The United States celebrates this weekend its semi-quincentennial (literally, halfway to five hundred years) and a more easily pronounceable and spellable name would have been in order. It is an achievement; the world has changed so much since 1776, world maps have been re-delineated countless times and numerous countries have been founded or have had their forms of government changed. And yet the USA endures.
The world and the Jewish people have benefited enormously from the founding of the USA, in mostly unanticipated ways. The great Torah leader, Rav Chaim of Volozhin, reportedly stated in the early 1800’s that the United States would be the last foreign refuge Jews would enjoy before the coming of Moshiach. Indeed, millions of Jews found safe haven in America in the 19th and 20th centuries, including three of my grandparents and my father, and for that we are eternally grateful.
The idea that any nation on earth would welcome Jews - even for a time - and permit freedom of worship flabbergasted and gratified immigrant Jews, even if many exploited the freedom of religion to flee from their religion. And the US played an important, if occasionally reluctant, role in Israel’s creation and even our survival.
It was 250 years ago, that these words electrified mankind: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." No other nation then invoked G-d’s name in order to do anything but justify the absolute power of the monarch. No other nation perceived these rights as “truths," much less self-evident truths. And no other nation had a system of government in which there were co-equal branches, each with checks and balances on the others.
None of this had to be and many Jews, as well as Americans, believed in the hand of Providence in America’s creation and statecraft. Abraham Lincoln, notably in his Second Inaugural Address, underscored this, and that, to paraphrase Bejamin Franklin, that the USA has been able to keep its republic for this long and to remain mostly faithful to its creed and values is remarkable, if not providential. No nation before had distributed power amongst the ruling classes in order to protect the individual.
Is it easy to maintain co-equal branches or government? No, it is not, and exhibit one today in Israel is the seizure of supreme power by a runaway judiciary that essentially appoints itself, follows no laws, and capriciously asserts control over any and every aspect of society it wishes to.
For me, this anniversary recalls the far more pronounceable bicentennial in 1976, exactly fifty years ago. I was a teenager, in Israel at the time, and the day is forever etched in my memory because it coincided with the astonishing rescue of the Israeli hostages at Entebbe, Uganda. Israel had been on emotional standstill for more than a week with the lives of more than one hundred Jewish hostages in existential danger, and with the Rabin government in the process of negotiating a release of hundreds of terrorists in exchange for their freedom.
That was the era when Israel prided itself on not negotiating with terrorists (how quaint that must sound fifty years later; for the more than forty years, we have just about only negotiated with and conceded to terrorists, beginning with the Abu Jibril deal in 1985 and reaching its full force with the Oslo Accords, and so on). But here the talks were designed to stall for time as Israel prepared for a potential military rescue.
We awoke that Sunday morning to the thrilling news of the rescue. We didn’t yet know that three hostages had perished along with one officer - Yoni Netanyahu. The sense of exhilaration was palpable. For one thing, almost immediately it lifted the gloom that had beset Israel in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. For another, the miraculous nature of the rescue - flying through the night thousands of miles, the decoys, the surprise assault, the quick escape with the hostages, and their safe return - all reaffirmed G-d’s role.
I recall traveling on a bus that afternoon from Netanya to Yerushalayim, looking at the clouds, which to me, seemed to form a hand, as in the hand of Hashem. The joy on the bus and on the streets was overwhelming. And where was I going? To the bicentennial celebration that was taking place in the football stadium of Hebrew University in Givat Ram. It symbolized for me the interconnection between the United States and Israel - how in many ways the American experiment was rooted in the Bible, how the Founders saw themselves as Providential actors - like Moses leading the Israelites across the Red Sea guided by the divine pillar of fire, itself Ben Franklin’s recommendation for the Great Seal of the United States - and how modern Israel sees itself, perhaps to a fault, as an American outpost in the Middle East, a nation guided also by biblical values.
There is no article about the USA (or Israel, for that matter) that omits the disclaimer that no nation is perfect, an indictment usually issued by citizens of nations that do not even aspire to goodness or virtue, much less perfection. One little known anecdote illustrates the point. On July 5, the day after the Entebbe rescue, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whose discomfort with being Jewish bordered on schizophrenia, called Israel’s US Ambassador Simchah Dinitz to complain about the Entebbe rescue operation.
“I have some bad news to tell you," Kissinger said. “You used American equipment outside of Israel (the C-130 transport planes). We will have to apply the law… [and] put a temporary freeze on military shipments." Dinitz responded, “you must be kidding," to which Kissinger stated, “You know you have no right to do this without prior consultation."
Dinitz, thinking quickly, replied that the transport planes are not “weapons, but equipment." If the weapons freeze was eventually authorized, it did not last long.
Indeed, no country is perfect, and imperfect people in positions of power sometimes take inexplicable and mendacious positions.
It is a little surprising that there is not a semi-quincentennial celebration planned in Israel similar to the bicentennial, at least to my knowledge. And it has little to do with the reigning president and his policies towards Israel. In fact, the bicentennial year was preceded by Ford’s Kissinger-inspired “reassessment" of relations with Israel due to Israel’s sluggishness in surrendering to America’s dictates, then concerning the fate of Sinai. It is no matter.
US-Israel relations have gone from cool to warm to very warm and everything in between. And many point to the United States current dysfunction and woes but, if anything, it was far worse in 1976. Inflation was in the double-digits, the US was in the middle of a bitter election campaign that would harp on the corruption of Watergate and the defeat in Vietnam. But anniversaries commemorate past events, not current events.
Despite my occasional pointed (and wholly justified) criticisms of the USA, suffice it to say that no other country aspires to do good in the world as does the United States. No other country has objective values that it tries to export across the world, and no country seeks the good and welfare of other countries as does the United States. Sure, it occasionally stumbles and even hesitates. As Winston Churchill - whose mother was American - reputedly said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities."
We are living through that again in real time.
But what is true about the virtues of US is also true about Israel. We also seek only the good of mankind, only to be castigated even by those we try to help. We are held to a standard of conduct that no other nation is - and often a standard of conduct that no nation could survive if truly implemented. And we seek their welfare even when they dream of our destruction. E.g., who feeds their enemy in wartime? A good question never asked until slightly more than two years ago.
And yet, that has left Israelis not bitter but still hopeful, knowing as we do that the arc of history bends not towards justice but towards redemption and Moshiach. Part of our hopefulness as Israelis is that the United States retain its course and its values and not surrender to the temptations of materialism and hedonism.
Undoubtedly, the disinclination of many American Jews to make Aliya stems from the fact that despite the surge of Jew hatred, the USA still remains a wonderful place to live, a place to which foreigners across the world regularly informed of America’s evil still want to sneak in and live there. Its opportunities still dwarf those of every other country in the world. And despite the frequent vicissitudes in US-Israel relations, we should be clear that the US is the only power in the world that is predisposed to our wellbeing.
If that should change, it would frankly be worse for the US than for Israel. But the American experiment has surely benefited all of us and transformed the world. The very notion of self-determination of peoples in their indigenous land - the essence of the political Zionism - found a powerful booster in the United States.
It would not be wrong to say that there are only two countries that are forces for good in the world: the United States and Israel. Today and tomorrow, if we remain on course, the possibilities are endless and optimistic.
Happy 250th to the USA, all Americans, and the world!
Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, Esq., teaches Torah in Modiin, serves as the Senior Research Associate for the Jerusalem Center for Applied Policy (JCAP.ngo), the Israel Region Vice-President of the Coalition for Jewish Values, and is the author of six books, including “Road to Redemption."