Why You Have to Vote Early and Vote Often

For thousands of years, the safety of the Middle East was based on the mutual hatred that Persians and Babylonians had for one another. In ancient times, Cyrus was fighting Nebuchadnezzar. Later on, it was the Shiites and Sunnis. Today, it’s Iran against Iraq.  

Both nations were powerful. If left unchecked, either one could swallow up all its weaker neighbor nations and hold the world hostage for cheap oil. But as long as they both could pulverize one another, neither could push beyond its own borders.  

This was the reality for thousands of years . . . until 537 people from Florida made a choice in the 2000 US Presidential election.  That choice put Bush in power – a leader who destroyed Iraq and occupied it for eight years. When his successor – Obama – finally left, Iraq was helpless. Iran swallowed it up, along with Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and Gaza.  

Almost a quarter century ago, the votes of a small handful of people altered the path of the entire world.  

This year’s election will be no different. The choices of a small handful of people will determine the world’s fate for decades, even generations to come.  

Rebbi Nachman’s Message 

Rebbi Nachman of Breslev teaches us that everything in the physical world reflects something happening in the spiritual world. A hand opening the refrigerator door expresses the supremacy of the soul over the body. The soul rests in the brain, and it’s the brain that directs the hand to open the door, and then move toward the leftover carrot cake.  

As we inch closer to the great day when Hashem will send us Mashiach ben David to redeem the Jewish People and save humanity, the Lubavitcher Rebbe teaches that all it took was one deed to tilt the Jewish Nation towards meriting his arrival.  

He would say to the tattooed teenager examining a pair of tefillin the same thing to the seasoned Yeshiva student: It can be your deed that changes everything. 

Just a single vote with a mitzvah, prayer, or refined behavior will determine the world’s fate for decades, even generations to come.  

We Vote Three Times a Day 

“We kneel and bow to acknowledge before the King Who reigns over Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He.” – The Aleinu prayer

We recite the Aleinu prayer three times a day, every day. In it, we declare God to be the King Who reigns over kings. We declare that the leaders of this world have little to no free will. They do the bidding of their King Who is our Father.  

Does it matter if a Republican or a Democrat is in charge?  

Independence, 1948 

In May 1948, the United States was in a post-war recession. Factories had stopped producing weapons to fight the Nazis, and people were losing their jobs. They feared the resumption of a depression that only stopped in earnest when World War II began in 1939 yet ended three years prior.  

Democratic President Harry S. Truman was not voted into office. A small-town senator from Missouri, he took over for President Franklin Roosevelt upon his passing while in office.  

Voters had grown weary of Democratic rule for 16 uninterrupted years. The recession had wreaked havoc on people’s lives, and few thought Truman was up to the task of fixing things. 

In May 1948, while running for his first full four-year term, he trailed his opponent by 20 points! 

Would he recognize the State of Israel? His Secretary of State, General George Marshall warned him that if he did, he would openly oppose him. For Truman, this would be the final nail in his political coffin. General Marshall was a war hero, and Truman already had a tough mountain to climb if he wanted to close the gap in the presidential race in less than six months.  

Truman did the unthinkable. He became the first world leader to recognize Israel just 11 minutes after her declaration of statehood.  

Yom Kippur, 1973 

One would think German Jew Henry Kissinger would do anything and everything to save Israel when the Arabs waged a surprise attack on Yom Kippur in 1973. He didn’t. He wanted his brothers and sisters in the Holy Land to “bleed” a little bit so he could force us into surrender and retreat.  

It would be his boss, Republican President Richard M. Nixon, who overruled Kissinger and ordered an airlift to supply us with everything we needed to secure our survival. [Editor’s addition: I was an officer in the USAF at the time and stationed at a Tactical Air Command base. Nixon put us and other bases on Full Alert “be ready to fly out in 24 hours to Israel”. In the end, the miraculous victory of Israel meant that we were not needed.] 

2008-2014 

In 2008, 4 out of every 5 Jews chose Democrat Barrack Obama as their president. Did this make him a friend of ours? On his first day in office, he ordered us to stop fighting Hamas in Gaza after they fired missiles at our cities. He forced Bibi to enact a freeze on building homes in the Land of Israel.  

When we were at war with Hamas in 2014, he withheld weapons promised to us by treaty. In his last days in office, he enabled the United Nations to pass a resolution that Israel didn’t belong to the Jewish People. 

2016 

In 2016, less than 1 in 4 Jews voted for Republican Donald J. Trump. You would think that his policy would echo the words of a fellow Republican, James Baker, who once famously said, “Forget the Jews. They don’t vote for us anyway.” 

Nonetheless, President Trump recognized Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and parts of Yehuda and Shomron as Israeli territory. He brokered the first peace deal with Arab nations that didn’t require us to give up land. He withdrew from a treaty that would give Iran the nuclear bomb, and he had Iran’s top general assassinated.  

It’s not the person in power who determines Israel’s fate. It’s He Who is in eternal power Who determines our fate. Sometimes He will use the leaders of this world, and sometimes, He won’t. 

Vote Early and Vote Often 

Will four more years of Donald Trump make us have faith in the USA over God, putting too much reliance on an old friend? Will a President Harris put Israel in such a disastrous situation that we all turn to Hashem, and only Hashem, to save us?  

Like the results of this year’s election, I don’t know.  

What I do know is that every vote counts, and a Jew votes with his mitzvah. We declare God the ruler over the leaders of the world and live our lives with the faith that it isn’t votes and candidates that determine our fate – it’s mitzvot and merit.  

In Hilchot Teshuva (Laws of Repentance), the Rambam tells us that if you commit one sin, you will overbalance yourself and the whole world to the side of guilt, and be a cause of its destruction; but if you perform one duty, you will overbalance yourself and the whole world to the side of virtue, and bring about your own and their salvation and escape. 

Every time we recite Shema Yisrael, proclaiming God’s Kingship over the world, and each time we say Aleinu L’Shabaich, proclaiming God’s rule over rulers, we are voting with our lives for God with the mitzvot commanded to us by our King. 

We don’t have to wait until Nov. 5, 2024, or November 7, 2028. We can vote for Hashem as many times as we want right now and every moment forward.   

Your vote is so important, it can usher in a time when no more elections will be necessary.  

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David Ben Horin lives in Afula with his family, millions of sunflowers, and Matilda, our local camel. David‘s Israeli startup, 300 Marketing Solutions, is a lean marketing agency for startups and small businesses that creates and promotes SEO-optimized ROI-driven to the right audience on LinkedIn to make your business the star of the show.