In his play, a freshmen student at the University decides to remove the statue of John Witherspoon that stands in the large open square near Firestone Library. The play imagines a heated conversation between Jasmine, the student, and Witherspoon, the statue.

As she takes out a blowtorch, the student, Jasmine, challenges Witherspoon to recall the names of his two slaves. Witherspoon wants to talk about how he did more “than most men for the upliftment” of blacks. But Jasmine wants to know if Witherspoon can even recall the names of the two people who served him: they are “Not details. People. People who lived with you. Who served you. For decades,” she yells at Witherspoon.

The playwright gives John Witherspoon the last line. As Witherspoon’s statue lays on the ground, having been toppled by Jasmine’s blowtorch, he says, “There are so many things I would change if I could. Once you’ve died: It’s too late. You just witness the effects. Of all you’ve done. And left undone. It’s wonderful and terrible. The worst, though. The worst are the compromises. The white lies you told yourself, so you could keep living your life. All those white lies.”

This is the legacy that leaders across Princeton have been wrestling with this summer. In town, the school board was wrestling with a request to change the name of Witherspoon Middle School. And on campus, students and faculty were wrestling with a request to relocate Witherspoon’s statue.

This is the time of year that we Jews consider our deeds. During the Ten Days of Repentance, and the month of Elul leading up to it, we look back. We reflect. We consider how others, and how God, will judge our past actions.

Soon we will recite the Unetaneh Tokef prayer as an introduction to the kedusha of musaf. The central idea of Unetaneh Tokef is the notion that God records our deeds in some type of written account. This idea goes all the way back to the book of Exodus. After the episode of the Golden Calf [Ex32], Moses pleads with God to forgive the sin of idolatry of the Israelites. Please forgive them, Moses says, and if you won’t, “then erase me from the record that you have written!”

The sefer hayim, the Book of Life, shows up in the Book of Psalms (69:29) and the New Testament. It also makes an appearance in the Mishna. In Pirkei Avot (2:1), Rabbi Judah Hanasi teaches that in order to avoid sin, we should be mindful of three things above us: an eye that sees, an ear that hears, and all our deeds are written in a scroll.

This idea that appears in the Bible and Mishnah that “someone is watching and recording us” made its way into the Talmud and eventually into our liturgy in the form of Unetaneh Tokef. The Book of Life is being recorded: on Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed.

The idea reminds me of a lyric from the Violent Femmes — and perhaps the few of you who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s like I did, will remember it: “this will go down on your permanent record!”

For many years I have struggled with this theology. Perhaps God is watching us. Perhaps, as Rabbi Judah Hanasi taught, there is an eye and ear above. I will admit that each morning, when I put a kippah on my head, I think to myself, someone will be watching what I do today. But I’m not so sure about the idea that there is a scroll with our name, written for life or death in the next year.

This summer, after the University voted to change the name of the Woodrow Wilson school, an alum of Princeton High School named Geoffrey Allen decided to see if the time was right to change the name of John Witherspoon Middle School, the school where my two sons have just started seventh grade. More than 1,500 people signed his petition, most of them alumni. Perhaps the most compelling line in the petition was, “This change is imperative, as the school’s name and Witherspoon’s legacy creates a hostile environment for both the middle school and district’s racially diverse student body.”

One parent from the school, Princeton Art Professor Rachael DeLue, said that changing the name will make the school more inclusive. She added that the name of her middle school when she grew up was Harriet Tubman Middle School, and that name “shaped how she saw the world.”

The school board agreed. After two meetings to discuss the request, they voted to change the name of the school.

I don’t know whether I believe that God is keeping a record of our deeds. What I do believe is that as a society, we, collectively, are keeping a written records of our deeds. Whether or not a Book of Life exists in the heavens, it sure exists here on earth. The decisions we make in life will be reviewed and judged by those who know us, by those who love us, and by those who come after us. And the scales of justice that they will use to measure our lives are not calibrated to the societal norms of our own day. The scales of justice they will use will be calibrated to the societal norms of the future.

Like John Witherspoon, we will all be judged. History, and the future, has their eyes on us.

Whether you are motivated more by the idea that God is keeping a ledger of your life, or by the idea that future generations will carefully review your actions, one idea rings true and runs throughout the liturgy of our high holy days: the choices we make, right now, they matter. The actions we take or don’t take, the words we say or withhold, the words we write or leave unwritten, the people we help or don’t help, the relationships we nurture or ignore, the way we respond to this pandemic.

I wish for each one of you a meaningful period of reflection these yamim noraim. One way to reflect this year is to take a few moments before Yom Kippur to ask yourself, “how might someone three generations from now judge my life?”

[1] For details of Witherspoon’s relationship to slavery, see https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/john-witherspoon.