At President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, 81-year-old Holocaust survivor Judah Samet received a happy birthday serenade from the assembled Congress. Yet the beauty of the moment was also measured by what just preceded it and what followed.
Before the serenade, Trump had celebrated another American, police officer Timothy Matson, for confronting the Tree of Life Synagogue attacker last October. Matson was shot seven times and has had 12 surgeries thus far. Samet was worshiping at the synagogue that day. It was the second time that America has saved him from fanatics against his faith.
The beauty here, then, is the exceptionalism of American morality. Trump regaled the moment Samet’s family was saved from Nazi tyranny during the World War II. Nazi captives, Samet’s family feared for the worse when, as Trump described, their “train screeched to a very strong halt. A soldier appeared. Judah’s family braced for the worst. Then, his father cried out with joy: ‘It’s the Americans. It’s the Americans.'”
Then Trump introduced us to another Holocaust survivor in the gallery, Joshua Kaufman. A prisoner at the Dachau concentration camp, Trump noted Kaufman’s liberation recollection: “To me, the American soldiers were proof that God exists, and they came down from the sky. They came down from heaven.”
But Trump wasn’t done; he added a fourth American to the tale.
The video of Kaufman saluting his savior, Zeitchik, and then helping him back to his seat, is truly special. It speaks to the sustaining story of America: courageous, honorable, and free. That’s why Trump’s concluding reference to the two men “seated side by side, here in the home of American freedom,” is also so important. Had America not won World War II and then stood against Soviet tyranny, these stories and our home of freedom would not exist. Instead, one of the two chambers below would likely rule over a global dystopia.
Stories matter. And so does the land of the free and the home of the brave.
