What Jonathan Sacks Saw in America

In the 1830s, a French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville authored Democracy in America. He wrote this book for his own countrymen, to help them understand that curious experiment in democracy unfurling across the ocean. Of course, the work has proven to be an inexhaustible source of instruction not only for his intended French audience, but for America itself. In our times, Lord Jonathan Sacks, a British peer and former chief rabbi of the Commonwealth, authored The Home We Build Together, which like Democracy in America, is a tribute to the United States. He further reflected on the unique nature of American society in many other works, including in his commentary on the Haggadah—the liturgy that orchestrates the ceremonial Passover meal—and in many of his reflections on the parashah, the weekly portion of Torah that Jewish communities study all over the world. Not since Tocqueville has a foreigner seen the United States with such clear eyes, and written about it in such an insightful way. These writings have greatly impacted me, as a Jew and as an American; and as the Jewish people marked the shiva and shloshim, the traditional seven- and thirty-day periods of mourning for Rabbi Sacks, it was in these writings that I found myself especially moved to appreciate his significance. The British peer and rabbi imparted to me the meaning of America.

Speaking to my community, America’s oldest congregation, in the week following his death, I noted that Sacks’s shiva coincided with the 400th anniversary of the event in which he located the beginning of the American story. On November 11, 1620, the newest arrivals to Massachusetts Bay affixed their names to the Mayflower compact, in which they pledged “solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another” to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick.” For Sacks, this moment marked America as unique. The settlements that would one day become the United States were inspired at the moment of their very birth by the Hebrew Bible, and therefore would forever be, in their very makeup, different from other nations around the world. He wrote:

American society is different because from the Pilgrim Fathers onward it was based on the concept of covenant as set out in Tanakh, especially in Exodus and Deuteronomy. The early settlers were Puritans, in the Calvinist tradition, the closest Christianity came to basing its politics on the Hebrew Bible. Covenantal societies always represent a conscious new beginning by a group of people dedicated to an ideal.