The Promise of Israel, by Daniel Gordis

A country with the soul of a church

More years later than I care to recall, I can still remember how uncomfortable I felt in Mrs. Brown’s seventh-grade Social Studies class. We studied mostly American history that year, and we started at the very beginning: the Mayflower and Valley Forge, Fort McHenry (the birthplace of the national anthem), and later, the Alamo. These were the stories of the founding of the United States of America, and she taught them with a pride and an urgency that I still recall – and that I still remember not feeling.

I didn’t tell my parents about the discomfort I felt, and I certainly didn’t tell her. But the feeling was palpable. The more she drilled those stories into us, the more I couldn’t help but feel that they were really not my stories. After all, my ancestors hadn’t been anywhere near the Mayflower; truth be told, they wouldn’t have been allowed on board. My ancestors never set foot in Valley Forge. Or got close to the Alamo. When all of that was happening, I knew (even as a kid), my ancestors were in Eastern Europe.

That year was an awakening of sorts. I was supposed to feel something that I just didn’t feel at all. And I wasn’t supposed to be feeling what it was that I did feel – that I had a different narrative, a different history that had shaped who I was and who I still am. But I kept all that to myself; being in an American Social Studies class meant having to pretend that my ancestors could have been on the Mayflower, even when I knew that they could not.

Being in an American Social Studies class meant having to pretend that my ancestors could have been on the Mayflower, even when I knew that they could not

I grew up, with time, and began to realize that what I felt wasn’t imaginary. Many of America’s greatest leaders had argued, sometimes explicitly and sometimes not, that joining American society meant giving up the identities with which our ancestor had come to North American shores. In 1914, Woodrow Wilson told a group of immigrants to the United States, “You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourself in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man [sic] who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.” At times, Wilson was even more vehement: if you wanted to be American, he insisted, you had to be nothing else at all:

If the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed [religion], or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American…. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American but something else also isn’t an American at all.

Interestingly, even President Obama, perhaps the quintessential American success story, discovered something very similar in Kenya, when he went to search for his roots. In his autobiographical “Dreams from My Father” (1995), he wrote about feeling something very new:

For a span of weeks or months, you could experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway… Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal.

What Obama was really writing about was loss. It is the loss that comes with a pervasive, constant awareness of otherness. It is the loss that comes from not being “truly at home” in the way that Jews can be in the Jewish state, that Obama could be in Kenya, and that many African Americans have undoubtedly felt upon visiting Africa. It is the loss that comes from not living in the country in which your race or culture is the norm, in which you feel like an exception that at best must be accommodated and at worst is merely tolerated.

It is that power of going “home” that explains why Birthright has such a powerful impact on its participants. What they are shown as their bus winds its way up the narrow highway to Jerusalem are the caves of the Maccabees, which the Jews used as bases as they fought to expel the Syrian Greeks from Judea more than two thousand years ago. They pass the carefully preserved remains of the jeeps and trucks that Jewish resistance fighters used in 1948 to try to break the Arab siege on Jerusalem. They pass the memorial to these fighters, and to Yitzhak Rabin, who at age 24 took it upon himself to lead the charge.

Suddenly, these great-grandchildren of the immigrants who gave up a great deal of their culture in order to make a life in America find themselves driving through a story that is theirs, wondering how they can recover the knowledge that they intuit is required to fully appreciate the culture that they are just now encountering in all its power. Barack Obama’s experience is actually much more universal than he might have imagined. Take any of us back to our “Kenya,” and suddenly we will “experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched.” That is the freedom that defines home. And that is the freedom that lies at the core of the continuing appeal of ethnic nation-states, those countries that (like Israel) are homes to particular traditions, particular religions, particular peoples.

***

Though American Jews have long resisted this notion, we ought to be honest. In many respects, the United States is in some significant ways a nation-state; it is a nation-state of the white, Protestant Europeans who came to the New World seeking the freedoms that they could not then enjoy in England. Yes, those Protestants eventually extended their freedoms to the many others who joined them (or who were “imported” by them, like African Americans). But the core of the society they formed did not greatly change. It was Christian, and it remains so.

What Obama was really writing about was loss. It is the loss that comes with a pervasive, constant awareness of otherness

The very notion that there is an ethnic or religious “core” that remains at the heart of the United States is obviously controversial. Millions of immigrants have found shelter and promise on America’s shores, in what has traditionally been described as a “melting pot.” But John Jay, the first chief justice of the US Supreme Court, himself, writing in “The Federalist 2,” had no trouble asserting the United States was a nation-state of a very particular sort:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established liberty and independence.

Though John Jay died almost two centuries ago, much of what he wrote remains true. Even the massive immigration of millions from dozens of different countries, it may be argued, has not changed the essential character of the United States that he described. John McCain, the Vietnam War-hero, Arizona senator and 2008 Republican Presidential candidate, remarked: “I would probably have to say ‘yes,’ that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation,” he said. “But I say that in the broadest sense. The lady that holds her lamp beside the golden door doesn’t say, ‘I only welcome Christians.’ We welcome the poor, the tired, the huddled masses. But when they come here they know that they are in a nation founded on Christian principles.”

Consider Samuel Huntington, the enormously influential scholar and political scientist. “America has always had its full share of subcultures,” he said. But then he added the following:

It also has had a mainstream Anglo-Protestant culture in which most of its people, whatever their subcultures, have shared. For almost four centuries this culture of the founding settlers has been the central and the lasting component of American identity. One has only to ask: Would America be the America it is today if in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.

America has been an extraordinary home to the Jewish people. And it has been a great home to Israel, not despite the fact that it is a Christian nation, but because it is a Christian nation. The United States, unlike Europe, still has a vast population that believes in roots, that cherishes narratives, that honors religion and tradition. That, to no small degree, is the root of many Americans’ support for the Jewish state, and that, despite all the surface differences, is one of the profound similarities between these two very different countries.