Recent Sermons

October 18, 2025

America, The Declaration of Independence, and Genesis- Self Evident Truths in Need of Our Staunch Defense

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” With these immortal words, almost 250 years ago, our nation was born. I want to spend some time this morning thinking about these words, where they come from, what they mean, and how they are at risk today.

When Jefferson said that all men — we’ll forgive the chauvinism for the moment — were created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights — what exactly was he referring to? What Creator created all men equal? When? To whom was this self-evident?

The answer is obviously other older immortal words, namely Genesis 1: And God created the human in his image; In the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.” From the fact that Adam, the first human, was created alone, the Mishna in Sanhedrin derives three core principles: anyone who destroys a single life, destroys a whole world (since Adam is ancestor to the whole world, each person is similarly an progenitor of worlds) and anyone who saves a single life saves a whole world; second, as we are all derived from a single ancestor no person can say to another, “My father was better than yours,”; and finally, the verse teaches us the greatness of the Holy One, Blessed be He, because “when a person stamps several coins with one seal, they all come out the same; But the supreme King of kings, the Holy One, Blessed be He, stamped all people with the seal of Adam the first man, and not one of them is similar to another.”

To say it more succinctly, every person is of infinite worth, everyone is equal, and everyone is unique, or, I might say the diversity of humankind is a God-given feature.

I want to be clear here. The Declaration was radical when Jefferson wrote it, and the words of the Torah were even more radical when they were written. Neither was self-evident to anyone. Prior to the advent of Jewish civilization, in ancient Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, rulers were demigods and conferred human rights only on those they regarded as peers. Human worth was not inherent; it was granted by the king.

By contrast, not only does the Bible insist on human equality, but the Books of Exodus and Deuteronomy are also written in the form of suzerainty treaties, a treaty used by a greater king to enter into an agreement with a subordinate king. Such a treaty generally begins with a preamble — “I am the Lord Your God”, followed by a prologue establishing a history between the two parties — I took you out of the land of Egypt.” The treaty goes on to detail its stipulations, provide for periodic reading and safekeeping of the treaty; assign witnesses, and conclude with blessings for those who follow tit and curses for those who don’t.

The question is why does God resort to using the template of a suzerainty treaty for the Torah? Does God or the Torah’s author just happen to have this kind of document lying around and they cribbed it or were they trying to write in familiar language and chose this? What is radical about this idea of suzerainty, is that while a suzerainty treaty is made between a great king and a lesser king, in the Torah’s case, God is the king and each Israelite is the lesser king. We are not subjects of some earthly king who determines our value and our fate willy nilly; we are independent, self-governing kings — mamlechet cohanim — a kingdom of priests , equal, unique and of infinite worth— subject only and answering directly to the King of Kings.

This idea obviously flows out of Genesis and it is equally radical — all human beings are equal and God enters into a relationship with the Jewish people in which each of us is, as it were, a vassal king, under His dominion, not only equal but empowered, noble, and dignified.

Grounding themselves squarely in the Bible, the founders enshrined the sacred democratic ideal of equality for all time and all people. Of course the question of who is equal has run through American history. When Lincoln stood at Gettysburg, and said, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all mean are created equal…,” he was throwing down the gauntlet, defining a more inclusive notion of all men and pushing the country toward “a more perfect union.” On that basis, Lincoln ended slavery and won the Civil War.

The words of the Declaration have, in fact, been the beacon of liberty throughout American and world history from the suffragettes in Seneca Falls to Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King. They have been the watchword of freedom across the globe, the battlecry of nations and peoples eager to imitate the American example and enjoy the rights and freedoms America enshrined. The Declaration’s proclamation of equality are among the most important words in human history, writes Jamelle Bouie: they “represent a unique moment in the story of the world…they have been since the day there were announced to the people of the United States, a clarion call for freedom both here and around the world.” Nevertheless, the meaning and importance of these words is again contested in America today, 250 years after their writing. Vice President JD Vance has argued that America is not united by creed, by belief in a singular idea, but rather it is defined by blood and soil, in his case, by five generations of his ancestors buried together in a small cemetery in East Kentucky. Eric Schmitt, US Senator from Missouri, contemptuously dismisses the democratic ideals of the US as “a few lines in poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence.” Schmitt instead argues, “We American are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims…our ancestors driven here by destiny…devoted to their cause and their God.” For Schmitt, pilgrims, pioneers, and settlers are the only real Americans. These ancestors, according to Schmitt, “forged a nation, a homeland for themselves and their descendants.” “America,” he says, “belongs to us. It is our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.” By birthright he means not the one enshrined in the 14th Amendment but the citizenship of blood as defined by Dred Scott, a citizenship in which black people, by virtue of their descent from slaves, can never be American citizens.

Make no mistake. Vance and Schmitt and many others in their camp, fueled by an ideology emerging from the conservative Claremont Institute, seek to turn back the page on these “five words about equality,” constricting the definition of American citizenship to exclude all those who do not descend from pilgrims and pioneers: blacks, Hispanics, Asians, nonwhite immigrants, Jews, Moslems, Hindis. Our very own Stephen Miller — no son of a pilgrim he —proclaims, “America is for Americans only!” seemingly blind to the painful irony that he himself will ultimately fall outside this narrow definition of American citizenship.

This is all frightening and painful. The great American past that MAGA turns its loving eye toward excludes most of us and our countrymen. This is a moment when we need another Lincoln who might clearly state who we are and who we are meant to be.

Before I conclude, I just want to offer one more thought about Jewish identity. A number of years ago, a woman at a funeral in the cemetery, pulled me aside to tell me sotto voce that all of her family were purebloods. No one had married a non-Jew; no one had converted to Judaism. I was kind of mortified, although I didn’t have the temerity to say something while we were standing next to the open grave of her loved one. “We’re not Slytherin,” I wanted to scream. Judaism may be more of a family than a religion, but that family has never been defined by blood alone. Anyone who adopts the faith of Abraham is in turn adopted into our family and comes under the wings of the Shechina. In a famous letter to Obadia the Proselyte, Maimonides was asked if a convert can say words such as, “God of our fathers,” or “You have chosen us, ” when he was not, at least by blood, part of this family. Maimonides answered that just as Abraham “made souls in Haran,” by teaching them true faith and the unity of God, and turning them away from idolatry, effectively becoming their father, Abraham metaphorically continues to convert people to Judaism when they discover his testament. Just as he was the father of those whom he converted, he becomes the father of anyone who adopts the teachings of Judaism. Like American citizenship, anyone who accepts the principles of Judaism and chooses to live under its laws and statutes, becomes one of us. Whether we were born Jewish or whether we chose it, all of us participate in the imaginative act of taking on the Torah’s story as our own, just as anyone born American or anyone who immigrates to America, takes on its story and chooses to live by its creed and laws.

Returning to this moment in American history, in the face of violent and insidious opposition to the very ideals on which America was founded, in the face of very real fear of demographic, social, economic, and technological change, in which some feel displaced and nostalgic for an idyll of the past in which they imagine they would belong, how do we come together again as an American people? I want to answer that question with the words of George Packer, in the most recent issue of the Atlantic, who offers a rousing call to a new patriotism. He writes, “American culture is as distinct as that of any other nation, but it’s the only one that comes from an idea. That idea is the equality of human beings, their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the form of self-government that secure their rights, including the right to change their government if it becomes tyrannical. This idea produced a mass culture famous for loud voices, informal address, innocence and ignorance, generosity and violence, bluntness and cluelessness — a culture of individualists who refuse to accept that anyone is their better; any tradition fixed for life, any possibility closed to them. It is the easiest culture in the world to join, and if the first generation can’t then the second will. It absorbs, changes, and is changed by each new one, blatant and accessible enough to provide a lingua franca in which they can all understand and be understood. It has no elaborate rules or ancient secret codes. It flattens and simplifies other culture into music, clothing, food, and words whose vulgarity appalls and seduces the rest of the world. It is stronger than any religious orthodoxy or class rank. What Americans have in common is a way of life made by their creed.” Packer argues that if we are going to save ourselves at this critical moment in American history, we will have to unite with our fellow Americans, however profoundly wrong we might think they are, to forge a more perfect union, end tyranny, and redeem ourselves.

It is no accident that our Jewish ancestors found welcome on these shores nor is it an accident that the American creed and our own have so much in common. We are molded by the same principle of equality and grounded in the belief that all who share our creed can become part of us, that ours is a commodious house that will not only accommodate others but be changed by them. It is with this knowledge that our Jewish ancestors sought freedom on these shores, and it is these principles around which we must unite — the core principles of American democracy — to save ourselves and our republic. If you think for one moment, that somehow Jews will be included in this old-new citizenship of blood, if you think that somehow money or white skin or Stephen Miller or Ivanka Trump will save you, think again. Remember the Jews in pre war Germany and pay attention to the antisemitism growing on the right and the left. Our fate lies not with the pilgrims nor the Rockefellers. It lies with reclaiming America’s democratic ideals grounded in the words of our Torah. All of us are equal; all of us possess infinite worth; all of us are unique and different as God created us to be.