Noah’s Ark – and Ours

John Adams was certain he would be forgotten. “The History of our Revolution,” he fretted to Benjamin Rush, “will be one continued Lye from one End to the other. The Essence of the whole will be that Dr Franklins electrical Rod, Smote the Earth and out Spring General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his Rod—and thence forward these two conducted all the Policy Negotiations Legislation and War.”

Adams would thus certainly have been surprised had he been in Israel’s Knesset when the parliament welcomed Mike Pence, his successor as vice president of the United States. Prime Minister Netanyahu, in delivering words of greeting, spoke of the history of America’s support for the Jewish state. He then quoted words that Adams had written in 1819, long before Zionism had emerged as a movement: “I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.” Isaac Herzog, the leader of the opposition, then rose to deliver prepared remarks and cited the same quote. The vice president then himself made mention of John Adams’s affinity for the Jewish people, in a speech where Pence celebrated the miracle that was the State of Israel. Suddenly the man who worried so about his legacy was receiving the attention he had so ardently believed he deserved.

This is fitting. If any founder deserves to be celebrated in Israel, it is Adams. Thomas Jefferson thought little of the Jewish intellectual legacy. But the Jews were “the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth,” Adams insisted. “The Romans and their Empire were but a Bauble in comparison of the Jews. They have given religion to three quarters of the Globe and have influenced the affairs of Mankind more, and more happily, than any other Nation ancient or modern.” Yet few in the auditorium knew the context of Adams’s declaration, noted by Netanyahu, in support of a Jewish restoration in the Holy Land; and this story lends special poignancy to Pence’s visit and to the ardently Zionist speech Pence himself delivered.