From Rabbi Resnicoff is a retired U.S. Navy Chaplain, former National Director of Interreligious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee, and former Special Assistant to the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force for Values and Vision:
In 2007, Senator Carl Levin visited the aircraft carrier USS HARRY S. TRUMAN for a ceremony to add a Holocaust Torah to the ship’s chapel, donated by the Jewish Federation of Tidewater. (It is on loan to the ship until it is decommissioned, estimated at the ceremony for 41 years.) Little did Levin know that 16 years later the Navy’s newest ship, on June 24, 2023 – the guided missile destroyer USS CARL M. LEVIN (DDG 120) – would bear his name. Or that his three daughters, Erica, Laura, and Kate, the ship’s official sponsors, would end the commissioning ceremony with the words “officers and crew of the USS CARL M. LEVIN, man this ship and bring her to life!” Once those words were proclaimed, hundreds of officers and sailors in sparkling white uniforms ran in a long line to board the ship and stand proudly upon her decks. With this commissioning ceremony, the ship was transferred from the shipyard to the Navy.
I cannot claim Senator Levin as a personal friend, but he was certainly one of my personal heroes. However, whenever I had the honor of delivering a prayer in the Senate, he made sure to come up to me afterwards, grasping my hand in a firm handshake, a smile on his face, beaming with pride. Plus, as a staunch advocate of the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, he was proud that I delivered the prayer at the official presidential ceremony to repeal it.
For these reasons and more, I was delighted to be invited to participate in the commissioning, but because the ceremony was on Shabbat, I almost couldn’t do it. I would be put up at the Four Seasons Hotel in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor so that I could give the invocation and benediction at the Friday night gala. Walking the three miles or so from the hotel to the shipyard would not be a problem for me. But the challenge was walking the short distance from the gate of the shipyard to the ship itself. The shipyard had a hard-and-fast prohibition of pedestrians – anyone not directly working in construction – in that area, based on both safety and security concerns.