How to Love America at 250 Years, Even With Its Flaws
- Rabbi Jason Holtz
- Jul 10
- 6 min read
Shabbat Shalom, and Happy 250 Years to America!
What defines us? Our best moments, or our worst? Our problems, or our ideals? Our sins, or our aspirations? Who we've been, or who we're still capable of becoming?
I ask because I think most of the arguments we have about this country, especially this year, are really arguments about which of those is the true measure. Some look at America and see the failures first. Given America’s problems, past and present, I can’t say I blame them. Some of us, though, look and feel gratitude first. That’s where I am. Let me tell you a little bit of why:
In the spring of 2006, as a rabbinic student, I traveled to Belarus with a group of other students to lead Passover seders. Before that trip I had barely thought about Belarus at all. Twenty years ago, Belarus was ruled by Alexander Lukashenko. Belarus is still ruled by that same man who some have called the last dictator in Europe. People there told us, half-joking and half not, that the Soviet Union never actually fell — not there. I learned what that population had endured across the twentieth century, and what it had specifically meant for Jewish life: the restrictions, the antisemitism, the fear that never fully lifted. That same summer I went to Prague, and saw what's left of the old Jewish quarter — synagogues that are as much museum now as living communities — and I went to Theresienstadt, the camp the Nazis dressed up as a model town for propaganda film crews, which was its own particular kind of hell underneath the staging.
Three of my four grandparents were Jewish, whose families were all from Eastern Europe. Their families got out in the early twentieth century, ahead of the worst of what that century had in store there. Not everyone was so lucky. If it weren't for America taking my family in, they would have suffered under communism, or perhaps perished in the Holocaust along with so much of the rest of European Jewry. Any honest accounting of what America has meant has to include this: for people like my own family, and for millions of others, it was a place of refuge and opportunity, a place of freedom in every sense of the word. It's the reason I exist to be standing here saying any of this at all.
Torah actually legislates this kind of accounting. In Deuteronomy 26, a farmer bringing the first fruits of his harvest to the Temple isn't permitted to just hand them over and say "I grew this. It’s my gift to God" He has to recite a fixed declaration first — Arami oved avi, my father was a wandering Aramean — and walk through the whole story: the descent to Egypt, the slavery, the redemption. Only after saying all of that out loud is he allowed to point to the fruit in his hands and call it his own. Torah seems to think a person doesn't actually understand what they're holding until they've named what it cost to get there. I can't stand on the bima and talk about this country's good and its self-inflicted wounds without doing something like that declaration myself, the fact that I get to be a rabbi in Georgia talking about Torah on a Shabbat instead of hiding from someone like Lukashenko, or standing where my family once stood in Eastern Europe. That’s my Arami oved avi - my ancestors were wandering in Europe, facing oppression, but made their way here, and thankfully, I have opportunity.
Of course, other people understand America differently.
It’s possible for two people to look at exactly the same thing and walk away with different perceptions. The Torah even gives us an example of two prophets who did exactly this. These two prophets are Balaam and Elijah.
In last week’s Torah portion, Balaam is hired to curse Israel. He has every professional and financial incentive to do it, and he's looking at a people with plenty on the record to justify a curse — the golden calf still fresh, constant complaining in the wilderness, open rebellion against Moses more than once. But he can’t bring himself to do it. He can’t bring himself to curse a flawed people. Instead, he says, “mah tovu ohalecha Ya'akov — how good are your tents, Jacob.” Not "how good you'll be once you do x, y and z." Just How Good. Those words became the opening line of the Jewish morning service, borrowed from someone hired to curse them.
Then there's Elijah. A real prophet, not a hired mouth like Balaam, standing at Horeb after watching the northern kingdom collapse into idolatry, and he says: I alone am left. Everyone else has abandoned the covenant. He sees the evil in the Israelites and in his despair can see no redeeming qualities, no one worthy, other than himself. And God's response isn't comfort. It's correction — there are seven thousand in Israel who never bent the knee to Baal. Elijah wasn't wrong about the apostasy. He was wrong that it was the whole picture. And the text seems to treat that failure of vision as disqualifying: soon after, God has him anoint his own successor. A prophet is supposed to be a person of faith, someone who believes in both God and in people. Elijah believed in God, but not in Israel. Elijah entered into forced retirement, because looking at Israel, all he could see were problems.
Two prophets, two ways of looking at imperfect people. Balaam sees the mess and still says good. Elijah can’t see beyond the mess. One of them gave us the words that begin every morning service and the other one got fired.
The people most alarmed about this country right now aren't wrong to see what they see. Torah commands lo tuchal l'hitalem — you may not turn a blind eye. It says that first about something as small as a neighbor's lost animal wandering the road. People would pretend not to see the lost animal because really, it’s a huge inconvenience to see a cow or an ox needing to be relocated some distance away. Better to pretend like it’s not there. But the Torah says we have to see it and help. The rabbis widen it into something much larger, though: a general duty not to look away from a wrong in front of you. Seeing this country's sins clearly is a mitzvah.
But look at how Torah talks about creation itself, on the very first page. It never calls the world God made perfect — not tamim, flawless, not shalem, complete. It calls it tov me'od. Very good. And when the rabbis ask what "very good" could possibly include, they don't flinch: death is in there, they say. The yetzer hara, the human inclination to evil, is in there — the very drive in people that causes so much trouble, and that the same rabbis say is also what gets anyone to build a house, marry, raise children, run a business. "Very good" was never a claim that nothing was wrong. It was a claim that the whole picture, struggle and all, still earned the word good.
That's the balance a lot of us are missing this weekend. You can see America's sins clearly — you're commanded to — and still mean it, without qualification, when you call the whole project good. Not a grudging good. Not a good with an asterisk. Good the way Balaam meant it: looking straight at the actual, imperfect camp, and choosing gratitude anyway, because gratitude was always the more honest response to what's actually here.
I've had the chance to live in two other countries — Israel and the UK. Both are extraordinary places and both carry their own deep, real struggles. Both have people that are filled with immense pride for their homes and people who are convinced that their countries can do nothing but stumble. But living outside this country taught me something I don't think I could have learned any other way: for all its problems, there is nowhere I would rather raise my children than here. When Jodi and I became parents, the first thing we did was to move home, move to America.
That's what I think we're actually marking at 250 years. Not a perfect union — no one, least of all the founders, ever claimed that. All they said was that they wanted a more perfect union, better than what came before. A union we get to love out loud, tents and all, the way Balaam did — not despite looking clearly at it, but because of it.
Happy 250th birthday, America. Shabbat shalom.
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