America Saved the Jews. Can the Jews Save America? 

America saved the Jews many times over. On April 29, 1945, American infantry liberated Dachau and found a death train outside the gate, over two thousand of those aboard already dead; Lt. Col. Felix Sparks wrote that the scene numbed his senses. His men freed the roughly thirty thousand survivors. Three years later, with hundreds of thousands of European Jews still in displaced-persons camps, Harry Truman recognized the new State of Israel eleven minutes after it declared its existence. 

Yet America’s protection of the Jews goes back to the nation’s founding. The rationale for protecting these “Hebrews” came from ancient Jewish wisdom, and that same wisdom may now let the Jews honor the covenant in return by helping America keep what it borrowed. 

In 1790, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. Everyone quotes the letter’s famous promise of a government that gives “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” But Washington didn’t write that phrase: Moses Seixas, the congregation’s warden, had sent him those words the day before, and Washington returned them as a courtesy. 

The line Washington added himself is the one worth remembering. He promised that every man would sit “under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid”—a line from the Jewish prophet Micah that Washington used nearly fifty times across his correspondence. A Hebrew image was what he reached for by reflex when he wanted to say what the republic was for. 

That reflex ran deeper than one letter. Scripture was the most-cited body of text in the founding era’s political writing, and its two biggest contributions to the republic are structural, not decorative. Genesis supplied the premise that a human being made in the image of God carries a dignity no government conferred and none can revoke—the idea beneath “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator.” Deuteronomy supplied the form: a covenant sworn not only by the present generation but by “those who are not with us here this day”, consent to government across time rather than government by conquest. Even the word “federal” records the debt, from the Latin foedus, covenant, a term the Puritans took from Jewish sources into secular politics. For the Reformed traditions that carried it—Congregationalist, Presbyterian—that covenant vocabulary was not one source of political legitimacy among several, but the master one. 

America’s founders grafted this ideal—a government bound by law, answerable to people not yet born—onto a republic that would have to survive its own disagreements. That graft may be incomplete: a covenant meant to bind the unborn needs a discipline of argument that keeps the losing side inside it, not law alone. As America faces what F. H. Buckley argues is already two nations in all but the force of law, the Jews might have something to offer. 

A Jewish Discipline for Disagreement 

The Jewish tradition has a discipline for staying in argument with people you will still have to live with tomorrow—מחלוקת לשם שמים, disagreement for the sake of Heaven—and America, to survive another 250 years, would do well to recover it. 

The Mishnah, an old code of Jewish law, supplies the phrase and a test along with it. A dispute that is for the sake of Heaven endures, it says, and one that is not, does not. Its example of the first is the rabbis Hillel and Shammai, whose schools argued for generations without either side trying to silence the other. Its example of the second is Korach, who led a rebellion against Moses’s leadership in the wilderness and lost. Notice what the Mishnah declines to do. It names both sides of the Hillel-Shammai dispute, but only Korach’s side of his dispute with Moses, because it describes how an argument was conducted; it does not rule on who deserved to win. 

Jewish tradition sorts disagreements into two kinds: arguments about truth, and disputes about power. An argument about truth can run for generations, each side sharpening its case against the other, because truth does not run out from being used—the argument has worth no matter who wins. It can even end in a binding ruling and remain what it was: the loser forfeits the decision and keeps his standing. 

But a dispute over who gets to decide what is true has one possible ending: someone wins, and the loser forfeits his standing along with the ruling. The energy spent fighting over who decides produces nothing. 

The Talmud, the centuries of rabbinic debate built up around the Mishnah, remembers this pair of schools above the rest for how they disagreed. It reports that after three years of dispute, a voice from heaven declared that both schools spoke words of the living God—and that the law follows Hillel. Both schools were right; the law could follow only one. Why Hillel? Because, the Talmud answers, his school was patient under provocation; it taught Shammai’s rulings alongside its own; more than that, it stated Shammai’s position first, by name, before its own. The law followed the school that was more gracious to the school it defeated. To state your opponent’s case first, and state it well, is a harder discipline than our courts or our politics now ask of anyone. 

And Jewish law does not erase the losing argument. The Talmud records the losing opinion anyway, on purpose, in case a later court finds merit in it—an argument kept for a reader who does not yet exist. It is the covenant of Deuteronomy in miniature, held open for those who are not with us here this day. 

American courts keep the same habit, whatever its lineage: the dissent is published beside the majority, binds no one, and waits. The dissenting judge returns to the bench, not eradicated for being wrong, because the truth is a process. The rules of the institution require this; public argument has no such rule. It had only a habit, and habits are what get lost. 

When Jews Forget Their Own Method 

No one has lost the habit more visibly than American Jews themselves. 

Three years after October 7, American Jewish opinion has split, not into two clean camps but into a widening gap: a majority still connected to Israel, and a growing minority, up ten points since 2020, saying the United States is too supportive of it. On top of that sits a separate fight over who defines the terms: when Harvard adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, the backlash came from students arguing that the definition itself chills speech. Both are fights over who draws the line and who is excluded once it is drawn, not arguments over a shared question. 

The exclusion is no longer only rhetorical. In 2024, the University of Minnesota offered a Holocaust scholar the directorship of its genocide-studies center, then rescinded the offer five days later after donors objected to his describing Gaza as genocide and warned that fundraising would “grind to a halt”; the university later paid $250,000 to settle. That is money paid to exclude rather than persuade—a dispute over who decides, not over what is true. 

A fight over who decides leaves no later court to appeal to. Once the other side is gone, there is no argument left to keep. 

None of this is unique to the Jews. The same instinct—disqualify the opponent rather than answer him—now runs through American public argument at large. 

An American Answer 

Some will object that disciplined argument is useless against people who treat every claim as a bid for power. But America has met this test before, without any Jewish vocabulary at all. In 1858, Stephen Douglas proposed to settle slavery in the territories by popular vote, professing not to care which way the vote went. Lincoln refused to trade the question of right for the question of who votes: “No man,” he said, “can logically say he don’t care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down.” Two years later at Cooper Union, he inverted the oldest creed of power, might makes right, into “let us have faith that right makes might.” Lincoln never persuaded Douglas. He argued as though the question had an answer, in front of people who had not yet decided, and within two years they came his way. Recovering the practice takes no national consensus about truth, only enough people willing to argue as though truth were the point while others are still listening. 

We American Jews could be some of those people. We alone cannot save this country. But what we kept through the centuries of exile we can practice again and teach as citizens: the method of arguing for truth instead of for power, of winning by being right rather than by being loud enough, funded enough, or connected enough to keep everyone else from speaking. 

Hillel framed the teaching as three questions. If I am not for myself, who will be for me? The practice has to be recovered at home first, inside the community that carried it for two thousand years and lately let it fall quiet. When I am for myself alone, what am I? Then it has to be handed outward, because a discipline kept inside one community was never the point of keeping it. If not now, when? The country that borrowed the covenant is losing its ability to maintain it. 

For centuries without a country of their own, Jews kept that discipline alive. We are home now, sheltered under this nation’s fig tree, Americans as fully as anyone and Jews still, and the discipline is the debt we can repay: the habit of fighting over the truth without trying to destroy each other. It is what keeps a fig tree standing, so that everyone beneath it might sit, at last, with none to make them afraid. 

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