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Religion See other Religion Articles Title: Living as Jews in Christian America (Beyond Excellent) As a boy I hungrily absorbed the eye-opening Torah teaching of my father, the late Avraham Chayim Lapin z”tzl, along with his terrifying tales of the viciousness of Lithuanian and Polish “goyim” that he endured while a student at Telshe Yeshiva in pre-World War II Europe. I quickly came to understand. “Goyim” hate Jews and try to hurt them. That is all there was to it. Later, as a student at that famed yeshiva located amidst some of the worst slums of northern England, I learned the rough-and-ready science of self defense on the streets of Gateshead. Lurking in the dark alleys that lay between the Beit Midrash and our lodgings, Gateshead “goyim” waited eagerly to prey and pounce upon me and my fellow talmidim. The contrast between those sinister streets full of Tyneside louts with their foul mouths and flying fists and the refined atmosphere of the yeshiva was almost beyond comprehension. My uncles, the distinguished roshei yeshiva, Reb Leib Gurwitz z”tzl and Reb Leib Lapian z”tzl, occasionally commented upon the bloody battle scars borne by their students. Although they would remind us that “goyim” hate Jews, almost as the fulfillment of ancient prophecies, I think they both would have preferred us to evade trouble rather than confronting it. I think they also suspected that their nephew derived more than a little unholy glee from inflicting retaliatory punishment upon our tormentors. During summer trips to France, Switzerland, and other European tourist destinations, I came to experience further evidence that “goyim” hate Jews and try to hurt us. And with all my travels, it was not until my late twenties that for the first time I crossed the Atlantic and came to America. Hoping to see as much as possible of this vast new land during the short visit I had planned, I picked up a full set of United States maps from the now defunct Texaco store in mid-town Manhattan. Returning to my Brooklyn boarding house, I set the maps out on a large table and began poring over them in eager anticipation of my forthcoming road trip. Suddenly my eye locked on to the town of Salem in Kentucky. Wow! Salem is the Biblical name for Jerusalem. How weird, I thought, as the ancient words of Genesis echoed in my mind: “And Malchizedek, King of Salem, brought out bread and wine” as he prepared to bless Avraham Avinu. How could the king that Rashi identifies as Shem, the son of Noah, of the city that Unkelos identifies as Jerusalem, come to life in a small southern town. I was jolted from this reverie as Salem, Massachusetts leaped at me off the page. Then Salem, Oregon, and then, my goodness, Salem, Illinois, followed by Salem, Indiana, Salem, Arkansas, and then nineteen other Salems! I was aware of no other Salems in any of the many other countries I had visited in Africa and Europe. What was going on here? As if hypnotized, my gaze was drawn to Hebron, Texas, then Hebron, Ohio, followed by nine more Hebrons. With maps flailing around the table, I quickly homed in on Zion, New Jersey, Zion, South Carolina, and another six Zions. How about Jericho, I wondered. Well, there just for starters was Jericho, Vermont and Jericho, New York. The mountain of Moses, Har Nevo, memorialized in Nebo, Louisiana, and Nebo, Missouri along with two or three others. (Remember that the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet reads as either a ‘b’ or a ‘v’ depending on punctuation.) How about twenty or so Lebanons or New Lebanons, eight Bethlehems, about a dozen Bethels (mouth of God) and a Piel, Washington, (mouth of God). Rehoboth, Goshen, Canaan, and New Cannan. There was no end to this! But you get the idea. To a recent arrival in New York with the dust of Kennedy airport still on his hat, this was all quite an astounding discovery. Still, I assumed that everyone else knew of this and so I felt quite ignorant. Heading out to the nearest shul for a mincha minyan, I eagerly awaited the end of the davening so I could inquire of the rabbi. I asked him who were the remarkable people who came to this country and could find no better names for their new homes than Biblical place names? To my astonishment he seemed to be not only unaware but also indifferent. I tried other synagogues and other rabbis yet few were able to provide a persuasive explanation for why of all countries, America alone had been populated by people seemingly in love with Tanach. There and then, although it involved several subsequent years as an illegal alien, I resolved not to leave this country until I fully understood who these remarkable people really were. By the time I came to know and understand them, I no longer wished to leave and here among their children and amidst several million of my brethren I have been ever since. Let me tell you a little about what I came to learn about those people for in coming to understand the fathers, I came to know the children. And in knowing the children, today’s American Christians, I came to see why America has offered our people the safest, most tranquil, most durable, and most prosperous home we have enjoyed in the past two thousand years. You will see that we Jews have enjoyed this unprecedented paradise, not in spite of the Biblical values of its founders but precisely because of them. But before examining the unique peculiarities of American Christians, let us glance at how our sages were already viewing early Christianity. British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that R. Menahem Ha-Meiri, the fourteenth century Provencal scholar, introduced a new perspective in framing relations between Jews and the wider Christian societies in which they lived. It has already been stated that these things [laws relating to gentiles] were said concerning periods when there existed nations of idolaters, and they were contaminated in their deeds and tainted in their dispositions . . . but other nations, which are restrained by the ways of religion and which are free from such blemishes of character - on the contrary, they even punish such deeds - are, without doubt, exempt from this prohibition. (Meiri, Bet Habechirah, Avodah Zarah) He explains that according to Meiri, all mishnaic rules circumscribing business and other transactions with non-Jews are to be understood as referring to pagan or polytheistic cultures, no longer extant, which in addition to being idolatrous were also unprincipled in their dealings with people. That has now changed. The nations amongst whom Jews lived were now "restrained by the ways of religion" and were therefore to be regarded as on a par with the "resident alien" of biblical times, namely as "the pious of the nations of the world." The introduction to R. Jonathan Eybeschutz's halakhic commentary, Kreti uPleti makes the same assertion about European Christians though their devotion to Tanach and its Jewish interpretation doesn’t come close to that of American Christians. The Christian nations among whom we live, broadly uphold the principles of justice and righteousness, believe in the creation of the world and the existence of God, and in the Law of Moses and the prophets, and oppose the Sadducean view that denies the resurrection of the dead and the immortality of the soul. Therefore it is fitting to be thankful to them, to praise and extol them, and to bring upon them blessings and not, God forbid, curses. This is a far cry from the way so many American Jews view Christians in spite of the fact that American Christians are even more righteous in the terms of Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz. For instance, in its early pre-Revolutionary-War years, Harvard, a college founded by Puritans who were denied higher education in England, placed a far greater emphasis on the study of the Bible in its original Hebrew than any other university in the world. By 1776 ten universities stood on American soil and they all required study of the Bible in Hebrew. Puritan minister Increase Mather, a future president of Harvard, was named thus because his parents translated the Hebrew name Yoseif correctly. His son Cotton (katan) Mather later became a founder of Yale. American Christians do love Jews and Israel and much of their reason lies in the vision of the Founders who saw America as trying to step under the protective umbrella of God’s covenant with ancient Israel. For instance, Jefferson Adams, Madison and almost all of America’s Founders were indirectly initiated into much of the Oral Torah, the commentaries that British author George Eliot termed “the great transmitters.” Their direct sources, especially John Locke, developed their theories of individual rights, property rights, religious toleration, and a federal republic form government based on the biblically derived theories of great 17th century scholars such as British Jurist John Selden and Hugo Grotius along with his Dutch contemporaries who in turn were taught by the Dutch rabbi, Menashe ben Israel, close confidante of the artist, Rembrandt, and friend of Oliver Cromwell. Grotius, Selden and their contemporaries developed their “laws of nations” and theories of “natural law” based on the teaching of Rambam, whom they quote and the oral Torah, including extensive study of the Noachide laws. Their theories focused on the first chapters of Genesis, which they understood as having universal application to all mankind, and they became the philosophical foundation for the creation of America. To understand this sudden outburst of learning about Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, we have to realize that the 17th century followed the protestant Reformation of the 16th century, which allowed Christians for the first time to read the Bible without the filter of the Catholic Church. Protestants began to search for the true meaning of the words they were reading for the first time, especially in the “Old Testament,” and turned to Hebrew and eventually the Jewish sages, most prominently Rambam. His influence on the intellectual development of the 17th century, including upon giants like Isaac Newton, is now just beginning to be understood by scholars. The Reformation and the newly developed yearning for political and religious freedom helped to sculpt the milieu in which the Pilgrims left England in 1608, first for Leyden, Holland where they studied Hebrew and then in 1621 on the Mayflower for what its second governor, William Bradford, called the Plymouth Plantation. Bradford brought to America what is considered by most historians one of the first Hebrew to English translation and commentary on the Chumash and Psalms by the Christian Hebraist, Henry Ainsworth (1612). This voluminous commentary contains extensive quotes and explanations from Rambam (Mishneh Torah and Moreh Nevuchim), Targum Yonatan, R’ Menachem Recanti, Pirke D’Rabbi Eliezer, and other leading sages. Through Ainsworth, America’s earliest settlers were exposed to the Noachide laws, the true meaning of “an eye for an eye,” and many other traditional Jewish interpretations of the Torah. One of my most treasured possessions is a reproduction of William Bradford’s seventeenth century book, History of the Plymouth Plantation. Bradford, who had come over on the Mayflower, was the second governor of the colony and filled the first twenty or so pages of his manuscript with words and sentences in Biblical Hebrew which he painstakingly translated. He describes Hebrew as the language in which God spoke to the patriarchs and the language in which Adam named all creatures and explains this as the reason he wanted to study the Lord’s language. Thomas Jefferson would later describe Hebrew as “the very language of the divine communication.” As Samuel P. Huntington writes, “Americans have always been extremely religious and overwhelmingly Christian. The 17th-century settlers founded their communities in America in large part for religious reasons. Eighteenth-century Americans saw their Revolution in religious and largely biblical terms.” Whether by chance or Providence, America was founded at the optimum time in European intellectual history. After Locke, European intellectuals de-Christianized and de-Judaized their political ideas. They abandoned the biblically based foundation of human rights and political liberty for the Godless theories of the Enlightenment, some of which were based on ideas from secular Jews such as Spinoza. This diversion helps explain explains why Europe’s political development was so differently from America’s and why America has been such a special place for Jews and Christians. When New York University was established early in the 19th century, one of the first professors hired was a Protestant clergyman as the professor of Hebrew. His name, as Professor Shalom Goldman reminds us, was George Bush, an ancestor of President George W. Bush. As recently as 1982, a joint resolution passed by the 97th Congress of the United States declared: “Whereas the Bible, the Word of God, has made a unique contribution in shaping the United States as a distinctive and blessed nation and people; Whereas deeply held religious convictions springing from the Holy Scriptures led to the early settlement of our Nation; Whereas Biblical teachings inspired concepts of civil government that are contained in our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States; Whereas many of our great national leaders - among them Presidents Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, and Truman - paid tribute to the surpassing influence of the Bible in our country's development, as in the words of President Jackson that the Bible is "the rock on which our Republic rests.” I found it hard to deny. America’s culture is Biblical, an amalgam of Jewish and Christian values, and so is our government. This may sound strange. We are told that the genius of our constitutional government lies precisely in the fact that it separates church from state. That of course is a distortion of the historical reality. Permit me to dispel the myth that sees nothing Biblical in the form of American government. The historian Robert Bellah wrote that "The Bible was the one book that literate Americans in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries could be expected to know well. Biblical imagery provided the basic framework for imaginative thought in America up until quite recent times; and unconsciously, its control is still formidable." Ezra Stiles, president of Yale University , went farther. He called our country "God's American Israel." One of his closest friends was Rabbi Chayim Yitzchak Carigal who was born in Hebron, Palestine in 1733. In many ways the Founders of American democracy looked for inspiration to the Torah. I find evidence of this in the chapters in Deuteronomy that prescribe the form of government which God ordained for Bnai Yisrael. The first sentence of the Torah portion of Shoftim, explains how government officials are to be appointed: "Judges and officers shall you appoint in your gates…" The words translated "your gates" (sh'arechah) are explained by Jewish tradition to mean that these officials are to be appointed on a city-by-city basis. In other words, what the Torah is prescribing is federalism, a system of emphatically local government where officers are drawn from the local populace, not from a far-away capitol. Their perspective will then be local, not national. City customs and manners will be observed and respected, rather than being trampled upon by bureaucrats who think they know better. Another fascinating indication of how government is to be organized may be found elsewhere in Tanach, in Isaiah's prophecies: "For the Lord is our Judge; the Lord is our Lawgiver; the Lord is our King…" Here, I think it's clear to see, is the tripartite system of administration found in the Constitution, with its judicial, legislative, and executive branches. It is also fascinating that the names referring to God in the Declaration of Independence are not names specific to Christianity such as son, savior, or holy spirit, but names drawn from the Hebrew Bible – Creator, Lawgiver, Judge, and Providence. In a later Deuteronomy chapter, we find the laws pertaining to the chief executive officer of the government –in Israel 's case, a king. In America our CEO is called the president, but one notes many striking parallels. In choosing our leader, the very first criterion the Torah sets out is that he is to be native-born: "from among your brethren shall you set a king over yourself; you cannot place over yourself a foreign man, who is not your brother". Other nations have experimented with foreign-born rulers, and have seen for themselves the catastrophes this can bring. Germany had Hitler, an Austrian. Russia had Stalin, a Georgian. France had Napoleon, a Corsican. The man appointed to rule a country of which is not a native lacks the feeling of brotherhood with its citizens that would restrain the hand and the will of a leader who is native-born. The foreigner takes chances with his adopted country in pursuit of his own glory, or his own twisted ideals. God knows this and directed Israel to choose wisely. America 's Founders knew it too, and ordained that the American president should be native-born. Some will argue that the king of Israel could not possibly have provided inspiration to the Founders. After all, not only is there no church-state separation in the form of government described in the Torah: the church, so to speak, is the state. And yet it's more complicated than that, for Torah-based government does provide a kind of parallel to our Constitution's prohibition of a state church. While the king is clearly a religious leader - after all, he carries a scroll of the Torah with him at all times (see Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Melachim 3:1) - this monarch is expressly not meant to be a priest, a cohen. The priesthood is drawn from the tribe of Levi, while the king comes from the tribe of Judah. This is a significant division of responsibility and one that was explored in Selden’s final but uncompleted work on the Sanhedrin as a model for the coordination, and separation of the three great types of laws governing mankind that Locke would later summarize as: “the divine law, the civil law, and the law of opinion and reputation.” We have here not any crude "separation" of religious and secular authority, as First Amendment extremists call for today. Rather, God sets up an exquisite tension, a unique balance. The authority of the king is not priestly, but it is informed by religious precept, symbolized by the Torah scroll the monarch carries. So too, again, with our own American Republic, where the president's authority is separate from that of any particular church, but where the government as a whole is meant to imbued, uplifted, and inspired by the values of faith and tradition. It gradually became clear to me why early Americans named their towns and villages after the places in which our forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob dwelled. It also became clear to me that their descendants retained complete conviction in the verse from Genesis—“I will bless those that bless you and those that curse you shall I curse.” For them, it provided the reason that God had so obviously blessed the United States of America and would continue to bless this land so long as its citizens continued to bless the descendants of Abraham. In February of 2004 I was privileged to call together a private meeting of twenty Evangelical Christian leaders in Washington DC at the request of a top Israeli government official who wished to meet with them. I am not at liberty to disclose the purpose of the meeting but I can tell you that the Israeli government representative whose name you would immediately recognize was as profoundly moved as was I by some statements made by several of the Christian leaders present. These men, whose televised messages are carried each day into upwards of twenty million American homes, told of how their mothers had made them listen to the radio as Israel came into existence in 1948, or for the younger ones how their mothers relayed the same message in front of the television in 1967. Their mothers carefully explained to them that this was the moment of God keeping His promise to the Chosen People. They pointed to this transmission from their mothers as the source of their love for Israel and the Jewish people, not speculative theories of the “end times” that they would only learn of as adults. Which brings us to our neighbors and friends in America today, the Evangelical Right. Do they want to convert us to Christianity? Of course they would like to do so. However what a blessed time we live in when Christians want to convert us with words rather than with guns and knives. We live in a time and place where constitutional guarantees assure us that only words will be used, but we should remember that these guarantees were all derived from the Word of God. It is useful to realize that throughout our history, when we have been given the choice of renouncing our faith or being murdered, we Jews have nearly always chosen death. If forced to choose we have always preferred a soul without a body to a body without a soul. American Christians do not threaten our bodies and while it is true that their teachings can threaten our souls, the enemy in this case is not Christianity but Jewish ignorance. When a disease invades a country’s borders, the first step is not trying to destroy the disease (especially if that is not possible) but it is inoculating the population. However we can never force people to get inoculated, can we? Most of our communities do have rabbinic resources to inoculate our spiritually vulnerable young people. We can’t force parents to use these resources but perhaps our Jewish federations and other organizations can help advertise the existence of these inoculating resources. Regardless of how distressing it is to see alienated Jews abandoning our faith, I am convinced that attempting to silence, reprove, or condemn Christians in an effort to prevent Jews converting to Christianity is not a really effective approach. One problem is that it causes resentment without accomplishing very much. You see, some Christians regard Evangelism to be the greatest act of religious fervor. It is unlikely that Jewish opposition will discourage them. Our noisy opposition often comes across as futile blustering and bullying. After all, they too have a long tradition of sacrificing for their faith and won’t cease on our account. However we will risk squandering a special friendship that may be God’s gift to us during perilous times. Many Christians are as aware as we are that we are losing far more Jews to Scientology, to Hindu-related faiths, and to just plain secular hedonism than we are to Christianity. They wonder, with some justification, why as a community, we are not protesting Scientology’s outreach, Krishna outreach efforts, and the seduction of secularism as ardently as we seem to protest Christian outreach. They sense that we Jews harbor a special and unique antagonism toward Christianity. While we undoubtedly retain an institutional memory of many years of Christian persecution, most American Christians are Protestants, not Catholics, and I have not been able to locate a single verifiable account of any Protestant pogroms. Martin Luther may not have had warm feelings toward us, but neither he nor his followers seem to have acted upon those feelings in any way that harmed Jews or their property. In the same way that we object to being blamed for the death of Jesus, American Protestants object to being blamed for the suffering of Jews in Europe. After all, they point out, not a single American Jew has ever been murdered, mugged, robbed or raped by Christians on their way home from church on Sunday morning. I have spent well over a quarter of a century of my life deeply committed to teaching Judaism to Jews brought up in ignorance about their religion. When Jewish Americans know the name of Jesus’ mother but not that of Moses’ mother; when they know more of Khalil Gibran than they do of the Kuzari, when they cannot understand or even read the Bible in its original Hebrew; when they find more warmth in the Christian community than in the Jewish one, then it is a Jewish—not a Christian—problem. Christian leaders, among them, Reverend Jerry Falwell, have told me that Evangelistic efforts are not effective among practicing religious and Torah educated Jews. But many Jews of our generation have never been exposed to authentic Judaism. They aren’t rebellious, they are simply ignorant. It is true that they are tragically vulnerable to spiritual seduction. To my dismay, a heartbreaking occurrence often takes place in one form or another after I speak to Christian audiences; a lovely sincere member of the audience comes up after my speech to tell me that she was raised in a non observant Jewish home. At some time she felt an emptiness and attempted to attend synagogue, often even meeting with the local rabbi, usually a rabbi from the Reform movement which is overwhelmingly politically liberal and opposed to traditional Jewish law. Instead of receiving spiritual guidance on drawing closer to a loving God and advice on how to enhance her life by “Living Jewish,” she was told how Judaism today was expressed by social action, by changing the world. Her Jewish soul was still parched and what is more, she wasn’t convinced that the liberal social causes she was urged to advocate were right. The rabbi seemed willing to cut out parts of the Torah that disagreed with the politically correct social conscience of the day, so it didn’t seem that he even took his religion seriously. Totally unaware that this rabbi didn’t represent an authentic connection with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, she kept up her search for meaning and eventually found it in Christianity, still in total ignorance of her own faith. Many times have I been grateful that my presence provided a last ditch opportunity for such a person to reexamine Judaism. Not only is it wrong to blame Christians for such conversions, it is not effective. When Europe blamed the Jews for the Black Death and went on a murderous rampage, they not only committed a great evil, but they also failed to find the real cause. Having a scapegoat may have kept them from discovering the real cause of the plague sooner. When Jews blame Christians for their children’s conversions, they are finding a scapegoat—albeit without the shedding of blood—and they are not dealing with the real cause, an abysmal ignorance of Judaism and a disinclination to recognize Judaism as a God-centered religion instead of a Woody Allen fan club. The loss will be stemmed not by attacking Christians but by teaching authentic Judaism to Jews. If we Jews were ever to find a sword at our throats or a .357 Magnum at our foreheads and an ultimatum to convert to Christianity, as has happened in other places and at other times, I would agree that we have a problem. But if American law, which prohibits people from pointing weapons at one another, were to be abrogated sufficiently to allow forced conversions to Christianity, then I can assure you that American Jews, like other Americans, will have bigger problems than religious freedom. On occasion a sincere Christian, wanting to share something he considers to be of inestimable value has invited my children to contemplate a relationship with Jesus. My son and my daughters respond politely and respectfully while firmly declining. Their faith was not threatened for a moment. This is because my wife and I made it an absolute priority to introduce our children to God from their earliest years. Each evening we helped them say and understand the pre-Shema prayer, “With an abundant love you love us Oh Lord our God.” Sadly, many Jews would immediately suspect this to be a Christian prayer, just as some would become indignant at a public reading of another prayer they assume to be Christian, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Our problem is that we have failed to mass market the only ultimately compelling reasons for being Jewish: an infatuation with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and a love affair with the searing truth of Torah, the revelation of the totality of all existence. By comparison with the clinical coldness of what passes for Judaism in America’s Jewish Community Centers, Christianity, to many, seems to hold a monopoly on spiritual warmth. Trying to silence Christians, for whom Evangelical activism is as central tenet of faith as circumcision is to us, is hardly the answer. I do think it is important to observe that Judaism and Christianity are two completely separate and incompatible faiths. However we are blessed to live in a country whose Christians do not hate us. Instead, they wish to learn from us and bring greater spiritual authenticity into their own lives. There is no way this can hurt us. The number of churches that hold “Passover Seders” grows exponentially each year. The number of Christian booksellers that carry in stock books from Artscroll and other Jewish publishers grows each year. What a perfect time to project simultaneous friendship toward our Christian fellow citizens and warm embrace to our alienated Jewish brethren. Finally, I think we can gain from recognizing that for this blessed little moment of history, we American Jews are living in a splendidly sunny Diaspora. Anyone who thinks that today’s American Protestants are indistinguishable from the “goyim” of Europe is simply ignorant of what life in the streets of European cities is really like. It is also perhaps a shocking example of showing no Hakarat HaTov—gratitude—for God’s providence in providing us with friends at a time when we have precious few. It would surely be astonishingly arrogant to suppose that our small nation should repay good with evil by shunning the hand of friendship extended by American Christians who ask nothing in return. One hundred million Moslems around the world hold little affection for us. Here in America, added to large Muslim immigration, there are many, particularly in our prisons, who are adopting Islam as their faith. Candor, necessary in times of peril, compels us to admit that the dream of black-Jewish friendship is no more than a fantasy. Only among those who cherish Jewish-Christian friendship based, not on a common theology, but on a shared vision of America’s Biblical blueprint, does one find genuine friendship between African Americans and Jews. Otherwise, elsewhere in America, as Time Magazine polls repeatedly reveal, large pockets of virulent anti-Semitism exist in the black community. The increasingly secular left wing of the Democratic Party and the academic world of the university campus can barely conceal their contempt for Israel and for the religious values so central to our existence. Not a lot of people like us. So now, some in our community actually believe that we ought to go out of our way to reject the friendship of perhaps the only large demographic in America that loves us? Doing so would totally refute all myths of Jewish intelligence. It would also be profoundly immoral. After WW I the communists condemned the great twentieth century Jewish leader Rabbi Yechezkel Abramsky to a life sentence in the Soviet Gulag. High level diplomatic efforts conducted in great secrecy by the British Government on behalf of Anglo Jewry secured his release in 1933. The Russians immediately expelled him to London, where he became a dayan of the London Beit Din, which is to say, a justice on the supreme Jewish court of the British Empire. Much later, I attended a public discussion on the Holocaust at which Rabbi Abramsky refuted the notion that anti-Semitism was somehow endemic to Germans. A member of the audience, agreeing, suggested the Holocaust could really have happened anywhere. But he then remembered Rabbi Abramsky's debt of gratitude to the British Government and with sensitivity to the Jewish principle of gratitude, he added, “excepting England, of course.” And Rabbi Abramsky looked very sadly at the speaker and he said "No, even in England." Before the stunned London audience could recover, Rabbi Abramsky continued "but probably not in America." Years later, learning at Kol Torah, I often visited with Rabbi Abramsky at his Jerusalem home to where he had retired. More than once I referred back to the London lecture. And I asked him "Why not in America?" He would only smile at me and repeat "No, no, not in America. No, not in America." I am not saying that things will forever be good. We are in the Galut, even in America. However there is no mitzvah in accelerating bad times. Let’s not behave in the foolish ways prohibited by our sages, that, God forbid, could turn friends into enemies and undo Rabbi Abramsky’s optimistic prophecy. The End
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#2. To: Jhoffa_ (#0)
Whether by chance or Providence, America was founded at the optimum time in European intellectual history. After Locke, European intellectuals de-Christianized and de-Judaized their political ideas. They abandoned the biblically based foundation of human rights and political liberty for the Godless theories of the Enlightenment, some of which were based on ideas from secular Jews such as Spinoza. This diversion helps explain explains why Europe’s political development was so differently from America’s and why America has been such a special place for Jews and Christians. The historian Robert Bellah wrote that "The Bible was the one book that literate Americans in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries could be expected to know well. Bookmarked to finish later. Thanks for posting. His viewpoint is interesting.
See my reply re Lapin and his connections to Abramoff, Rove and Norquist.
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