What follows are selections drawn from the introductory essay and the concluding essay of Jewish Roots of American Liberty. These selections cannot capture the various insights and flavors of the book, which range from the Hebraic language of the New England Puritans and the eighteenth-century Founders to the rhetoric of political leaders and the heroes who form the most enduring tropes of the American imagination. But we trust they point toward the book’s abiding theme: the vital interpenetration of Jewish and American ideas that has been an undergirding feature of American history.
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The net effect of this volume’s content, we hope, is a demonstration of the closeness and foundational character of the relationship between the American experience and the Jewish experience, and the nature of the Hebraic impact on the United States. It would be an understatement to say that this closeness has eluded the awareness of both groups for much of American history. On the contrary, for much of our history, there has been a general assumption that the two traditions were intrinsically antagonistic to one another.
But the workings of history have clarified that relationship. In recent decades, the rising challenge of a militant secularism in the West, openly hostile to Israel and to many elements of the traditional Judeo-Christian heritage, has made believing Christians and Jews able to see how much they have always had in common. A new awareness of a deep and intrinsic affinity for one another has begun to take hold; and we believe this volume can be of great assistance to dedicated teachers and others who want to further that growing awareness and convey its blessings to a rising generation.
...the rising challenge of a militant secularism in the West, openly hostile to Israel and to many elements of the traditional Judeo-Christian heritage, has made believing Christians and Jews able to see how much they have always had in common.
The insight cuts two different ways. Jews owe an immense debt to America, which has been for them an incomparably generous and welcoming land in which they have been permitted to dwell in relative security and have been able to flourish as they have in few other places on the planet in their long and often troubled history, marked as it has been by many centuries of persecution and exclusion. They also know that America has been a stalwart supporter from the very beginning of the modern nation of Israel, in whose existence and thriving so much of Jewish hope is invested. Even in the months after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists, the support of the American people for Israel has not wavered, even as that of their government has been less certain.
But it is equally true that America owes a profound and incalculable debt to the Jews. It is they who provided the deep metaphysical and moral and anthropological foundation upon which much of the American experiment in democratic self-government was erected, and who have gone on to contribute in ways large and small to the soul of America, and its making and improving.
This collection of essays takes account of both forms of indebtedness, and in so doing, seeks to foster a spirit of mutual understanding and mutual gratitude that reflects a proper perspective on the American-Jewish relationship, a perspective that we hope will take root and deepen as the 21st century unfolds….
Grave threats to the Hebraic way of life have always been with us—as the Bible itself describes, our ancient forebears had their Canaanite, Egyptian, and Babylonian rivals. But the modern age seems different. Paganism and terrorism are now aided and facilitated by the uncontrollable fruits of human rationalism. The crooked spirit of man is now armed with mankind’s novel technological powers—be they genetic engineering, transgender surgery, and Internet pornography on demand or chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons proliferated on a mass scale. Human lust, you might say, has teamed up with the lab scientists.
Admittedly, defending and embodying the Hebraic way of life, with its governing strictures on human conduct and human relations, has always been hard. It demands the moral training of both body and soul, and it requires endurance: all the harder when society constantly invites us to let go, to give in, to adopt the apparently easier but ultimately dehumanizing path.
But today the current moral challenge seems particularly difficult and dramatic. Anti-biblical civilization is now on the offensive, with its leaders well-entrenched in the commanding heights of modern culture: the universities, the media, the schools, and now even the corporations. And these progressive prophets, in their secular temples, are armed with some very seductive arguments: that modern science has embarrassed the truth-claims of biblical religion, and that religious morality is oppressive, judgmental, and unnecessarily prohibitive. A new form of compassion has thus become the dominant ethos of our age, and a well-policed moral relativism is now our dominant ideology. In this vision, every way of life is seen as equally good, including a variety of lifestyles that were once taboo; to think otherwise would make other people suffer under the weight of moral standards (and scarlet letters) that supposedly dehumanize and imprison them.
Admittedly, defending and embodying the Hebraic way of life, with its governing strictures on human conduct and human relations, has always been hard. It demands the moral training of both body and soul...
But not quite every way of life is tolerated. From the rainbow menu of moral pluralism, only the biblical vision, propped up by harsh and archaic laws that restrict human freedom, is excluded. In the new progressive mind, traditional religious morality is now treated as a form of bigotry to be utterly restricted, rejected, and suffocated. In this, as former Attorney General Stephen Barr argued at Notre Dame, today’s relativists show themselves to be draconian absolutists, ready to consign any who dissent from their dogmas to “a figurative burning at the stake.”
Of course, the arguments of the new secularists can be readily answered, both in theory and in practice. One need only point to the myriad abandoned and damaged children from marriages with no inter-generational commitment to the family; the relations between men and women living without any hard-won traditional guidance about their distinctive roles in human life; the collapsing birthrates in the most advanced civilizations; the fruits of secular radicalism in the last century’s Stalinist and Hitlerite nightmares, checked only by the warrior courage of believing Christians and Jews in battlefields military, political, diplomatic, and cultural.
The history of Judeo-Christian civilization itself is surely stained by many errors and sins—including the Christian mistreatment and persecution of Jews. But past errors and excesses are not grounds for present surrender to the new tyranny of moral liberationism. The Judeo-Christian moral vision is not always “nice” (to use the term that the late Allan Bloom identified as the moral credo of generations of his students, blissfully ignorant that the miracle of freedom is an unmerited gift, a hard-won achievement, and a condition in need of defense). Rearing children, facing death, preserving justice in the face of criminality—niceness alone is not enough, and niceness wrongly understood will only lead us astray. Our age needs moral toughness, not amoral niceness. The Hebrew Bible understood this from the very beginning.
For Western civilization to flourish, Judeo-Christian moral disarmament, or moral surrender, must come to an end. Traditional Jews and Christians must forcefully reassert that the Hebraic way of life—with its vision of sanctified normalcy, governed by the Hebrew Bible’s moral code, and courageously defended—is good and true. They—we—should never be embarrassed by traditional Judaism or Christianity, and should never give up on our sacred moral heritage.
The ultimate theological differences between Jews and Christians will never be resolved, and their respective places in human history can never—and should never—be the same. But as Jews and Christians, we share a vision of the human person shaped by the moral passion of Abraham, the law of Moses, the spiritual yearnings of David, and Hannah’s longing for a child.
For too long, the prophets of anti-biblical civilization have tried to discredit the Judeo-Christian way of preserving and perpetuating a dignified way of life in the face of human frailty and human evil. Our frailty and vices they have instead fed and encouraged, while to human evil they have naively or perniciously given a free pass and opened the gates of the city. In the absence of religious faith and religious morality, just as the great Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor warned decades ago, “we govern by tenderness”; and when such tenderness is detached from its ultimate source in a just and almighty God, “its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” Seduced and paralyzed by our supposedly more compassionate form of relativism, virtue retreats as evil advances.
The challenge for traditional Jews and Christians is to regain the moral high ground of Judeo-Christian civilization by repudiating and fighting back against its enemies, by rekindling our own moral self-confidence, and by proclaiming and demonstrating that the Hebraic commandments are humanity’s truest guide to the best way of life. We need to restore religious liberty, promote religious schools, reclaim the biblical foundation of America and of the West, and protect modern Israel as a fragile miracle that should inspire Jews, Christians, and God-seeking people around the world.
That emphatically is the message of, and from, Jerusalem.
The challenge for traditional Jews and Christians is to regain the moral high ground of Judeo-Christian civilization by repudiating and fighting back against its enemies...and by proclaiming and demonstrating that the Hebraic commandments are humanity’s truest guide to the best way of life.
In 2000, Pope John Paul II visited Jerusalem for the first time. He prayed at the Western Wall and delivered a speech at Yad Vashem—a memorial museum whose story ends not with the destruction of the Jews but with the rebirth of Israel. In his speech, he declared:
My own personal memories are of all that happened when the Nazis occupied Poland during the war. I remember my Jewish friends and neighbors, some of whom perished, while others survived. I have come to Yad Vashem to pay homage to the millions of Jewish people who, stripped of everything, especially of human dignity, were murdered in the Holocaust.
We wish to remember. But we wish to remember for a purpose, namely, to ensure that never again will evil prevail, as it did for the millions of innocent victims of Nazism. Out of the depths of pain and sorrow, the believer’s heart cries out: “I trust in You, O Lord: I say, ‘You are my God’” (Psalms 31:14).
The improbable Jewish story—the resurrection of Jerusalem, a “broken bone come together, set, and grow[ing] again”—provides perhaps the most compelling grounds for believing that good, in the end, will indeed ultimately triumph over evil. For without God’s election of the Jews, the biblical vision of human life as sanctified normalcy, under commandment, courageously defended, might never have come into being. The Jews are the divine message in the bottle.
Like his fellow Christian pilgrims in their multitudes, the pope came to Jerusalem not to crusade or to conquer but to draw inspiration from the chosen people in the holy land. He came to pray with and for his “elder brothers in faith.” Jerusalem, forever the Jews’ city of hope and once again the West’s, is now the emblem of our shared purpose: to work with faith, political will, and moral resolve to rescue and defend our shared heritage from destruction and decay.
Read more in Jewish Roots of American Liberty: The Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story
