Birthdays are an important time to celebrate what we’ve accomplished, contemplate what we can improve, and commit to doing all we can to identify opportunities that advance and realize maximum potential.
It’s a time for family and friends to wish us all that we wish for ourselves, and, knowing we’re all busy living our lives and may forget things from time to time, shed light on blind spots we may have so that the coming year is a meaningful chapter in the continued journey.
As America celebrates 250 years, the wishes for this bastion of life and liberty, leader of the free world, imperfect but striving to better itself and the world – must factor in the state of the world and imminent threats to all it represents.
Intersecting challenges to the post-World War II rules-based international order, to freedom of thought and the pursuit of knowledge, in a digital reality dictated by a polarizing, fragmentation business model impact the aging, frail foundations of democracies that many have come to take for granted.
The founding fathers recognized that freedom is not free. After 250 years of gradual process and progress to ensure that “We the People” includes all people does not make that, or the imperative to be willing to fight for freedom, any less true.
It has been 250 years anchored in vision, values, and shared covenant that launched the greatest attempt to improve democracy as “the worst form of government – apart from all the others,” merits, at the very least, an exploration and understanding of what may be lost if the unwillingness to fight for it persists.
The overwhelming gratitude of generations for the foundations that enabled the US to be truly free – modern ideas, access to education and information, social mobility that created a significant middle class, innovation and invention propelling forward a free market – are just some of the accomplishments.
As it is in life, none were achieved without mistakes, growing pains, and tremendous sacrifice. But that should make their achievements only more remarkable and worth fighting for.
Those shared visions, values, and covenants are extremely personal to Jews. From the foundations of the Hebrew Bible to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream,” they echo and distill thousands of years of Jewish memory, identity, and heritage into the ‘modern’ 250-year-old experiment America embarked on.
It is, among other reasons, why Jews feel especially connected and grateful for this liberal democracy, appreciating freedom of religion, and acknowledging that all of us are created equal in the image of God. Anchored in this idea is the abolition of slavery, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and voting rights for all.
The trials and tribulations to get there should not be glossed over or erased; quite on the contrary. They are integral to progress, always difficult and imperfect.
It is perhaps the reason that the normalization of ever-mutating antisemitism, and rewarding of its ‘modern’ strain of anti-Zionism that demonizes, delegitimizes, and applies double/invented standards to its younger, more ancient sister Israel, the Jew among nations, legitimizing the targeting, attack, and murder of Jewish and Zionist Americans – should sound sirens at 250.
It is also perhaps the reason that a mayor of New York City is rewarded for demonizing, delegitimizing, and applying double standards to the one and only Jewish majority state, to which the Jewish nation returned to sovereignty after millennia of exile and persecution, committed to equality – anchored in the very same vision, values, and covenant – sounds sirens to the bastion of democracy.
Erasure of God from blessings of America
In a city that is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, the erasure of God from the blessing of America is not only a concern to the millions who have become targets of political ideology intent to destroy the foundations of democracies.
NYC, as an experimental ground that supports genocidal terror as liberation, that views rape as “armed resistance,” and that reverses the IHRA definition of antisemitism in its first act, echoes Rabbi Sacks’ warning that antisemitism “is the world’s most reliable early-warning sign of a major threat to freedom, humanity, and the dignity of difference.”
The "progressive" neo-Marxist ideology that hijacked and weaponized human rights to divide the world into oppressed-oppressor, victim-victimizer strips the individual of agency and responsibility.
The cynical hypocrisy of this regressive ideology turning the Jew into the victimizing oppressor is just the canary in the coal mine of a far more insidious threat that turns America into a racist, imperialist, colonialist, and oppressive pariah of all that is evil that must be destroyed.
The greater irony is, of course, that it is peddled and spread by racist, imperialist, colonialist, oppressive pariahs of all that is evil – openly declaring their intent to build an alternate reality on the rubble of our shared civilization.
And so, as America celebrated 250 on July 4, the wishes for bastion of life and of liberty is for “We the People” to remember the promise of all it was founded to be; to reclaim all that has been systematically hijacked and weaponized threatening to destroy it from within; and to renew the shared covenant upon which it was founded and anchored, including the willingness to fight for it all, as its younger more ancient sister has proven the willingness.
“God Bless America.”
The writer is CEO of the International Legal Forum, former Israeli legislator and Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism.