But in fact, in an important sense, all of us won. As Jeff Jacoby put it in his column in the Herald (written before the results were in), a miracle took place this week.  The miracle isn't that we voted-though that's part of it. The miracle is that our nation peacefully expressed its will, and then we peaceably accepted the results of the election.  In our country, the transfer of power largely occurs free of violence.  We should never take this for granted.

As I went to the polls myself and then anxiously followed the returns on television, I was reminded of the lyrical writing of Theodore H. White, and I couldn't resist:  I reached for my well-thumbed copy of The Making of the President 1960 (a study of the Kennedy and Nixon campaigns), and I re-read (for the hundredth time), its opening words, which constitute a beautiful ode to the American tradition of voting:

        It was invisible, as always.

They had begun to vote in the villages of New Hampshire at midnight, 

as they always do, seven and a half hours before the candidate rose.  ...

By the time the candidate left his Boston hotel at 8:30, several million had already voted across the country-in schools, libraries, churches, stores, 

post offices.  These, too, were invisible ....  All of this is invisible, for it is 

the essence of the act that as it happens it is a mystery in which millions 

of people each fit one fragment of a total secret together, none of them 

knowing the shape of the whole.

What results from the fitting together of these secrets is, of course, the 

most awesome transfer of power in the world-the power to marshal and mobilize, the power to send men to kill or be killed, the power to tax and 

destroy, the power to create and the responsibility to do so, the power to 

guide and the responsibility to heal-all committed into the hands of one 

man.  Heroes and philosophers, brave men and vile, have since Rome 

and Athens tried to make this particular manner of transfer of power work effectively; no people has succeeded at it better, or over a longer period 

of time, than the Americans.  Yet as the transfer of this power takes place, 

there is nothing to be seen except an occasional line outside a church or school, or a file of people fidgeting in the rain, waiting to enter the booths.  

No bands play on election day, no troops march, no guns are readied, no conspirators gather in secret headquarters.  The noise and the blare, the 

bands and the screaming, the pageantry and oratory of the long fall 

campaign, fade on election day.  All the planning is over, all effort spent.  

Now the candidates must wait.

I suppose one reason that I was drawn to The Making of the President is that this year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the first election to the Senate of the late Edward (Ted) Kennedy-and another Kennedy (Ted Kennedy's grand-nephew) was on the ballot of our district, running from Congress.  But it was more than that. 

After all is said and done, notwithstanding the fierce partisan divides in our country, we are one people. You can sense that in the gracious words of the two prominent Massachusetts political figures who delivered concession speeches on Tuesday night; and you can sense that in Theodore White's words as well.  We can be grateful that, as painfully drawn-out as our election campaigns now are (far longer than they were in the 1960s!), they do come to an end, and we can and do move on-together. 

Let's hope and pray that, even as we become more and more heterogeneous-ethnically, religiously, and politically-our country will continue to aspire to be one nation, engaged in working together to provide "liberty and justice for all."

Rabbi Carl M. Perkins