There are few things that better illustrate the hyper-partisanship currently prevailing in the American public square than the way many on the left are reacting to the planned celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The fact that the person who will be presiding over the semiquincentennial festivities is President Donald Trump has cast a pall over everything being done to commemorate the birth of the American republic. Or at least it has for the many Americans who don’t merely oppose Trump, but regard him with such detestation to the point at which they are prepared to oppose just about anything he does or is associated with.
And that goes double for liberal Jews who are particularly annoyed that Trump has gone out of his way to include their community in the national shindig.
Shabbat 250
Rather than merely acknowledge the annual recognition of May as Jewish Heritage Month—along with the countless other such months highlighting a myriad of groups, faiths, ethnicities and special interests—the president added on something else. He called on “Americans to celebrate their faith and freedom throughout this year, during this month, and especially on Shabbat to celebrate our 250th year.”
That announcement gave birth to “Shabbat 250”—to be held on the second Sabbath of May from sundown on the evening of Friday, May 15 until sundown on Saturday, May 16, during which Jews and non-Jews can not only take their weekly break from everyday life, but also contemplate the blessings of American liberty.
But, rather than embracing this unprecedented recognition of the cornerstone of Jewish faith and its incorporation into the fabric of the national celebration, some Jews are, predictably, deeply troubled by it.
The left-wing Jewish Council on Public Affairs, the network of Jewish community relations councils that was once associated with federations but now is an independent partisan outfit, was outraged. Amy Spitalnick, its CEO, sputtered her indignation about the alleged violation of the separation of church and state. The Forward’s coverage of the event focused primarily on the fact that “Shabbat 250” preceded by a day “Rededicate 250,” a May 17 event that will celebrate the country’s history of faith and its importance in the founding. The very notion of acknowledging the Christian faith of the founders and the role it played in establishing the nation and its traditions of liberty is odious to those who are as disturbed by the presence of believers in the public square as they are by Trump.
Indeed, as EJewish Philanthropy reported, while many Jewish groups were scrambling to put together programming for the national Shabbat, particularly in the Orthodox community, others were distinctly nonplussed. Some, including rabbis, expressed concerns that the president’s honoring the Jewish day of rest in this manner would somehow erode religious freedom.
That is counterintuitive, but it makes sense to political liberals who have long held that Jewish security lies in erasing expressions of faith from the American public square. Indeed, many Jews seem to believe that if religion is treated as central to our national culture and identity, the fact that the majority of Americans are Christian inevitably means that Jews will suffer discrimination or be deprived of their rights.
That stance made sense in the context of the European countries of origin for the Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In such countries where religions were enmeshed in government and law, Jews were not merely persecuted; they were considered inherently alien.
Fear of religion
But when transplanted to America, those fears confused a rational concern about being treated as a minority whose tenuous security depended on toleration with the reality of life in the United States. While the majority culture here was undoubtedly Christian, with no sect or denomination having the privileged position as the established religion, a tradition of equality for all faiths was the rule rather than the exception.
And though antisemitism was far from unknown throughout American history, it was not a matter of law or state policy, and the few exceptions to that rule (such as Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s infamous 1862 Order No. 11expelling Jews from Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky) were quickly rescinded as illegal and unconstitutional.
Nevertheless, in the 20th century, liberal Jews were in the forefront of an effort to raise the “wall of separation” so high as to essentially relegate religion to a subordinate status within the nation’s civic culture. But while the most significant of these efforts, such as the banning of prayer from schools, eliminated situations in which religious minorities were made to feel uncomfortable, the notion that such measures made Jews safer was highly dubious, at best.
What it led to was the expectation—primarily among mostly secular Jews—that they ought never to be confronted with the faith of the majority, even in the most friendly and unthreatening circumstances.But there were two problems with this mindset that promoted a wall of separation so high as to marginalize or ostracize faith.
One was that it was naturally resented by the majority of Americans, who saw nothing wrong, let alone an expression of hostility to minorities, in the country acknowledging their faith. The other was that such notions of a purely secular republic—in thought as well as deed—was as ahistorical as it was inimical to Jewish safety.
A tradition of faith
The founders of the American republic were at pains not to repeat the religious wars that had characterized so much of the history of modern Europe—including in England to which most of them looked for inspiration and tradition—and thus made sure not to establish any of the Christian sects to which they belonged as the official religion of the new nation. But they were far from hostile to faith.
To the contrary, the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, looks directly to faith as the wellspring of American liberty. Thomas Jefferson’s text speaks of a new nation rooted in “The Laws of Nature” and “Nature’s God.” Above all, it says that the rights of citizens are not the gift of any monarch or government, but rather derive from God. Americans are, it said, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
And while the Constitution didn’t mention God or faith, the First Amendment that was added to it, ensured that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
As John Adams —who was not only a driving force behind the Declaration, but became the nation’s first vice president and second president —made it clear, the edifice the founders had created was not only not inimical to faith; it depended on it. He wrote in 1798, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Yet this strong strain of reliance on faith is resisted in some quarters by those, including many Jews, who see any acknowledgement of these obvious truths to be a cause for alarm.
Washington prayed
Indeed, something as innocuous as the notion that President George Washington prayed, is still controversial.
Just this week, The New York Times took time out from its antisemitic campaign against Israel to take a shot at one element of the America 250 celebrations by claimingthat the ubiquity of the 1976 painting of Arnold Friberg, “Prayer at Valley Forge,” is an ominous sign of the rise of “Christian nationalism.”
The painting is based on something in the popular Washington hagiography by Parson Mason Locke Weems, who helped popularize an array of myths about the first president, including the apocryphal story about his chopping down a cherry tree as a boy. It may be that there is no documentation for a specific incident in which the commander of the Continental Army dropped to his knees in the snow at Valley Forge during the darkest days of the American Revolution as the painting depicts. But by the same token, it is utterly implausible to assert that the general never prayed while trying to keep his army of starving and shivering patriots together in the winter of 1777-78. He was, after all, a religious person and an active member of the Anglican Church, rather than an irreligious Deist as some claim.
Yet those who are determined to preserve a dubious freedom from religion rather than freedom of religion that the founders deeply believed in, are offended by the use of the painting in the government’s America 250 celebrations.
Trump’s special attention to Jewish heritage can also trace its origins back to Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. In it he promised the small community of Jews then living in the United States that the American republic “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” and expressed the hope: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
That Trump should honor Shabbat in this manner is also not merely in keeping with American traditions, but an important contribution to the fight against the surge of antisemitism that has made itself felt since the Hamas-led Palestinian-Arab terror attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Partisanship or Jewish security
Trump’s efforts to fight Jew-hatred on college campuses and threats to defund elite universities that tolerate and encourage the targeting of Jews were vital to Jewish security. But they were met with opposition from some of the same liberals who are angry about his honoring Sabbath observance. They are so immersed in partisan hatred for him that they’d rather preserve the reign of woke diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) on campuses that grants a permission slip to antisemitism than give him credit for seeking to end it.
That is a reminder that the absence of faith in the public square is a far greater problem for Jews in 21st-century America than any lowering of the metaphorical wall of separation. It is the aggressive secularism and hostility to faith of leftists whose toxic ideologies are the engine of contemporary antisemitism that threatens Jews today far more than an acknowledgment that Christianity is an important element of the American political tradition. While the neo-Marxist left that encourages mobs to chant for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews everywhere (“Globalize the intifada”), it is evangelical Christians who are the greatest defenders of Israel and Jewish rights.
A riposte to the Jew-haters
It is true that there is a growing hostility to Jews, Judaism and Israel among a minority on the American right, and given expression by antisemitic podcasters like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and the neo-Nazi groyper Nick Fuentes. They might well be termed “Christian nationalists” who are determined to discriminate against Jews. But what better riposte to their hateful messages could there be than Trump’s embrace of Shabbat as part of “America 250?”
It is not just that his daughter, Ivanka, son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and their children are Jewish. By including Jews and Shabbat in the celebration, Trump is, as he has done throughout his two terms in the White House, making it clear that Jews are not isolated or alone in this difficult time.
By acknowledging that “the contributions of Jewish Americans have shaped our past, have strengthened our communities and will continue to inspire American greatness for generations to come,” Trump is doing more to fight antisemitism than any effort to erase Christianity from national forums.
Jews need not be frightened by honoring America’s religious heritage. To the contrary, by shining a spotlight on Shabbat, Trump is honoring the growing interest in the day of rest among Christians as well as Jews. Even as Carlson, Owens and Fuentes, abetted by Megyn Kelly, stoke the fires of hatred against Jews, others, such as the late Charlie Kirk, espoused an affinity for Judaism and for Shabbat observance —the subject of his last book, Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life, which was published posthumously. Observant Jews have long understood that, as the writer Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzburg) wrote, “More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.” Many Christians are now realizing that it can help them, too, and that is something that Jews of all denominations and beliefs should welcome.
Trump’s narcissism and love of grandiose gestures make it hard for his political opponents to make their peace with the fact that the Declaration’s anniversary will be celebrated on his watch. But instead of opposing “Shabbat 250,” the Jewish community should recognize and be grateful for this timely rebuke of the antisemitism growing on the left and on the far-right.
Just as faith has always been an important element of the American experiment, the same is true of the Jewish contribution to the nation. Some would prefer to ignore or deprecate the flag-waving patriotism of the republic’s 250th birthday party out of spite against Trump or devotion to an ahistorical and destructive secularism as well as separationism. But anyone who cares about America’s civil religion of liberty should join with Trump in celebrating Shabbat and honoring the role of faith in preserving a republic dedicated to freedom.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
