We the People
A Prayer for Our Country on January 6, 2022
Written by Rabbi Benjamin H. Spratt
Our nation began
With the right, the duty
To throw off absolute despotism
To oppose a long train
Of abuses, injuries, and usurpations.
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
Our founders, visionary and limited,
Reached across division and discord,
To dream a new nation into being.
Born of revolution,
Ours is the grand experiment
Of a collective perspective,
Holding to the virtue
Of holding together.
To believe in democracy,
Is to believe in the value of
We the people.
We the people
Are more diverse than ever imagined.
Immigrants and native-born,
Empowered and impoverished,
Welcomed and abandoned.
We the people
Are Beauty – the brave, the broken,
The tired, the poor, and the golden door.
We the people
Are the slave and the master,
The zealot and the peacemaker.
We the people
Are the wise and the foolish,
The hopeful and the cynical.
The American Dream,
Is not prosperity,
But solidarity.
Not the unity of homogeneity,
But the flourishing of diversity.
This is the Dream:
We the people.
We the people
Asks of us to hold in heart
The America beyond our own home
Those marginalized from our own belonging
Those who feel forgotten in the Dream.
We the people
Is not the crushing of opposition
But a willingness to stand with it.
We the people
Is no longer resorting to revolution,
But challenging ourselves to resolution:
We will rise or we will fall together.
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
That all are created equal,
Even as so many still strive for equality;
That we are endowed by our Creator
With certain unalienable Rights,
Even as so many have yet to be realized;
That among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
We the people.
Today, may we expand our sense of We
Beyond what we know and see
Imagining a nation meant for more
Than only me.
Let freedom ring,
Hope hewn from discord,
And faith forged of fraternity.
May we speak the words,
Raise the song,
Extend the hand,
Live the Dream,
That boldly declares
We the people.
