Unity Through Faith: The Legacy of Joe Lieberman Offers a Way Forward After the Election
Regardless of who wins the upcoming presidential election, Americans from both major parties may find it difficult to accept the results.
Political divisions are likely to remain. So, what can be done to end the polarization and build consensus and harmony?
Appearing on the CBN News program The Global Lane, the widow of Sen. Joseph Lieberman shared her late husband's final thoughts on the way forward: unifying the nation through religion.
Hadassah Lieberman's latest mission began with showing support for Israel by visiting Jerusalem during a time of war. She is also committed to helping America overcome political division and social disunity.
That's why Hadassah is also talking about the book by her late husband, former senator Joe Lieberman. Just before he died last spring, Lieberman completed a draft of what would be his final book, Faith's Answers to America's Political Crisis. How Religion Can Help Us Out of the Mess We're In.
"I remember coming into his study and saying, 'Joey, this is a beautiful legacy. It's so beautiful. It's so honest. It's so natural.' Joe's dream was always to unify not only this bipartisan stuff that he was doing politically, which was very important to him, but also to have unity. "
Fellow Democrats often felt Senator Lieberman didn't fit the party mold.
After becoming the first Jewish vice presidential candidate running with Al Gore, he became an independent Democrat in 2008. That year he also endorsed Republican John McCain for president over Barack Obama.
Hadassah said her late husband believed the country could overcome polarization by putting the nation before a party. "One of the things he discusses in this book is how important it is for people of faith, in particular, to come together. They each have a creator and each worships in different ways. But we need to use what we're taught through creators and through speech, and we have to carefully use our faiths as a guide to better behavior. "
Hadassah Freilich married Joe Lieberman in 1982. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Hadassah was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and was named after her maternal grandmother, who was murdered at Auschwitz.
"My father was in the work camp, slave labor work camp, where he was taken with many men. And my mother was in Auschwitz and Dachau."
Those experiences made the October 7th massacre even more painful. Occurring just six months before Joe Lieberman's sudden passing, Hadassah recalls their shock of that attack and then sadness over the subsequent antisemitism expressed on American college campuses.
"He was very concerned and didn't want repeats from earlier moments in history in the early parts of World War Two and how people were behaving to each other. But we had never thought we'd experience this in America and the USA, the country that welcomed us and helped us be brave and strong and helped me to be the wife of a senator from Connecticut."
As the daughter of a rabbi, and an observant Jew like her late husband, Hadassah believes Americans can overcome these troubling times by turning to God.
"Life is complicated. And Hashem, God, we pray that he doesn't hide, that he's not blinded to all the suffering we've experienced. And we must stay strong."
And she believes educating younger generations of Americans is crucial to building a more tolerant and peaceful society.
"We have to have people talking to them, teaching them to work through to the positive. Despite the animosity and anger in the world. We must believe that God will help us."
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