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<\/a><\/p>\nA Jewish New Year’s card, showing Jews in America welcoming recent immigrants from the Russian empire. (Alfred and Elizabeth Bendiner Collection\/ Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
My colleague said something clicked for her: For American Jews, the United States was the promised land. Not just another exile to endure, but a di\ufb00erent end to Jewish history. Rivka presented herself as a modern day Pilgrim, seamlessly integrated into the American story. Growing up, I never thought of myself as a Jew who happened to live in America. I thought of myself as a Jew, and as an American, and I never imagined it any other way.<\/p>\n
As we arrive at the United States semiquincentennial \u2014 the 250th anniversary of the nation \u2014 American Jews have been upended. Surging antisemitism \u2014 measurable as separate from anti-Israel activism \u2014 and a fractured political landscape have left us unexpectedly vulnerable. Many look around and wonder if this unique land is turning into just another chapter of persecution.<\/p>\n
To understand where we go next, we must realize how deeply America upended our aggadah (rabbinic folklore) and halacha (Jewish law). For millennia, Jews viewed the world through a simple framework. As we learn from midrash \u2014 ancient rabbinic commentary \u2014 we experienced four kingdoms, four eras of time: Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel followed by Babylonian exile, Persian anti-Semitism, Greek erasure of Jewish identity and finally Roman subjugation, rendering the Jews a disfavored minority in a sprawling empire. We were destined to remain second-class citizens waiting for balance to be restored and the fourth kingdom to fall.<\/p>\n
Even the European Enlightenment was encumbered. In France, Jews were admitted as equal citizens only if they renounced their identity as a distinct people. They could be French citizens of the Mosaic persuasion, but not a nation of their own. Jews could transcend their history of oppression only by transcending their own historical understanding of themselves.<\/p>\n
The Holocaust was the final, devastating act of that old world \u2014 the fourth kingdom.<\/p>\n
But America was di\ufb00erent.<\/p>\n
The founders of the United States were interested not only in reforming their old nations, but creating a new one. They held certain truths to be self-evident, among them that \u201call men are created equal.\u201d<\/p>\n
This new reality was captured in 1790, when Moses Seixas, a synagogue sexton, welcomed George Washington to the Newport Synagogue. Seixas noted how Jews had long been deprived of the rights of free citizens, but now enjoyed a government \u201cwhich to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.\u201d Washington famously echoed these words back to him.<\/p>\n
While applying these principles selectively and often grudgingly to the enslaved, their descendants, women and Native Americans, America never demanded that Jews purchase equality at the price of their collective identity. For Jews, this country has never been an oppressive empire, nor is it a place that happens to be kind. It has simply been, in a completely unprecedented way, a country in which Jews are full and equal citizens. And it created a culture in which Jews were no longer waiting for the last exile to end.<\/p>\n
This unique environment fundamentally changed Jewish law and practice. America o\ufb00ered citizenship to Jews as a pathway into a society that would be defined by its citizens, without any government involvement in promoting dominant forms of religious or cultural expression. This wide-open environment has meant that American Jews have the untrammeled freedom to intensify, attenuate or remix their Jewish commitments as they see fit.<\/p>\n
Sociologist Charles Liebman long ago pointed out that all Jews in America are Jews by choice. Nothing in American society binds you to your Jewishness. Family pressures are real; insular communities can often e\ufb00ectively coerce people to remain within them. But Jewish life in America plays out in an unpressurized cabin, even if many Jews find ways to put on their own oxygen masks.<\/p>\n
This means that Judaism in America has had to cultivate a Judaism built on avodah mei-ahava \u2014 service that flows entirely from love, rather than fear, reverence or social pressure. Maimonides emphasized this as an essential component of religious commitment: doing what is true because it is true, out of pure conviction and enthusiasm.<\/p>\n
We are often preoccupied with demographic continuity and skyrocketing intermarriage rates. This concern is reasonable, and leads some to dismiss the American experiment as a sort of spiritual churban, or catastrophe. But that same America forced us to build a Judaism that people only practice because they want to.<\/p>\n
This is maddening for rabbis and educators. It is ine\ufb00icient to the point of insanity when it feels like you have to entice people to participate. But for those who do stay it produces something remarkable: Jewish life that is embraced for its own sake, shifting us from a discourse of guilt to a discourse of aspiration.<\/p>\n
One can be grateful without being naive. This is a fraught moment. The country is divided and pride in being an American has steadily slid downward. We are confronting realities we thought would not manifest here.<\/p>\n
As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I will never assume any place is an impregnable fortress against hate. But as an American, I refuse to classify this country as the latest manifestation of an oppressive empire. Americans can be cruel like anyone else, but America\u2019s DNA is di\ufb00erent.<\/p>\n
President Bill Clinton proclaimed in his First Inaugural Address: \u201cThere is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.\u201d This remains true. The ideals on which America was founded, the Constitution that continues to govern it, remain pathways to respecting human equality and protecting religious liberty.<\/p>\n
More importantly: America\u2019s problems are our problems. We are not living under the protection of a foreign sovereign. We are part of the sovereign people by whose consent the government governs. Passive pessimism is not an option.<\/p>\n
As citizens of this country, we have something to o\ufb00er. We walk through the world with the conviction that human beings are created in the image of God \u2014 and America needs that conviction right now. We know how to disagree without fracturing \u2014 the Talmudic rivals Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel fought for generations and never stopped learning from each other \u2014 and America needs that model too.<\/p>\n
The Talmud reminds us that simply following the rules of the covenant can sustain us for a thousand generations, but serving out of love creates a bond that lasts 2,000.<\/p>\n
I am not a politician; and though I am, in a sense, the son of a politician, I still don\u2019t pretend to know if America\u2019s best days are ahead of us. But I do know this: As long as there is hope that they are, we must do our part to make it so. When we build a culture of service from love, we should be building on a scale that thinks in thousands of generations. The idea of America is too precious to abandon. This is our democracy as much as anyone else\u2019s, and internalizing that should gear us up for at least the next 250 years of answering George Washington\u2019s call.<\/p>\n
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