That Christmas coincides with the first night of Chanukah this year is a happy reminder that the term “Judeo-Christianity” has long been used to imply a moral continuum, at least in America. In other parts of the world, people consider it oxymoronic. Since both holidays include a focus on the joy of little children encountering the ever-miraculous world, their exuberance serves to sustain us all when horror strikes—as it invariably does. The fortuitous coincidence bodes well for a nation and civilization in need of unity.
So, too, does another coincidence, the appointment on Nov. 24 of Rabbi Yechiel Leiter as Israel’s ambassador to Washington one year after he penned a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden, in which he noted their common birthplace of Scranton, Pa., where his own parents still live and his grandparents lie buried. In the letter, Leiter entreated the president not to prevent Israel from doing what it must. “Take it from one plain-speaking Scrantonian to another, we’re going to win this one, with you or without you.”
To underscore the uncompromising urgency of that determination, he wrote, “You know, Mr. President, better than most, the pain that I’m feeling now.” Leiter had invoked the most excruciating coincidence they shared for he read the letter out loud at the graveside of his own son—his eldest, Moshe.
A father of six and paramedic learning to become a doctor, Moshe Leiter died serving in the Israel Defense Forces after stepping on an explosive device in a Hamas tunnel. Speaking as one bereaved father to another but also as a compatriot, Leiter urged Biden to “stand with Moshe, who loved America and even trained with your Delta Force during his army service. Stand with my son who loved his people [and] his homeland, and who gave his life in the name of civility, justice and morality.”
Leiter then invoked the shared tradition of our two covenantal nations: “What I want to say to you about my dear Moshe, who was proud of his parents’ and grandparents’ American heritage, was that he was fighting your fight, Mr. President. He was fighting our fight. … He gave his life so the barbarians wouldn’t get through the gates of our democracies, of our Judeo-Christian Western values. He was fighting for human freedom and against all the lies and distortions of the freedom-deniers, who unfortunately fool so many Americans with their double talk.”
Leiter has studied the history of those values. In his copiously researched book John Locke’s Political Philosophy and the Hebrew Bible, published by the University of Cambridge Press in 2018, Leiter explains that America’s founding commitment to the inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” rightly considered to reflect Locke’s own formulation in the “Second Treatise on Government” of “life, liberty and property” can best be understood when read together with Locke’s almost unknown “First Treatise.” In it, Locke rejects Robert Filmer’s reading of Genesis, whereby a king is supposedly Divinely chosen to descend “directly” from Adam, thereby justifying his right to rule over others.
By contrast, Locke argued that Genesis provides a creationist doctrine that considers Adam the ancestor of us all. He believed that this alone provides the moral basis for an egalitarian and just society, where every individual is endowed with inalienable rights. Divine human creation creates an imperative for self-preservation and thus, by extension, an obligation to respect everyone else. This is made possible by consensual government, deriving its legitimacy from the will of the people. The declaration echoes this biblical idea, even if its practical application has been late and still imperfect, proceeding in anything but a straight line.
It will be interesting therefore to watch this rabbi-scholar-diplomat arrive in Washington at a time when identity politics rejects the fundamental creed of the nation, the principle of human equality. While claiming anti-racism, identity politics presupposes it. That it does so by invoking a deceptively similar sounding, yet manifestly antithetical, notion of “equity” is no ordinary chutzpah. The refurbished neo-Marxist antinomy pitting the oppressed against oppressors can tear this country apart, and some of its proponents seem to desire just that.
Multiple surveys indicate that antisemitism—the quintessential racist ideology—has reached epidemic proportions in the United States, especially inside the academy, K-12 public education, and the media and publishing industries. Fortunately, it seems that a sizable majority of the population outside of the “eliteocracy” rejects this trend. Will a mercurial President-elect Donald Trump be able to turn this polarized culture, which threatens not only America but Western civilization?
The new American-born Israeli ambassador, invoking his own suffering and his country’s agony as it fights for its life while still hoping to return the hostages, can tell Trump what he had told his predecessor: “Never have the people of Israel been so united. This is our job; it is what the Jewish people are here in this world to do—to help fix it. Sometimes fixing the world means using strength and military power. Perhaps, just as we read in the biblical book of Esther it is the whole reason you are the leader of the free world at this particular time.”
America shares with Israel a commitment to genuine peaceful coexistence—not the Communist big-lie version nor the extremist Islamic variety. But much as we in the West wish that we can fulfill Isaiah’s promise of turning swords into plowshares, fixing this increasingly chaotic and dangerous world requires using strength and military power.
Since the word com in Medieval Latin means “with, together” and incidere is “to fall upon,” we are coincidentally linked by a common vision: Together, we will not fall. So, this year, as we celebrate both Christmas and Chanukah, why not have everyone raise a toast invoking the words of the beloved carol “Joy to the World!” If joy is asking too much, we could just settle for L’chaim!