America at 250: A Jewish Reckoning

Looking around the country today, the America Jews have come to know, appreciate, and love is becoming increasingly unrecognizable.

Looking around America today, the country Jews have come to know and love is becoming increasingly unrecognizable.

For the past several years, this has played out on a cultural level, as shifting values and eroding institutions have clashed with Jewish tradition. But now it feels more personal, in a way that makes Jews feel increasingly uncomfortable and unsafe.

In his halachic responsa (Jewish legal writings), Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, one of the most influential Jewish legal authorities of the 20th century, fled Europe in 1937 to escape antisemitism and Soviet religious persecution. He described America as a “a kingdom of kindness” for the Jewish people. Similarly, Rabbi Menashe Klein and Rabbi Moshe Stern, both Holocaust survivors who settled in America, describe this country in their responsa as a medinah shel chesed, a benevolent nation.

What might they write today about a country where a major-party Senate candidate spent years openly sporting a Nazi SS "Totenkampf" tattoo? This candidate has continued to receive endorsements from mainstream Democratic leaders despite widely reported evidence of his antisemitism and other serious concerns.

Meanwhile, Dan Bilzerian, an extremist with 30 million Instagram followers, is on the ballot as a Republican in Florida's 6th Congressional District. He has little chance of winning but his presence on the ballot, and whatever share of votes he collects, is jarring.

As I sat down to write this, members of the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe marched through Athens, Georgia carrying a swastika banner, and a sitting member of Congress delivered a rant against Israel filled with long-debunked falsehoods. It seems not a day goes by in this country there isn’t one or more terrible stories involving antisemitic rhetoric or, worse, actual violence, and it’s coming from all parties and all sides.

What is the Future for Jews in America

So what is the future for Jews in America? Is it the “a kingdom of kindness,” a country of unprecedented religious freedom, a democracy that awards rights and protection to our people? Or is it, as other ancestors warned, a “treife medinah,” a place that Jews don’t belong, a country that will compromise and corrupt us morally and physically?

As we approach the celebration of America’s 250^th anniversary, for American Jews this is an essential question. Certainly, Jews everywhere should be asking themselves not if, but when will they move to Israel. That is the destiny and ultimate destination for all Jews.

But in the meantime, is our time in America just a holding pattern, a passive, meaningless stopover?

Rabbi Aharon Kotler, the towering Lithuanian rosh yeshiva who founded Lakewood's Beth Medrash Govoha, certainly didn't think so. At a time when immigration to America was deeply unpopular in traditional circles, Rabbi Kotler understood his move in religious terms, as a mission tied to a prophecy of Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner, the foremost disciple of the Vilna Gaon and founder of the modern yeshiva movement. According to a tradition relayed by many leading rabbis, at the laying of the cornerstone of his yeshiva in Volozhin in 1803, Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner told his students through tears, "This will not be the final station of Torah before the Messiah comes. Torah has yet to flourish in America before he can come. America will be the final stop of exile."

Rabbi Kotler took this as a charge, planting the seeds for what would become the largest yeshiva in the world and a network of kollels (advanced Torah study centers) in communities across America.

Have the Jewish people succeeded in impacting America? Have Jews brought Jewish values and ideals to this country? The answer is a resounding yes.

In the midst of the September 2000 presidential campaign, amid the national conversation about the religious observance of Joe Lieberman, obm, Michael Novak, a non-Jewish writer and philosopher who often wrote on theology, wrote in the New York Times:

I am pulling for Bush and Cheney, not Gore and Lieberman, and I am not Jewish but Roman Catholic. Still, I love what Senator Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, is doing to wake this nation up to its deepest identity, rooted in Jewishness.

John Adams wrote, “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation.” He wrote as a Christian, but added that even if he were an atheist and believed in chance, “I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.”…

The best kept secret of American history is that the favorite language of that founding generation came from the Torah. The founders referred to their own experiment as the Second Israel. They commissioned a design for the Great Seal with a symbol recalling the first Israel, for they thought of themselves as crossing the deserts of Egypt en route to building a “city on the hill.”

Ben Franklin proposed as a motto of the Republic “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” It fit the American circumstance. The signers of the Declaration, after all, were committing treason. They needed some sort of moral warrant. They also needed hope that they could avoid the hangman’s noose; they faced the most powerful army and navy in the world. It helped that they believed that Providence would assist them and that Providence had created the world so that liberty would in the end prevail. For without liberty, how could the Creator, who desired the friendship of free women and men rather than the worship of slaves, fulfill his eternal purposes?

Most historians lazily say that the founders were Deists, because they did not use Christian names for God, like Trinity and Savior and Redeemer. They miss the crucial point. Three names for God in the Declaration — Creator, Judge and Providence, are unmistakably Jewish names for God. This language did not come from the Greeks or Romans…

If for whatever reason the time for Jews in America is not yet over, we must be here with a sense of purpose and mission. Certainly, it is to defend and advocate for our values, morals and principles.

But in this moment, I think it is something even more.

The Founding Values of America

As America celebrates 250 years, we must remember how America first came to be. This country was born from a faith deeply informed by the language and ideas of the Jewish Bible. When our Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” they were echoing the first chapter of Genesis, that every human being is created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of God.

When they appealed to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” they were affirming that there is a moral law higher than any king, any parliament, or polling data.

America must stand true to the principles, values, and ideals that made her exceptional in the first place.

When they concluded, “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,” they spoke in the language of the Hebrew prophets, a people placing its destiny in the hands of Heaven.

America must stand true to the principles, values, and ideals that made her exceptional in the first place.

The right for even someone with a Nazi tattoo to run for office is an American value. For anyone to endorse or vote for him is a grossly un-American value.

The right to protest against Israel, or even speak of Israel and Jews in vile terms, is American. The failure to stand with Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, the land from which America’s own values drew, is un-American.

The right to platform purveyors of hate is American. To amplify their message, spread evil lies against Israel or the Jewish people on college campuses, outside of synagogues and in the halls of Congress, is un-American.

As we approach this significant milestone, it is a critical time for Jews to stand tall and proud and tell our fellow citizens that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are not about hatred of the Jew alone. These beliefs are not only un-American, they are rooted in hatred of America.

We must align with allies, religious leaders, elected leaders and influencers to return and restore this great country to its roots. If America is to remain a “kingdom of kindness” we cannot outsource that work to others. Each of us must ask: What am I doing to make my home more Jewish, my community more courageous, my elected officials more accountable, my non-Jewish neighbors more informed, and my children more proud?

We must live with gratitude for this country, loyalty to our people, longing for Israel, and a renewed sense of responsibility for the sacred mission of Jewish values in America.