By Paul Caron, Wall Street
Journal: A Kosher Fourth of July, by William McGurn:
7/4/19 WSJ.
Two hundred forty-three years ago, a new nation was inspired by the Old
Testament. Since that
fateful July 4 when the Second Continental Congress invoked the unalienable
rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to declare independence
from King George III, an argument has raged over the Christian roots of the
American Founding. Now a group of scholars suggest that if we are looking only
to the Gospels to understand the new American nation, we may be arguing over
the wrong testament.
“The American Republic,” they write,
“was born to the music of the Hebrew Bible.” The book is called Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land:
The Hebrew Bible in the United States: A Sourcebook. The title comes from Leviticus and is
inscribed on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. The book comes courtesy of the
Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, where it was
pulled together by Meir Soloveichik, Matthew Holbreich, Jonathan Silver and
Stuart Halpern.
These men are not arguing that America
was founded as a Jewish nation. Nor is their subject Jews in America, or the
role of Jews in the American Founding. Their proposition is more supple and
profound: that at key moments in the national story, Americans have looked to
the ancient Israelites to understand themselves, their blessings and their
challenges.
The evidence, they say, is all around
us. The American landscape is dotted with town names that reflect this
understanding, from the Zions, Canaans and Shilohs to the Goshens, Salems and
Rehoboths. And whether it is John Winthrop invoking a “covenant” to
characterize the order the Puritans established with Massachusetts Bay Colony,
or Martin Luther King more than three centuries later talking about having been
to the mountaintop, Americans have long looked to the biblical Israelites for
the “political and cultural vocabulary” to explain the American proposition.
Though this American affinity for the
Israelites pre-dates the Revolution, the war for independence intensified the
parallels. In their revolt against George III, the men of the 13 colonies saw
themselves as modern Israelites escaping a latter-day Pharaoh. So when the
Second Continental Congress created a committee to design a seal for the new
United States, also on July 4, 1776, it was only natural that two of the
committee members—Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin—turned to Exodus.
Across the land this July 4, American
homes will play host to backyard barbecues, the company of family, friends and
neighbors, maybe all topped off with fireworks. You might say it is the
American version of what the Hebrew prophet Micah had in mind when he wrote
that “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none
shall make them afraid.”
Which also happens to have been George
Washington’s favorite way to describe the blessings of liberty we celebrate
this and every Independence Day.
The
Tablet, America, Born of the Hebrew Bible: America, G.K. Chesterton once
observed, was “a nation with the soul of a church.” Make that a shul: As Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land, a powerful new book, argues, “the
American Republic was born to the music of the Hebrew Bible.”
Its editors—Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik,
Matthew Holbreich, Jonathan Silver, and Stuart W. Halpern, of the Straus Center
for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University—make their case, in the
fine tradition of our wise forefathers, by laying before us scroll after scroll
of source material, showing us the Biblical thread that binds everything from
the Mayflower Compact to Lincoln’s second inaugural address.
This idea—that Americans, like the
Israelites of old, have been singled out by God and instructed to erect a city
on a hill that would shine its light unto the nations—is far from a historical
side note. It is, arguably, the engine that drove America to grow from a string
of struggling colonies to something much grander and more consequential. The
language of divine election may sound too wild for us these days, too rich with
perils and prejudice; but even if we no longer wrestle with this idea as our
predecessors once had, this idea still, behind our backs, wrestles with us.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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