We’re living in a time in which polarization is at an all-time high, and when we just, you know, a lot of times it’s because of ignorance. And you think about our First Amendment right of, you know, Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, nor interfering with the free exercise thereof. And gosh, it’s just, it’s heartbreaking when I see how that has been diminishing in different contexts, especially on college campuses, and we’ll get into that in a little bit.
But the Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveitchik from Chicago, Yeshiva University. Now this is interesting. He has a PhD in New Testament thought from Princeton, and he studied under Robbie George, if you know, devout Catholic genius.
Robbie said to me, you know, Solly, that’s his nickname, and you can all call him that now, it’s okay. He said, he’s the most brilliant student I’ve ever had. And I think tonight you’re going to see why, but not just, not just the intellect, but his heart.
And he’s just been such a dear friend to me. We were counting up earlier today. We’ve only got 40, I was wrong.
It’s 46 more states to go. So he and I have spoken together in now four different states on different topics. But tonight, Hawaii, here we come.
Yeah, exactly. Aloha. So Hawaii, here we come.
But, but so, so tonight we’re just going to have a conversation and there will be, he will be hanging out afterwards. If you want to ask me any questions that you want, nothing is off limits. And so I’ll be at the bar.
Yeah. So let’s just, let’s just start with the fact that, you know, we’re living in such a busy time as well. And it’s interesting how kids want to wish time away.
You know, you asked the little ones and he’s got, he’s got five kids. He’s got six, excuse me, six. He won more than ten times.
No. So five, five boys and one daughter. But, you know, you ask him how old they are and they’ll say, well, I’m six and a half or I’m eight and 11 months.
And they just can’t wait to be the next number. But then as we get older, it stops somewhere along the way, because no one says I’m 30, 39 and a half, you know. But isn’t it interesting just how we, how we view time and is there anything more precious than time? Well, certainly it’s what we do with it that matters.
And I know for most of us, and many of you in the room are Christians, maybe you’re, maybe you’re not honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy as the commandments have been given to us. But in the Jewish tradition, it’s absolutely beautiful because this isn’t an add on or something that we do that’s optional. It’s actually, it’s actually a way of life that’s been prescribed by almighty God for their own good.
I thought about Chariots of Fire with Eric Liddell and how he said, God made me fast and I feel his pleasure when I run. And I’ll never forget when he’s crossing the finish line and he’s just like that and the pleasure. And what’s so interesting is in that same movie, Eric’s father, and you know this story.
Sure. First, I have to do it in the Scottish accent if I’m going to be so excited. So Chariots of Fire, which is one of my favorite films.
So the line you’re referencing first from Eric Liddell, he says to his sister, Jenny, says, Jenny, I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure. Yeah.
Yeah. So that’s it for me. Thanks everybody.
But what about the divine dictator? Earlier in the film, Eric Liddell’s father, who actually encourages his running, but he tells his son to sanctify his running. He says, run in God’s name and let the world stand back and wonder. So he’s talking to Eric Liddell’s friend, Sandy, and he says something like, Sandy, the kingdom of God is not a democracy.
There’s no referenda as to what course to take. There’s one right, one wrong, one soul, an absolute ruler. And so Sandy says, a dictator? He says, I, but a benign, loving dictator.
Yeah. By the way, my English accent is horrific, but Scottish accent, I’m pretty good at. Yeah.
Better than mine. And what’s funny about this, I could just quote, you know, just bring up a movie and he’s going to have a quote. Like I literally think he could be a film critic.
So we had Sisker and Ebert. So now Plan B. So the rabbi, the film critics. But let’s talk about it for a moment with the Jewish calendar.
And, you know, we’re, we’re just, we just had Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, preceding that by 10 days, Rosh Hashanah. And so you’re with your family. You’re going to have shofar, the horn that’s blown maybe a hundred times for the first two days.
And it is this awaken from the slumber. Talk about that a little bit. First, let me just say how delighted I am to be here.
As Todd mentioned, as my dear friend Todd mentioned, yesterday was the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, day of atonement. That meant I went for 24 hours without eating or drinking anything. Now we move on to the happy part of the Jewish calendar.
All we do is eat for the next several weeks and really for the rest of the year. But of course that meant that yesterday I was giving sermon after sermon so that at this point, my congregation is sick of me. So thank goodness I found other people who are willing to listen to me because rabbis need to talk, right? That’s what we do, right? So I’m delighted to come to leave Manhattan and come to Arkansas.
And the fact that you’re willing to listen to a rabbi, and not just a rabbi, but a rabbi who’s also an academic. Most people don’t say, you know what, I’m going to get dressed up and go down to the club and listen to an academic talk. Like that’s not somebody’s idea of a good time.
I think there was a Supreme Court justice who described teaching at Harvard Law School, and he said that he was once grading an exam booklet. You know, there used to be exam booklets at the end of exams. He saw that a student had written on one of the pages of the exam booklet, Professor, I want you to know that if I had one hour left to live, I would want to spend that hour sitting in your class.
So he was very flattered. He turned the page and he saw that the student continued, because Professor, an hour in your class feels like an eternity. So that really gets to the heart of what our conversation is about today.
The relationship between time and eternity. Because ultimately, ultimately, time best spent is time that is utilized. In a way that allows us to foster the aspects of our life that are most eternal.
Our relationship with God, our connections to our family, our bonds to those in our covenantal community. But we sense that in today’s society, something has gone awry. That we don’t actually live that way.
There are so many articles that have captured the imagination of the public that highlight this aspect of human existence. So one example is a pretty famous article that appeared in the New Yorker. It was written by the essayist Adam Gopnik.
And he was describing an imaginary friend that his daughter Olivia has. Now, as you know, it’s not unusual for a child to have an imaginary friend. But the unique thing here was, is that his imaginary friend was too busy to play with his daughter, Olivia.
So he describes his daughter Olivia talking on her toy phone. And the imaginary friend’s name is Charlie Ravioli. So the daughter is saying, Ravioli, Ravioli? Okay, call me back.
And then she closes her toy phone and she says to her dad, I always get his machine. So Adam Gopnik’s sister is a very famous… Adam Gopnik lives in Manhattan. That’s where I live.
This speaks to me as someone who lives in Manhattan. And so Adam Gopnik calls his sister Allison Gopnik, who’s a very famous child psychologist who lives in, I think, Stanford, Palo Alto. So he says to her, she says, well, it’s not unusual for a child to have an imaginary friend.
So he says, yes, but have you ever heard of a child that has an imaginary friend that’s too busy to play with her? And so she replies, I’ve never seen this in the psychological literature. That sounds completely New York. So then he describes that Olivia, his daughter, talks about another imaginary friend, Lori.
So he thinks, oh, Lori must be the person that you play with instead of Ravioli. But it turns out when he quizzes Olivia, that Lori, he says, who’s Lori? So Olivia says, he works for Ravioli. And then Gopnik writes, it came to us with a sickening clarity.
I think that was his phrase. He says, Lori was not the person you played with for consolation. Lori was the person who told you that, unfortunately, Mr. Ravioli was in a meeting.
So as his sister later pointed out to him, this is new. In all of the animals of psychology, she had never seen a child who had an imaginary friend who was not only too busy to play with her, but who had another imaginary friend to run interference for her. So he asked his sister, do you think we should do something about this? She said, I think you should move.
Now he writes in the piece, he has a phrase that works something like this. He says, the perpetual crowding of our space has been followed by the perpetual crowding of our time. And we just build up constant buffers of deferral.
I’ll call you next time. I’ll speak to you later. Adam Gopnik lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
He says he has a friend who lives, I think, he says, on the West Side where I live. It’s a 15 minute walk. He says he hasn’t seen him.
They’re in touch all the time, never sees him. He has become, he writes, my Charlie Ravioli. And I’m sure he misses me, he writes, just as Ravioli must miss Olivia.
And he concludes the article by saying, meanwhile, Olivia is still trying to reach her friends. He describes her lying in bed at night saying, Ravioli, Ravioli, tell him call me. Tell him call me when he comes home.
Now, Gopnik reports that when he wrote this piece, he heard from a lot of people who were very moved by it. And they’re moved, of course, because it describes our own lives. The devices that we have, as I think Gopnik knows, are meant to help us organize our time.
But they don’t actually. We know they don’t. We know that they actually crowd out our time.
So within the Orthodox Jewish community, Shabbat, which means really stop, Sabbath means stop. Sabbath is a day for stopping certain things and thereby allowing for spiritual renewal in other aspects of our lives. But for us, that means that there is a hard and fast stop.
As the sun sets, there’s a lot of things we can’t do. We can’t cook. We can’t write.
We can’t use our electronic devices. That means that the hours before the Sabbath begins are crazy because everything has to be prepared, especially if you’re talking about like during the winter, right, where sundown is 4.15, 4.30. That’s a tense time. But then suddenly, everything changes.
And that means, of course, that even though I’m a rabbi and a lot of people are trying to get a hold of me, it’s over. Friday night, no one is Charlie Ravioli. I’m sitting at the table with my family.
My wife before sundown has blessed candles ushering in the sanctity of the Sabbath. I’m saying blessings over the wine that sanctifies the meal of the Sabbath. And we’re all together.
We talk about what has occurred in the week before. Some of my older children are at school. They’re in the dorm a lot of the week.
Now they’re home. This is when I see them. This is when I talk to them.
And so if there is a significance to the Jewish Sabbath, it is to avoid the fate of Charlie Ravioli in today’s day and age. That’s really what it means for me. And not only is this important for his family, but I think his witness, there’s a story where, and they mean this, and this is serious.
He is stuck on a subway, which can happen frequently in New York City. By the time he comes up, he realizes, oh, the sun is down. So pick it up from there.
So I was traveling from Manhattan to Brooklyn by subway on the afternoon before the Sabbath. As you know, in Manhattan, if you’re traveling anywhere, you’ve got to go under tunnels or water, as I think the line from Saturday Night Live has it. If you want to know why we in New York are so depressed, it’s because for us, the light at the end of the tunnel is New Jersey.
But so this is many years ago, taking the subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn. I am north of Brooklyn. And as the subway gets stuck, so I can’t call anybody, no reception.
Subway comes out. So by the time I get to Brooklyn, where my in-laws live, Sabbath is here, and the Sabbath is coming, or it’s here. It was around that time.
So it’s about to be, I got to, I’m about to enter Sabbath. So I have my wallet with me. Can’t carry my wallet on the Sabbath.
And I can’t carry my wallet in the street. So I decide that I got to get rid of my wallet. For me to observe the Sabbath, that means I can’t have my wallet on me.
This is how I’m going to greet the Sabbath. Cannot usher in the Sabbath if I’m still holding my wallet. So in those days, there were still people who worked in the subway booths.
So I went over to one of them and I said, is there a lost and found? I’d like to leave my wallet here. So of course, that guy looks at me like I’m nuts because no one leaves their wallet in the lost and found. Lost and found is people who drop their wallet.
So I said to him, I said, my Sabbath is, when it comes to Sabbath, I can’t carry my wallet. And so if you don’t hold it onto it for me, I’m going to have to throw it out. Because I can’t just throw it on the ground.
Someone’s going to take it with all my stuff. So he says, no. And he’s thinking this is crazy.
So I walk over to the garbage. Resigned. I pick up my wallet.
I’m about to throw it in. And he says, what were you doing? I said, what I told you I would do is throw my wallet in the garbage. So he said, OK.
He said, you tell me where you’re staying. I’ll bring you your wallet after my shift. So he just shifted perspective entirely.
Because he understood, in other words, that this was real. This is a rule. And then the skepticism was replaced with respect.
Maybe even a little awe that someone could live that way by these rules. And he literally came at midnight or 10 p.m. or whatever. Dropped off my wallet for me.
Because when Shabbat happens, Shabbat happens. There are no referenda, as we say, as to what to do. There’s one right, one wrong, one sole and absolute ruler.
Fortunately, I didn’t use my Scottish accent. I’m a subway guy. But that’s the way it is.
Shabbat is here. I can’t carry my wallet on the street. That’s that.
And that actually, on the one hand, can make life crazy. But it also makes life simple. Of course, if it’s a question of, say, of a life endangerment, the preciousness of human life overrides the Sabbath.
That’s inherent in Jewish law. But if it’s just your regular life, and you’re going to be tremendously inconvenienced, then you’re tremendously inconvenienced. That’s the way it is.
And the rules actually allow, they keep out, they keep the world at bay. There’s a wonderful book by a Christian woman called Strangers and Neighbors. I think it’s called Strangers and Neighbors, What I Have Learned About Christianity by Living Among Orthodox Jews.
And she writes how she learned from her neighbors that all of those myriad of laws, the Sabbath, I think she writes an adamantine edge that does not allow the concerns of the world to intrude for one day and just be creatures called by God. That’s what the rules of the Sabbath do. Isn’t that beautiful? As I’m sitting here, I’m thinking, okay, so what does it look like for me and my family on Shabbat? And how my two boys would be like, I’m not giving up my phones or I’m not doing whatever, but yet I know in your household, the kids, especially the younger, they’re like waiting for the clock and they’re waiting for the sun to go down because they know how special time’s going to be with their family and with God.
And I think it’s important for all of us to really do an assessment of where we are and what we’re doing and how we’re living among those entrusted to our care like kids, but also neighbors and then witness that that can be to people that are just in this frantic pace of just thinking there’s never enough time, but the reality is we all make time for the people and the things that are most important to us, do we not? And so I’m just grateful for your witness on that subway, but how you lead your family and just what this means to me and this group here, because it’s just, it’s so inspiring. And I think that all of us can learn from that example. Well, again, as I’m certainly not here to tout my righteousness, I say like anyone else, that were it not for these rules, I don’t think I would be able to withstand the pressure of life itself.
Another article that highlights this, this one, the Pulitzer actually, there’s an article by Gene Weingarten where he did an experiment where he asked Joshua Bell, a brilliant violinist, to stand in a nondescript outfit with his Stradivarius and play a piece by Bach for the violin at rush hour at the Washington DC Metro. You can Google this, just Google Joshua Bell subway, and you’ll see everybody rushes past him. Nobody stops.
Or as Gene Weingarten says, the people that stopped were children. And then their parents just dragged them, not knowing that they were, they could have been party to one of the greatest, a virtuoso playing one of the greatest pieces of music. And Weingarten also writes about how people wrote in, so moved by this, because as he puts it, if the force of modern life is such that we are deaf and blind to something like that, then what else are we missing? In the book of Kings, Prophet Elijah goes back to Mount Sinai, where the Torah was given to the Jewish people.
Now, of course, at Sinai originally, God appears in thunder and lightning, in awesome voice and the sound of the shofar. Here, in the book of Kings, Elijah comes, and there’s a great earthquake and a great wind, but God is not there. And then God appears in the still, small voice.
And the point, there was a friend of mine, the late chief rabbi of Britain, Rabbi Jonathan Sachs put it, the point of God speaking in a still, small voice is that still, small voice is something you have to listen for if you want to hear it. And if you’re allowing the cacophony of modern life to intrude, then you’re not going to hear it, especially if your ear pods are in it. You’re not going to hear it.
And I love my ear pods. I mean, I experience terror if one falls out and scatters somewhere. You worry, oh no.
And sometimes you wake up and you feel it to see if you fell asleep with your ear pods in it. That’s me during the week. But think about what that means.
One of my favorite stories is told by the writer Joseph Epstein, who’s a Chicagoan like me. So in Chicago, the trains, a lot of them are above ground. So the cell phones work on trains, so commuters can talk, which is very annoying to other commuters.
So Joseph Epstein writes about a friend of his who is sitting behind a woman. His friend is a woman and she’s sitting behind another woman whose fake name in the article is Amy Hempstead. And Amy Hempstead is making like 10 phone calls on her cell phone because she’s leaving messages to tell her friend that her dinner party is being moved.
So she says over and over, hi, it’s Amy Hempstead. I’m calling to tell you that I moved the dinner party. It’s going to be at Stefani’s restaurant.
It’s still going to be at noon on Saturday, but now it’s at Stefani’s. It’s just over and over. Saturday, Stefani’s restaurant, Sunday, Saturday, Stefani’s restaurant.
And Joseph Epstein’s friend is sitting behind Amy Hempstead and is seething, can’t take it. And later she tells her friend about this rude woman, Amy Hempstead. So Joseph Epstein says to her, so did you just intervene and say something to Amy Hempstead about how rude she is? And his friend says, no, I said nothing.
But when I got to work, I called Stefani’s restaurant and I canceled her reservation for Saturday. So the point is, we live in a cacophonous world. And it’s not easy to shut it down.
It’s not easy, especially if you live in Manhattan. My fellow Orthodox Jews live in Teaneck, New Jersey, Lawrence in the five towns among islands. And there, it’s an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.
So you can actually sense the neighborhood’s shut down. But in Manhattan, we get up in the morning, on Saturday morning, people are going for bagels. People are going to get, you know, bagel and a schmear or going to Starbucks.
And I’m walking to synagogue and all the cars are rushing past. It’s noisy. You have to work really hard to hear the still small voice of God in Manhattan, New York on the Sabbath.
And I think canceling that reservation reminds me of something that Ferris Bueller would probably do. And you remember the line, life moves pretty fast. And we have to, and we have to stop Shabbat or else we may miss something.
So I think that’s the lesson learned today. There you go. He says stop.
So let’s shift and talk a little bit about your congregation. Okay. So Healy, I didn’t mention this earlier.
So he is the rabbi of the oldest congregation in the United States, Upper West Side, New York City, Shareth Israel. And obviously you, everything you share in your individual witness, but that of your congregation, we live in a beautiful, exceptional country. And one of the reasons for that is because of the founding fathers and these amendments and these rules and the constitution, things that were put in place that grants each of us freedom of speech, but also freedom of religion.
And I know in particular this past year, that’s changed for you personally, as well as your congregation and the perception of people towards you simply because you’re Jewish. So go ahead and back us up, maybe not even to October 7th, but maybe the day before. Yeah.
So maybe I’ll back up a little further, just to talk a little bit about my congregation first and what that means, because you spoke about religious liberty in America. So as Todd mentioned, my congregation is the oldest Jewish congregation in America. We don’t like to talk about that in the synagogue, except pretty much every day, because we’re kind of proud of it.
Dates back really to when 23 Jews arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654. And actually, and I don’t think I shared this with you, Todd, at least not in one of our conversations. According to the great law and religion expert, Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School, the first religious free exercise case after the passage of the First Amendment involved a Jew who was actually, had been a member of my congregation.
Amazing man, Jonas Phillips is his name. Jonas Phillips came, was a German Jew, came in 1756 to Charleston, went to New York, became a member of my congregation, married a woman from the congregation. He and his wife, I am not making this up, he and his wife had, I think, 21 children.
He was literally American Jewry’s founding father. 21 children. And he moved to Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War.
I think he served in the Revolution. And he wrote, you can look this up, just Google this, Google Jonas Phillips, George Washington. And you will see that when the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, he wrote in a letter to complain, because at the time, to serve in the legislature, one had to take an oath affirming certain creeds that a Jew could not affirm.
And so that meant Jews couldn’t serve in the legislature. So he wrote in to complain. It’s an incredible letter.
Just to imagine, this man at this point, he is well-to-do, he has freedoms in America, the likes of which my ancestors in Eastern Europe could never even imagine, in 1787. But he writes to say to Washington, I served in the Revolution, and this is not equality. This is not equality.
Or as he put it, the Jews have been true and faithful Whigs, Whigs as patriots. And he writes, they have fought and bled for liberty which they could not enjoy. And of course, the Constitution that was produced, at least at the federal level at the time, banned the religious task for office.
This was before the First Amendment. And that’s why the Jews, from the very beginning, even though there was a huge debate over ratification of the Constitution, this is one of the reasons why the Jews of America saw this. No other country in the world.
So already after the First Amendment was passed, Jonas Phillips is subpoenaed to appear in court, in the Philadelphia court, as a material witness. He’s not a litigant, he’s not a plaintiff or defendant. He’s just a material witness.
Court used to meet in Philadelphia Sunday, I’m sorry, Monday through Saturday. So he was called on Saturday. He refused to come.
And he was fined. And that’s according to Michael McConnell, the first sort of free exercise case ever after the passage of the First Amendment. Now, coming to court on the Sabbath, look, I’m not saying that would be an A-level biblical violation of the Sabbath.
But Jonas Phillips felt, look, you don’t have court on Sunday. So if you’re not going to honor my Sabbath observance, then I’m not going to honor you. So my point is, this goes to the very heart of the story of the Jews.
Not just religious liberty, but the Sabbath. So, October 6th. Before he gets into that.
So he was recently appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which is a high honor. And I can’t think of anyone more deserving. And I failed to mention, or I wanted this is the appropriate time to mention, so Congressman French Hill and his wife Martha are here.
And I want to thank you both and French just for being a champion for religious freedom. Because I know it’s this important. It’s so important.
Thank you. Thank you. So October 6th, 2023.
I was, I write a monthly column in the magazine Commentary. So I was up against a deadline. And I was also up against another deadline, which was sunsets, because that was about to be the start of the holiday.
So I needed to come up with something. I had nothing. Not much new was happening in the Jewish world.
And so I chose to write about a small clip that I had seen from the TV game show Jeopardy. I like Jeopardy. I always thought I would be pretty good if I went on Jeopardy.
That’s a different story at the time. Could use the cash as well. And there was a clip from some months ago.
This was already in 2023, where the category title was Walking and Talking. And the clue was something like, This Bible book contains the verse, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. And you watch on the clip is all three contestants.
And obviously, to be on Jeopardy, you have to be somewhat educated. Stare blankly. And then the buzzer goes.
Which means that these very knowledgeable people had never heard of the Psalms, basically. Because this is the most famous verse in one of the most famous of biblical books. So I wrote a column about what that culturally or sociologically meant for America.
That this was possible. This was a warning. Especially considering how profoundly the Bible, and I would emphasize how profoundly Hebrew Scripture had impacted America.
So I wrote that October 6. Sent it in. October 7, the Jewish people began its own sojourn through the valley of the shadow of death. And I found myself on a holiday.
It’s a holiday, October 7. Doing something that I really, I don’t think I’ve ever done before. At least very rarely. Which is ask people to say a psalm of distress.
Meaning that there are psalms of joy and there are psalms of distress. And because we were not online, I’m only getting snatches of information. The numbers that I heard seem devastating.
Though in retrospect, they were extremely small. From what actually was the number. If you hear numbers like 40 people or 200 people, it seemed immense.
And of course it is immense. Of course it wasn’t close to what the number actually was. And I certainly couldn’t have predicted that we’d be saying psalms of distress every Sabbath in the synagogue throughout the whole year.
But at the same time, that’s been a great source of faith. A relative of mine, a member of my family, is studying in Israel now. And he described to me a being in the yeshiva, that’s a Jewish school.
And saying psalms there as the missiles fell while they were in the shelter in the recent missile attack, when 180 ballistic missiles were launched in Israel. And according to the Jerusalem Post, during the first Iranian missile attack, one of the most googled, according to one version of the story I read at a certain point, the most googled item, word that was searched for was Tehillim psalms. So there are some places and some cultures here in America and in Israel where the psalms still matter.
And in this very difficult year, I have seen many Jews in Israel and in America in the face of one of the most difficult years in recent memory, nevertheless emerged from it with their faith fostered and their identity enhanced. And a deeper sense of the wondrous story that is the many thousand year tale of the Jewish people. Thank you for sharing that.
You know, and when we look at the scriptures, look at the Hebrew scriptures, we’re reminded and I think about Psalm 139. You know, God says, I knew you before you were born. I knew you in your mother’s womb.
I knew the numbers of days in which you would live before a word was on your tongue. You know, the Lord knows it all. He knew that each one of us would be here tonight.
But when we think that each person is made in the image of God and we elevate that as being supreme above anything else, above political differences, above differences of religion and opinion about different things, hot topics, it unites us. So one of the most wonderful memoirs, which I really recommend to everybody, is the memoir of Anatoly or Natan Sharansky, who was imprisoned by Soviets, Jewish dissidents, was imprisoned by the Soviets for nine years. He wrote a book called Fear No Evil.
And he describes how he and he was in prison and he had a tiny Psalms book in Hebrew, which he utilized to teach himself Hebrew. But he also would study the Bible with a Christian prisoner there, Volodya. And he writes in the book, this was in the 80s.
And he said they would call their Bible study sessions in prison Reaganite readings, because Ronald Reagan, it sounds, I mean, it’s 1983 was declared by Ronald Reagan to be the year of the Bible in recognition of all that the Bible had meant for the founding and the story of America. So you have to imagine you have these two people, one a Jew, one a Christian, studying Bible together in the valley of the shadow of death and feeling God is with them and calling it Reaganite readings because of what the Bible means for America. So and I wrote this up in an article on National Review.
I think it’s called the Jewish meaning of what Jews mean to America. I think it’s called what Jews mean to America is the title of a piece. It’s about the remarkable way in which Jews have been welcomed in America.
And so I happened to interview Natan Sharansky in Israel sometime after October 7th. So given that his book is called Fear No Evil, I wonder what he’d make of that Jeopardy clip. So first, of course, I had to explain to him what Jeopardy was.
That took a little time, right? You know, this is a Russian Jew who moved to Israel when he got out of prison. It’s not like Jeopardy is one of his regular watching appointments. And so I asked him, what do you make of this? These three educated people and one of the most famous verses in the Bible, the name of your book.
So he said to me, he used to be the head of the Jewish, after he got out of prison, he eventually became the head of the Jewish Agency, which focuses on the needs of Jews around the world. So after an anti-Semitic attack in France, 2014, maybe, I don’t remember when, Sharansky said that he’d asked a French philosopher, I think his name is Alain Finkelkraut, whether there’s a future for Jews in France. And the philosopher replied, the question is whether there’s a future for France in France, by which he meant whether France would continue to uphold the values of Western civilization.
Then he said to me something like, Sharansky said, I never thought I would worry about that when it came to America. In other words, whether America would retain a sense of its origins and what it was. But I think he said something like, but now he sees, especially in the academy, a rejection of one’s identity as Americans.
And that’s true on the one hand. Of course, on the other hand, there are many Americans that not only treasure the Psalms, they treasure the way in which the story of biblical Israel inspired America to see itself as a covenantal people. And many of those Americans have made that manifest by standing with the Jewish people and standing with Israel during this time.
And that’s been a great source of inspiration, sustaining inspiration to me. And it’s so imperative that we educate the next generations in particular, not just the ones that were the bigger kids on Jeopardy that didn’t know this common phrase from the Bible, but the younger people. And Sully and I are both very committed to that, to going to high schools, college campuses, to have the places that we should have the free exchange of ideas.
You can agree to disagree and not vilify one another, but also let people see that we actually care about each other. We love each other and we’re friends. Absolutely.
And of course, friendship does not mean denying our differences. Rabbi Sacks, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, has a wonderful book written from a British perspective about America. You should all read it.
It’s called The Home We Build Together. And he writes about how he learned about America as a covenantal nation. He says that when he was, I think, a college student, he came from England to America and he came to Washington, D.C. And he noted that when you go to the memorials, you don’t just see statues of the memorials, you see words, ideas.
Lincoln has the statue, but there’s also the Gettysburg Address. Jefferson has a statue, but also a Declaration of Independence. And he says, if you go to London, the memorial for David, Lloyd, George has three words, David, Lloyd, and George.
Right? Churchill, the Churchill statue just says, Churchill. Now, words were kind of important for Churchill, but you don’t see any of those things. Why? Because as Rabbi Sacks said, this is basically what he said, England, at least, was a tradition-based society.
So as Rabbi Sacks says, those who belong knew, and those who didn’t know showed they didn’t belong. Whereas America, Rabbi Sacks said, is the rarest of things, a covenantal nation. People come together in declaration of an idea.
Or as Rabbi Sacks adds, Israel, ancient and modern, and America are the only examples of nations founded in conscious pursuit of an idea. So now Rabbi Sacks turns it on its head and he says, or takes this and runs with it and says, what does a covenant do? What a covenantal nation does is it can bring people who are different together. He tells a story that he used to study Bible with Tony Blair, Prime Minister.
And Tony Blair said to Rabbi Sacks, he said, Jonathan, I’ve reached the boring part of the Bible. So Rabbi Sacks said, which boring part of the Bible have you reached, Prime Minister? So he said, the tabernacle. Does go on a bit, doesn’t it? Hey, my British accent’s not bad either.
Does go on a bit, doesn’t it? Okay. So he says, yes, in fact, you know, God. Creates the whole universe in Genesis 34 verses, but for some Jews in the desert to build, you know, one synagogue takes like 600 verses, right? That’s what Rabbi Sacks said, because, you know, synagogues are built by committees, right? So it takes forever.
Okay. So he says, but what’s the larger lesson really? What’s it doing there? He says, because if you study the story of the tabernacle is, it’s a story of difference coming together in unity. Some people bring gold.
Some people bring silver. Some people have the skill of weaving, right? And what they do is they create a home we build together. Society, he says, is the home we build together.
It represents integration without assimilation. Now, of course, they’re all of one faith, the Israelites in the desert. But this inspires America, as Sacks writes, to understand what a covenantal society can be.
Integration without assimilation means not we want to do away with our differences, but we also can come together in conscious pursuit of a larger American creed. But of course, to do that, we need to believe that we are an exceptional nation. Not that we’re a perfect nation.
Of course, nobody believes that. But we are an exceptional nation with a creed to seek. That’s what it means to be a covenantal nation.
And we’re talking about religious freedom for everyone. The Jew, the Muslim, the atheist that doesn’t believe in God and having the freedom to not believe if they so choose. And anytime one group is shown disdain or they’re belittled or canceled or worse, that should concern all of us.
Because if one group is treated that way and we allow that, it’s not long before others. There’s a precedent set. And that’s why it’s so important that we can have conversations like this.
And so important that you would be here with us to have it. So thank you from the bottom of my heart. It just means so much that you would come out and that, Sully, I mean, if you think about this, the holiest week or 10 day period for the Jewish calendar, just finish, you know, Yom Kippur and it’s like, and why would you come to Little Rock on this day? So it’s actually one of the most moving things that I can experience.
What you said about religious liberty for everybody is exactly right. I’m on the board of the Beckett Fund, which is, I think, the premier religious liberty law firm in the United States. And we represent everybody.
Jews, Christians, Muslims, people of a whole panoply of faiths. There’s a wonderful, I was given the honor of being awarded the Canterbury Medal for activism for religious freedom by the Beckett Fund. And one of the best pictures from the event is one of our, one of the Beckett Fund’s plaintiffs that are represented was a Native American who couldn’t, because of environmental rules or something like that, was unable to travel with his Native American headdress and take it for his religious rituals.
So the Beckett Fund represented him. And so then he did our ritual dance at the dinner. And they have this amazing picture of him doing the dance.
His name is Pastor Soto. And my son at the time was now massive and 14 years old, but at the time was seven. He’s looking at him like, you know, he’d grown up in an Orthodox Jewish community and never seen anything like this.
He’s just looking. That’s the Beckett Fund, but that’s America. That’s America.
And so, but to come here and to be so warmly welcomed, it’s very meaningful because it has been a difficult year for the Jewish people. As I wrote in this piece of National Review I referenced, to come right after that and to be so warmly welcomed, really embraced is the word, makes you say, God bless America. That’s exactly how I feel.
Yeah. Well, on that note, he will be here to hang out if you have any other questions. Thank you again for being here.
What a pleasure. Thank you.
