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Israeli soldiers in June, 1967 at the Western Wall, a remnant of an ancient retaining wall of biblical Israelites’ Jerusalem temple, whose site Israel has controlled since the “Six Day War” for the first time since losing it to the Roman Empire in 70 C.E.

Author’s preface:

Israel invaded and destroyed Gaza 28 centuries ago, but few Americans know that such ancient “undercurrent events” ever really happened, let alone that they still drive current events that divert our attention from older, deeper realities. The following essay, revised and updated from one that I wrote for Salon on March 31, 2024, doesn’t track current events in Israel/Palestine. Instead, it takes a dive, or at least a dip, into long running undercurrents that have shaped the conflict. 

The original Salon essay was picked up and re-posted by the international website Reset.doc, which also translated it into Italian. It was excerpted and assessed on The Hannah Arendt Center website at Bard College. When I wrote it early in 2024, charges that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza were plausible but debatable, and it was possible to question protestors’ ideological motives. But by mid-summer, Israel’s strategies had become genocidal in effect and, for some of the strategists, in intent, and anyone who might think that I’m interpreting the biblical and 17th-Century undercurrents to justify current events would be misreading this essay. More than a few commentators and editors have seemed inclined to dive under their desks or jump out of windows instead of reporting or sharing what I actually say here.

Fortunately, others are commenting in ways that can enhance our understanding of what’s developing. The head of a private school who also teaches in Columbia College’s Contemporary Civilization curriculum sent a message to a mutual friend calling this essay “a fascinating and intellectually rich article, the difficult paradoxes of which may escape most modern readers…. But if we are ever to escape the binary thinking of every political and civic argument that plagues us currently, we need historically nuanced analyses like Sleeper’s. The ancestral thread tying Calvinists and ancient Hebrews together is a lens I hadn’t seen through before, though most of us know the two sides of each (culture? religion?) — its ambitious, questing, covenantal side and its ‘manifest destiny’ brutality.” 

A political and intellectual historian in New York wrote me, “Thanks for sending this amazing piece.  I devoured it immediately.  I know a bit about the Biblical influence on New England’s elimination of America’s very own Canaanites, but most of the works you cite were new to me.  I am also glad you appreciate the work of my friend Adam Shatz.  Anyway, it seems to me you have the core of a book condensed into a few pages here.  I hope you keep developing this line of thought.”

Dive in with me now as I keep on developing this line of thought. Help me do that by writing to jimsleeper12@gmail.com

 

By JIM SLEEPER

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot wrote in the first of his Four Quartets, but America’s increasingly warlike divisions, some of them deepened by the Israel-Palestine conflict, are forcing many of us to bear realities we haven’t borne so heavily before. These include an animus against Jews that Eliot himself held and that may become menacing again, as have some Jews’ frantic efforts to suppress antisemitism in ways that may only prompt more of it. But far-more-powerful eruptions of hatred in America’s increasingly uncivil society are driven not by antisemitism, and not only by global riptides of capital and technology that are prompting desperate migrations and belligerent nationalisms. They’re driven also by beliefs that figured in Israel’s ancient origins and in 17^th Century Puritans’ importation of those origins into America’s conflicted, now-fragmenting political culture. Such undercurrents are converging to prompt not only the latest headline-making “news” but also biblically resonant upheavals that grip people who aren’t religious at all. Donald Trump is riding those currents toward a civic implosion, alongside his many evangelical Christian and Orthodox Jewish supporters. Belligerent Jewish nationalists who currently govern the State of Israel are accelerating a doom-eager Zionism that the Hebrew prophets anticipated and condemned.

Few of us acknowledge the extent to which these conflicting realities began with Jews’ “origin story,” in Genesis 12:1, in which God tells Abraham to “Go from your country [Ur, in Mesopotamia] and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Since then, Jews have often unsettled and uprooted themselves, and they’ve been unsettled and uprooted by others, in ways that have stimulated and sometimes exasperated many of the peoples among whom they’ve sojourned. In effect, Jews have long been a “tribe” that negates what’s usually tribal by developing an enlarged mentality that crosses communal boundaries, sometimes prophetically. 

The word “Hebrew” —ivry — means “He passed over,” as in crossing borders that are metaphysical and cultural as well as geographical, to pursue universal knowledge and justice across time as well as space. Many of us consider such pursuits essential to the Enlightenment, not to a religion or a tribe. Yet in the Genesis myth, Abraham’s tent and hospitality are open in all directions, to all comers, and his grandson Jacob demands to know the terms of the tribal mission, wrestling with an angel for an answer until the angel releases him at dawn, naming him Yisrael, meaning, “He contends with God.”

That has been “too much reality” for many people and peoples to bear — Jews as well as non-Jews. Yet it has driven American civic culture in ways and for reasons that I want to sketch here. The 17th-century English Calvinists who colonized lands that they called New England, and whose legatees participated in founding and extending the American republic, pursued strategies strikingly similar to those of today’s Israeli settlers in the West Bank and military invaders of Gaza who claim a divine mandate or a nationalist “manifest destiny” to impose the Hebrew-derived, ethno-religious identity at the expense of longtime Palestinian inhabitants. The ”settler-colonial” paradigm that progressives apply to Israel certainly did fit Puritans who seized lands to which they had no ancestral claims, but those Puritans went even further by citing ancient Israelite claims to a divinely promised Zion to justify their own ventures in America. So doing, they seeded America’s civic-republican culture in ways that still drive its messianic inclinations and some Protestants’ and Jews’ preoccupations with Israel’s presence in the Middle East.

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In retrospect, American Puritans seem almost to have been ‘copying’ today’s Israeli Zionists 300 years ahead of time, tactic for tactic and pious justification for pious justification.

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I experienced that convergence of Hebraic and Calvinist mythologies personally in the 1950s while growing up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, an old Puritan town whose public-school teachers passed on to us some echoes and remnants of its origins. My fourth-grade teacher Ethel Smith didn’t merely look at us 9-year-olds; she looked into each of us, as if arraigning our souls before something awesome. At that same time, I was learning biblical Hebrew two afternoons a week in a nearby synagogue and, later, in eight years of Jewish summer camp. 

Even when “Puritans” like Miss Smith looked into us sternly, they sometimes did so caringly. In December, 1956, she told me and another boy to stand as she announced, “Jim and Richard are Jewish boys, and they don’t accept our Lord as their savior, and they won’t be celebrating Christmas. But I want you all to know that the Jewish people is a noble and enduring people, and our Lord himself was a Jew. You may sit down now.” Disoriented though I was by that introduction to my classmates at age 9, I sensed from Miss Smith’s gentler-than-usual tone that she meant well in a way that has never quite left me. Later it would occur to me that for her then, only eleven years after the Holocaust (about which I knew nothing at the time), we Jews weren’t pariahs but librarians, keepers of foundational texts.

When I entered Yale nine years later, in 1965, in the twilight of its Puritan ethos, I understood the significance of the Hebrew phrase that the college’s founders had put on its seal — Urim v’tummim, meaning, approximately, “Light and Truth” or “Illumination and Testimony” — and I knew that the university’s president, Kingman Brewster Jr., himself born in Longmeadow, was a lineal descendant of Elder William Brewster, the minister on The Mayflower that had carried Puritan pilgrims from England to Massachusetts in 1620, in what they considered their own Exodus from slavery that fulfilled “the type of Israel materially,” according to Cotton Mather, their most-prominent tribune and chronicler at the end of the 17^th Century.

Seal of Yale University, founded 1701

At my opening freshman assembly at Yale in 1965, a thousand of us mostly white young men in dark suits rose and sang (or read and mumbled) a hymn composed by Yale Divinity School Professor Leonard Bacon in 1833 that rendered the Yale founders’ Exodus from their English Egypt to what they called their “Hebrew Republic” in New England:

1 O God, beneath Thy guiding hand
Our exiled fathers crossed the sea,
And when they trod the wintry strand,
With prayer and psalm they worshiped Thee.

2 Thou heard’st, well pleased, the song, the prayer;
Thy blessing came, and still its pow’r
Shall onward through all ages bear
The memory of that holy hour.

3 Laws, freedom, truth, and faith in God
Came with those exiles o’er the waves,
And where their pilgrim feet have trod,
The God they trusted guards their graves.

At Yale’s 1964 commencement, three months before my freshman assembly, Brewster, the legatee of the Puritan Exodus, had presented the university’s honorary doctorate of laws to Martin Luther King, Jr., who at that time was telling America’s lords of segregation to “Let my people go,” as Moses had told pharaoh, and was leading American Blacks to what King called “the promised land,” again echoing Exodus. So, as Brewster handed him the certificate of Yale’s degree, their handshake reached across time and space, summoning Protestants and Jews whose ancestors had made history of the Exodus myth in ages past.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Yale President Kingman Brewster, Jr. at the 1964 Yale Commencement

Like the Hebrew prophet who “lives out a myth that may be dead in us and for us, whose fruitfulness cannot be known except by exposing it (and himself) to possible failure,” as political theorist George Shulman puts it, King and Brewster used speech-acts in the ceremony to revivify an ancient, sacred past and, not incidentally, to make us moderns do double takes on our presumptions. Yale’s civic poetry still had enough power then to inflect Authority as decisively as Congress did by enacting the new civil rights laws of 1964 and ’65. 

When biblical undercurrents resurfaced more directly a few years later in a war between Hebrews and Egyptians in what Jews still called their “promised land,” those undercurrents also resurfaced in me: Early in June, 1967, you would have found me standing in line at the Jewish Agency in Manhattan, hoping to register as a noncombatant supporter of Israel in the Six-Day War. Not yet 21, I needed parental permission, which I didn’t get, so I didn’t go. But two years later, I was in Haifa and the Galilee with a small Movement for Arab-Jewish Cooperation, holding intensive conversations with Palestinian citizens of Israel, as I’ve recounted in The New Jews, an anthology of essays by young American-Jewish activists that I co-edited with the late scholar of Hebrew literature Alan Mintz. It may be worth noting my expressions, in that book, of doubt about Jewish nationalism and Zionism, even as an idealistic young supporter of Israel.

My experiences matter here only because they exposed me to origins of today’s controversy that are overlooked or mishandled by many Christians and Jews, including secular liberals and ardent progressives. The biblical stories matter, too, because, as King and Kingman demonstrated, they go a long way toward explaining why Jews have figured disproportionately in Americans’ and other peoples’ civic reckonings and international interventions. That handshake at Yale in 1964 suggested that Hebrews’ uprooting from Ur and their contributions to the conventions of other times and places still figure in many non-Jewish Americans’ understanding of their country as a nation of clean breaks and fresh but covenanted starts. Those understandings and their origins figure now, even as the country is becoming less Hebraic and covenantal and more gnostic, agnostic or libertarian. Our preoccupation with the Gaza war continues to divert warranted attention from larger, more lethal wars.

So let me make a few more observations about the original Jewish break from other traditions, and then about how New England Puritans transported that break into what has become this country’s fraught, disintegrating civic-republican culture. A different, equally powerful intervention in American political culture was made by Spanish Catholics who colonized Florida and the American Southwest, but in this essay I trace the Calvinist/Hebraic origins of the Northeastern, classically liberal “Protestant Establishment” that governed the United States well into the 20th Century.

There are so many variants of proselytizing in America today that you may be tempted to misread this essay as just another of those ventures into preaching. But I’m not evangelizing or propagating what I’m about to describe. Having grown up at an intersection or crossroads of the belief systems I discuss here, I’m recognizing their influence in American public life from several angles.

Jewish sublimity and its discontents

In the Genesis myth as interpreted in Midrash Genesis, one of the rabbinic commentaries on that book, Abraham smashes Ur’s idols as he’s leaving, and he even prepares to sacrifice his own son Isaac at the command of his hidden but omnipotent Interlocutor. Yet God’s command to sacrifice Isaac is rescinded even as Abraham binds his trusting son and raises his hand to strike the fatal blow. His grief and loneliness are broken by the angel Gabriel, who brings a ram to substitute for Isaac in the offering. Yet Abraham has other disputes with God — for example, against God’s decision to obliterate the corrupt cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, killing many innocents. And Yisrael contends with God ever after. 

Such biblical accounts of humans’ separation from what seemed divinely ordained demonstrate not only human independence in thought and action but also human futility: A central prayer in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, originated the claim that “man’s origin is dust, and his destiny is dust,” depicting every individual life “as a fragile potsherd, as the grass that withers, as the flower that fades, as the fleeting shadow, as the passing cloud, as the wind that blows, as the floating dust, and even as a dream that vanishes.” Such a scourging awareness of human fragility projects the faithful into a vast unknown between them and a ubiquitous but hidden God. It prompts yearnings like Jacob’s to discover God’s will and to justify humans’ often-flailing efforts to transform a world that isn’t wholly impervious to their efforts to displace tribal insularity with missions across time and space. “The Jewish nation is the nation of time, in a sense which cannot be said of any other nation,” the German Protestant theologian Paul Tillich explained in 1938:

“It represents the permanent struggle between time and space. … It has a tragic fate when considered as a nation of space like every other nation, but as the nation of time, because it is beyond the circle of life and death, it is beyond tragedy. The people of time … cannot avoid being persecuted, because by their very existence they break the claim of the gods of space, who express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm, and tragic self-destruction. The gods of space, who are strong in every human soul, in every race and nation, are afraid of the Lord of Time, history, and justice, are afraid of his prophets and followers.”

Afraid, indeed: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,” wrote Blaise Pascal, a French contemporary of the Puritans. Jews have negated much of what’s tribal yet haven’t disappeared as a “tribe” themselves, at least in many other people’s minds: “How odd of God to choose the Jews,” quipped journalist William Norman Ewer a century ago, capturing the mixture of antipathy and admiration that they’ve provoked ever since Judaism prompted its “axial” break in Western consciousness. You don’t need to “believe in” that break in any religious sense to notice that Jews have stimulated and exasperated other peoples among whom they’ve sojourned.

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‘How odd of God to choose the Jews,’ quipped William Norman Ewer a century ago, capturing the mix of antipathy and admiration they have provoked ever since Judaism prompted its ‘axial’ break in Western consciousness.

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Judaism’s derivative religions, Christianity and Islam, adopted Hebraism’s separation of spirit from nature: “We are all, in all places, strangers and pilgrims, travelers and sojourners,” intoned Robert Cushman, a contemporary of the Elder William Brewster and an organizer of the Pilgrims’ ‘Exodus’ to Massachusetts, in a sermon he gave in 1622. Three-hundred-fifty years later, the American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that the “paradoxical relation between the possible and the impossible in history proves that the frame of history is wider than the nature-time in which it is grounded. The injunction of Christ: ‘Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul’ (Matthew 10:28) neatly indicates the dimension of human existence which transcends the basis which human life and history have in nature.” Somewhat analogously, Islam commemorates Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac in its holiday, the Feast of the Sacrifice, which honors Abraham’s obedience but celebrates Isaac’s release. 

In some Jews’ judgment, Christianity and Islam go too far to relieve humankind of having to bear “too much reality” in this fallen world. In Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews, the late Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel notes that Christians have depicted God “as a suffering, agonizing man, but thereby… transformed a human need into a theological principle that ends with an illusion” and “a false consolation.” For two millennia, Christians have intoned, “My kingdom is not of this world” and “Baptized in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek,” yet they’ve reigned from golden thrones over armed states whose national identities are rooted even more deeply in ties of sacred “blood and soil” than Jewish “tribal” identity has been.

Yet the Hebrew Bible depicts Hebrews as no less terrified of existential uprootedness than Blaise Pascal or any Christian king. Even as the Book of Exodus recounts God revealing the terms of His covenant to Moses on the summit of Mount Sinai, His chosen people are busy fabricating and idolizing a Golden Calf at the foot of the mountain. Later they turn to kingly and materialist protections against wandering. Zionism appears in several historical periods as an attempt to return to and possess the promised land, the latest attempt provoked in the 20th Century by Jews’ urgent need to escape rising persecution and even extinction.

But returning doesn’t guarantee succeeding. For three millennia, Jews celebrating the Passover holiday have invoked poetically and ritually their “return” to Jerusalem and deliverance from exilic, often ghostly, wandering. At times, they’ve actually returned to the biblical land and to what Tillich called “the gods of space, who express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm, and tragic self-destruction.” In the Book of Samuel, Israelites importune its eponymous judge to “Give us a king to rule over us, like all the other nations.” Although that demand displeases Samuel, he and the Israelites commit genocidal assaults against neighboring Canaanites, Amalekites and Philistines:

“Remember what the Amalekites did to you… [when] they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven.” [Deuteronomy 25]

“Then Samuel said, ‘Bring me Agag king of the Amalekites.’ Agag came to him cheerfully, for he thought, “Surely the bitterness of death is past.” But Samuel declared: ‘As your sword has made women childless, so your mother will be childless among women.’ And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal.” [1 Samuel 15]

Eight centuries before Christ, and 28 centuries before the Netanyahu government waged war against Hamas in Gaza, the prophet Amos said, “For the three transgressions of Gaza, Yea, for four, I will not reverse [its punishment]: Because they carried away captive a whole captivity [of Israelites] to deliver them up to Edom. So I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza, and it shall devour the palaces thereof; … and the remnant of the Philistines shall perish, Saith the Lord.”

So the militarized nationalism of today’s Zionists can be understood as another such reversion or “return” to the promised land, reinforced in 2018 by the Knesset’s “Basic Law” declaring that Israel is “the Nation-State of the Jewish People,” and greatly diminishing it as a liberal democracy.

Such contradictory, conflicted uprooting and re-rooting has sometimes given Jews their mobility, marginality and occasional magnificence and malfeasance, breeding tough, defiant spirits not only in Moses and Jesus but also in Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the atomic bomb and self-avowed “destroyer of worlds.” The Jew as interloper, living marginally in homogeneous societies but flourishing and sometimes predominating in pluralistic and open ones — agile, entrepreneurial, walking on eggshells and thinking fast – has sometimes seemed most “at home” in media of exchange, whether of information, social commentary, money, merchandise, music, math, medicine or scientific discovery. Confirmation of their prominence in those realms is presented sociologically, lyrically, and abundantly in Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century.

That Jews, unlike the “settler-colonial” American Puritans, do have ancestors in their “promised land” was confirmed in 1947 by the discovery of what became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls (transcribed in Hebrew that I can read with little more than my “Hebrew school” and summer-camp training) that had been buried in caves seven centuries before Jews’ millennia of exile from the area and before Islam existed and Arabic was spoken in the region. Those scrolls had been in those caves for almost a thousand years before the Roman Emperor Hadrian coined the name “Palestine” for the land in the second century C.E., to elevate its Philistines at the expense of its rebellious Israelites, whom his legions had recently defeated and forced into exile.

Although Jews were mostly absent from Palestine for the ensuing two millennia, the “settler-colonial” paradigm that applies so obviously to English Puritans applies only ambiguously to Jews, as John Judis explained invaluably and grimly two months after the October 7 attacks. That paradigm, or accusation, is especially ambiguous in regard to the half of today’s Israeli Jewish population whose ancestors never left the Middle East after Rome’s conquest but settled in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Ethiopia for millennia until many of them were driven from those countries to the State of Israel after its founding in 1948. Most of these “Mizrahi” Jews have never set foot in Europe, nor have they had “mother countries” to which they could return safely, as most European colonizers could have done and sometimes did.

Yet the biblical passages transcribed on the ancient scrolls include prophetic warnings that Israelites’ territorial claims were contingent on their keeping the covenant sealed at Sinai — or, as we might put it now, on their transcending narrow tribalism to meet a higher, more universal standard. If they failed to do that, God would punish them at the hands of their enemies: Here is the prophet Amos again, sounding almost like a protester against Israel today:

“Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria, the notable men of the first of the nations, to whom the house of Israel comes! …. Go down to Gath of the Philistines. Are you better than these kingdoms? Or is their territory greater than your territory, O you who put far away the day of disaster and bring near the seat of violence? Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory and stretch themselves out on their couches, … who drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!” [Amos 6]

Isaiah, another reluctant but overwhelmed biblical prophet, warned that God would punish Israelite elites’ arrogance by destroying their Zion “until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken.”

Forsaken?

Jewish youth rescued from the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp show their camp tattooes on their forearms on board the refugee immigration ship Mataroa July 15, 1945 at Haifa port. (Zoltan Kluger/GPO via Getty Images)

Many Jews of my American generation grew up with photos like this, not as historical curiosities but as reminders of what we ourselves might not have escaped had we been born a decade or so earlier in the Europe of our grandparents, instead of in postwar America. (That was true of me, born in Worcester, MA, in 1947 to parents whose Lithuanian-Jewish parents had emigrated to the U.S. shortly before World War I. Had I been born in 1937 in my paternal grandfather’s village of Dusiat, I wouldn’t have survived what happened there in the summer of 1941.)

Jews who’ve facilitated but sometimes challenged modernity’s dislocations have been targets of others’ resentments, owing to what George Steiner called their role as “a moral irritant and insomniac” — and what Assaf Sagiv, in a formidable essay, “George Steiner’s Jewish Problem,” — characterized as Jews’ function as an interlocutor “of the darkest impulses of man.” Steiner considered that status “an honor beyond honors,” but some Jews who’ve been persecuted, or haunted by memories of persecution, have resorted to sinuous subservience to established powers, especially in times of populist frustration and backlash. The Jew as fixer or apologist for the powerful — suspicious and opportunistic, legally and commercially underhanded, contemptuous of detractors – has been a stereotype too often earned by Jews such as Trump’s former henchmen Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, and Allen Weisselberg, who’ve acted as if such behavior would serve them in societies presumed hostile to progressive, humanitarian hopes and even to Jews.

And not only Jews. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, a Roman Catholic who became a Trump acolyte and chair of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Republican Conference, also became a self-appointed alarmist against American antisemitism when she spearheaded a Dec. 5, 2023 House committee hearing on what she called “the rot of antisemitism” in student protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza. Stefanik demanded that university presidents seated before her answer “Yes or No” to her accusatory question about anti-Gaza war campus protesters: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?” So saying, she struck a politically decisive blow not only against the presidents of Penn and Harvard, whom she admonished to resign because of their equivocal responses, but also against America’s civic-republican culture.

Some protesters who shout “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or “Globalize the intifada!” and who hold Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ violence are indeed historically uninformed and politically immature. But very few have been “calling for the genocide of the Jews,” as Stefanik insisted. They’ve been accusing Jews of committing genocide against Palestinians. Stefanik likely understood that the protestors have a plausible, if debatable, case, but she flipped their script to make their intentions seem genocidal against Jewish victims and to make university presidents seem their enablers. (Not incidentally, she also bolstered conservatives’ long-running campaign to blame liberal university leaders for ruining liberal education.)

Ironically, only two years earlier, Stefanik herself had been asked to resign from the advisory board of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics because she’d supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election with her “public assertions about voter fraud… that have no basis in evidence, and… public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect,” in the words of the school’s dean.  When Stefanik refused to resign and was removed by the board, she departed gracelessly, claiming that it was a “badge of honor to join the long line of leaders who have been boycotted, protested, and canceled by colleges and universities across America…. The decision by Harvard’s administration to cower and cave to the woke Left will continue to erode diversity of thought, public discourse, and ultimately the student experience.”

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Protesters who shout ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Globalize the intifada’ may be historically uninformed or politically immature. But they’re not ‘calling for the genocide of the Jews.’ They’re accusing Jews of committing genocide.

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Anti-antisemites are right to insist that Hamas’ intentions toward Jews are genocidal and nihilistic and that Hamas is a despotic, destructive force for Palestinians under its rule. But that doesn’t cancel the historical reality that English settlers who founded Harvard and the American republic were as genocidal as the biblical Hebrews upon whom they modeled themselves. Condemning student protesters for excusing or defending Hamas yet ignoring the murderous extremism of Israeli settlers on the West Bank and of the IDF in Gaza only intensifies the pathologies of both Holocaust-traumatized Jews and Nakba-traumatized Palestinians.

What the writer Adam Shatz has called “vengeful pathologies” inflame not only those who are tied ancestrally or materially to one side in this war; they also inflame people who have no such ties but who seem more enraged by this war than by other regional conflicts that are as devastating and as hideous as the IDF’s killing of more than 40,000 Gazans, including many women and children, and destroying their homes, schools and hospitals. Unless we’re truly unable to “bear too much reality,” as T. S. Eliot surmised, we’d also have to note the sadism of Hamas leaders who’ve maimed countless Palestinian dissenters and of Hamas fighters’ whose body-camera footage depicted their murders of Israelis who were forced to watch their own children or parents being butchered just before being slaughtered themselves.

Some young Americans protesting the Gaza war are indulging in an ersatz politics driven by zeal to “prove themselves” in moralistic posturing and ideological position-taking. “This concern for the Palestinians is not a matter of anti-Semitism so much as it is a reflection of self-absorption,” Shatz wrote in The Nation in 2014. “Palestinians are for the radical Western left what Algerians were for Third Worldists…: natural-born resisters, fighting not only Israel but its imperial patrons…. Palestine is still ‘the question’ because it holds up a mirror to us. ‘Too many people want to save Palestine’ one activist said to me. But it could just as well be said that too many people want to be saved by Palestine.” The “all-consuming preoccupation with America and Israel,” Shatz continued, has left some progressives “strangely incurious about the crimes for which the West can’t be blamed and the developments, such as the politicization of sectarian identity, that are shaking the region far more profoundly than the Israeli-Palestinian arena.”

Since progressives champion freedoms of speech, of conscience, of sexual identity, and of reproductive choice, and since hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East and North Africa are denied those freedoms, why aren’t progressives chanting, “From Tehran to Tripoli, Muslims will be free!”? My criticism of the left on such grounds doesn’t excuse the Zionist movement and Israel’s degrading and now, yes, genocidal assaults on Palestinians. Since at least the 1930s, some Zionist leaders such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky have been unapologetically racist. Yet I cannot condemn Israel uniquely when it’s blamed or valorized by Americans whose ancestors destroyed Indigenous peoples and enslaved millions of Africans, or when their condemnation of destructive Zionism ignores or excuses an equally destructive, state-theocratic Islamicism.

“Forgetfulness, and… historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation,” noted Ernst Renan, the 19th-century scholar of Semitic languages and civilizations. Equally “essential,” it would seem, are demagogic leaders who safeguard their own nations’ false memories by ginning up moralistic condemnations of other peoples’ vengeful pathologies. A wiser, more effective strategy might begin by acknowledging with Renan that no nation’s emergence has been morally innocent, and by seeking honest explanations and answers, even when they’re painful. Several courageous American Jewish writers have tried to do this.

The former liberal Zionist Peter Beinart has held instructive public conversations with young Palestinian activists and thinkers such as Ahmed Moor. The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has held reflective, informative conversations with Palestinian and Israeli thinkers such as Amjad Iraqi and Yossi Klein Halevi. Roger Berkowitz, director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, worries that changes in the nature and dimensions of war have ended its plausibility as a “solution” to conflicts such as the Israeli-Palestinian, but that has left him with a tragic realism.

In 2014, in a remarkably prescient essay, “When the Hell that is War Loses its Power,” Berkowitz gave richly deserved attention to Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian philosopher and president for 20 years of al Quds University in East Jerusalem, who had tried to build bridges and common ground with Israelis for decades but who, despite meeting some very fine, humanist Israelis, encountered a reality that has become too hard to bear. “Do I see Israel now as a failed project?,” Nusseibeh asked himself. “Do I see a time when, like South Africa, it will disintegrate from within? I cannot say I can see that. But I can easily imagine it happening. I can easily see how whatever it is that is rotten and has embedded itself in the system will eventually wear it out of existence, replacing it by something else. Not by war, but by its own body-grown cells….  It will not be place for normal human beings who want to pursue normal lives, let alone a place where anyone can hope to fulfill a sublime life.”

Berkowitz adds that “War no longer serves… to resolve those problems that cannot be resolved politically.” Instead, we now live in an age of total war that “erases the traditional distinctions that underlie the law of war. Civilians are willingly used as shields and children are seen as reinforcements. Since in total war, the decimation of an enemy is the only path to victory, the logic… is inherently escalatory. Nothing can be held back…. The tragedy that is the Middle East would, traditionally, have been solved by a war” in which “[t]he Israeli advantage in weapons of war would be met by the Palestinian advantage in unconventional warfare…. But war today is increasingly impossible, at least wars with clear victors and losers….It is nearly inconceivable that Israel and Palestine would fight a war to the end in which one side was defeated—imagine the unthinkable horrors that defeating either side would require…. “And thus we are left,….as Nusseibeh sees, with the hell of war as a relatively permanent part of everyday life. Nowhere is that possibility more visible than in the Middle East.”

We no longer need to “imagine the unthinkable” because it’s unfolding before us and, as Nusseibeh suggests, within some of us.

Beinart, Klein, Shatz, Berkowitz, and other, even younger writers now exemplify another irony: Jews’ ancient, proto-cosmopolitan breakthrough still drives liberal Jews who are passionate about America, not only because some of their own forebears escaped the European nightmare but also because the Puritan-Hebrew emphasis on communal covenant has figured so strongly in America’s civic-republican ethos. Free now of Calvinist preoccupations with personal salvation, and also largely free of rabbinical constraints, the liberal Jews whom I’ve mentioned are more “Jewish” than ever in striving to strengthen a covenant that entwines personal renewal with public progress, even amid ruins.

How America’s Puritans became the ‘New Israel’

The first landing of the Pilgrims, 1620. (Getty Images/Bettmann)

It’s remarkable how closely Puritans’ and their legatees’ strategies in their American colonies prefigured those of today’s Zionist settlers on the West Bank and of the IDF in Gaza. In 1637, Puritan soldiers surrounded a major settlement of Connecticut’s Pequot people as Puritan leader John Mason “snatched a torch from a wigwam and set fire to the village, which, owing to the strong wind blowing, was soon ablaze,” according to James Truslow Adams’ 1921 Pulitzer-winning “The Founding of New England”:

“In the early dawn of that May morning, as the New England men stood guard over the flames, five hundred men, women, and children were slowly burned alive.” Ministers of Christ saluted one another “in the Lord Jesus,” some of them profiting directly from selling surviving Pequot boys and girls into slavery.

In 1676, future Harvard president Increase Mather urged and then celebrated a genocide of the Narragansett people, declaring, in his chronicle of “The Warr with the Indians in New England”:

“The Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightfull Possession, have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun…. And we have reason to conclude that salvation is begun [because] there are two or 3000 Indians who have been either killed, or taken, or submitted themselves to the English…. [T]he Narragansetts are in a manner ruined… who last year were the greatest body of Indians in New England, and the most formidable Enemy which hath appeared against us. But God hath consumed them by the word, & by Famine and by sickness …”

Gregory Michna, a historian of that war, writes that “Just as [the biblical] Canaan was wrested from the hands of heathens through sacral violence… the Rev. Joshua Moodey advocated infanticide as a wartime strategy, writing that ‘The Bratts of Babylon may more easily be dasht against the Stones, if we take the Season for it, but if we let them grow up they will become more formidable, and hardly Conquerable.’” Does that sound familiar? Similar suggestions are being made about young Gazans who may grow up as bitter, vengeful, and unconquerable survivors of the current slaughter.

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It’s remarkable how closely the early American Puritan strategies, including mass murder, anticipated those of today’s Zionist settlers on the West Bank and the IDF in Gaza.

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Indigenous people made retaliatory attacks against the English, including in an infamous raid in 1704 on Deerfield, Massachusetts that destroyed that settlement — by the measures of its time, nearly as horrifying as Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. The devastation of Deerfield has figured deeply in my own moral imagination ever since a February morning in 1957, when my fourth-grade class in Longmeadow — including some of my classmates who were descendants of the town’s Puritan settlers — sat on the floor, with the lamps turned off for effect, as Miss Smith stood before us in the pale, wintry light, telling us that on another cold February morning approximately 250 years earlier, howling, hatchet-wielding “Indians” had slaughtered nearly 20 English settlers of Deerfield, 40 miles upriver from us, and then force-marched nearly a hundred more through the frigid wilderness to captivity in Canada.

The captives included Deerfield minister John Williams and his family. Two of his children were killed in the attack, and his wife, Eunice, became weak on the trek north and fell down a ravine, tumbling into a river that swept her away. Williams’ account of that personal and communal calamity, all the more harrowing for its self-sacrificing affirmations of faith amid crucifixion, was published as The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion soon after he and his son Stephen were returned to Massachusetts in a hostage exchange. For a while, his account rivaled John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as a parable and primer for the Puritans’ holy but dangerous errand into the “howling wilderness,” as the historian John Demos recounts in The Unredeemed Captive; A Family Story of Early America, highlighting Williams’ daughter’s refusal to leave her Native captors to rejoin the English world.

Williams’ son Stephen later became the minister of Longmeadow’s Congregational church, which stands 100 yards from the classroom where Ethel Smith told us about his captivity. The great Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards visited him there in 1740, and a year later Stephen Williams rode the five miles south from Longmeadow to Enfield, Connecticut, to hear Edwards preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and write an eyewitness account of its listeners’ writhing reactions.

My belief that this matters may be overdetermined by the fact that, 215 years later, I bicycled along Williams Street every weekday, passing the church where Edwards had visited Williams, on my way to and from Miss Smith’s classroom. (Fifty-eight years after that, in 2014, I wrote a quasi-puritanical jeremiad for Salon about the American republic’s dimming prospects. I wasn’t thinking of Edwards at the time, but The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg tweeted in response, “Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture — and that’s a compliment.”)

Miss Smith didn’t tell us that the English had included some rogues, swindlers and mountebanks who drove the expulsions and massacres of Pequots, Pocumptucs, Mohawks, Narragansetts, Wampanoags and Abenakis. Despite the settlers’ proclaimed good intentions, their land hunger generated duplicitous trade and land deals, alongside pious missions to convert indigenous people into “praying Indians.” James Truslow Adams explains that

“as the whites increased in numbers and comparative power, and as their first fears of the savages, and the desire to convert them, gave place to dislike, contempt, spiritual indifference, and self-confidence… it was no longer considered necessary to treat with the Indian as an equal…. [T]he lands of the [Indians] gradually came to be looked upon as reservations upon which their native owners were allowed to live until a convenient opportunity, or the growing needs of the settlers, might bring about a farther advance.”

Today’s Israeli settlers on the West Bank might take note and take caution. So might “old stock” Americans, proud descendants of the intrepid Puritans who prefer not to remember these and other awful precedents for our present civic-republican crisis. Even Stephen Williams, the redeemed Deerfield captive who had followed his father into the ministry, wound up owning Black slaves as his house servants in Longmeadow, as recent Harvard graduate Michael Baick recounts in a fascinating senior essay. It would be wrong for today’s faltering, “mainline” Congregationalists, Presbyterians and other Protestants to displace onto today’s Israel their own discomforts with the fraught aspects of their Puritan history and with the soulless neoliberalism – and, in some white-nationalist evangelists, the reactionary tribalism — that it has spawned. If we could reweave older, stronger covenantal threads into our civic-republican fabric, we might remember that its strength has depended on premises and practices that armies and wealth alone can’t nurture or defend. Puritans placed the Hebrew approximation of “Illumination and Testimony” on Yale’s seal because they decided to ground their salvation-hungry faith in covenanted, earthbound communities of law and work whose model they called “the Hebrew republic.” And some Jews would learn from them, as I did in Longmeadow and at the “old” Yale, to cherish its then-still-“Protestant” personal and moral introspection.

Even when Puritans held New England in their thrall, slaughtered native Americans, and hanged 40 witches, they sometimes knew better than to forgive themselves as casually as many Americans do now when they excuse or even valorize their country’s collective hysterias and brutalities. In 1697, a conscience-stricken Judge Samuel Sewall, who’d presided over the Salem witch trials five years earlier, stood penitently in Boston’s Old South Meeting House one Sunday as the pastor, Samuel Willard, read aloud a note from Sewell confessing his “guilt contracted… at Salem” and his desire “to take the blame and shame of it, asking… that God… would powerfully defend him against all temptations for Sin, for the future: and vouchsafe him for the efficacious saving conduct of word and spirit.”

Who among America’s current and recent leaders desires to take such blame and shame for enabling the killing or unjust incarceration of thousands of innocent young black men? Who begs forgiveness for opening floodgates of slaughter in Vietnam and the Middle East or enabling the official brutality on our streets and the subtler but no-less decisive dispossession of hard-working but under-informed Americans from their homes and jobs? Who takes blame for designing and operating the powerful engines and marketing sensors that grope and titillate lower viscera which Puritans like Edwards probed and restrained?

Against the present conventional presumption that globalization is flattening the world for the better, Puritans would warn that our “flat” world has abysses that open suddenly at our feet and in our hearts and that a good society needs to plumb those depths in ways that are spiritually potent enough to face down the demons in them and in ourselves. Abyss-plumbing requires caring as well as discipline — a tall order and a humbling one, as Judge Sewall made clear by “humiliating” himself, in the old usage of that word, and as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. did, too, by drawing on Puritan remonstrances and metaphorical remnants. Sewall’s wasn’t the only way in which Puritans tied public policies to policymakers personal integrity and inner beliefs. John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, urged his followers “to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities […] [and] make others Condicions our owne […] allwayes haveing before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke.” The historian Daniel T. Rodgers reminds us that Winthrop was even more pointed in economic terms, warning that “It is a true rule, that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.”

Even after Puritans had lost their ecclesiastical and judicial grip on New England early in the 18th Century and had settled into becoming the Yankees I knew in the 20th, parts of their legacy are still worth considering, and even living up to, as I’ve showed a decade ago in DEMOCRACY Journal. If we nervously satirize, demonize and dismiss them, we may only be displacing blame for our own darker side. We have apps and algorithms that Puritans never dreamed of, but do we have their wisdom and will?

How American republic’s founders invoked biblical Hebrews

In 1771, the young James Madison, then a future framer of the republic and president, stayed on for a year at the College of New Jersey (later known as Princeton), to study Hebrew and Puritan theology.

In 1776, Benjamin Franklin proposed that the great seal of the United States depict “Moses in the Dress of a High Priest standing on the Shore, and Extending his Hand Over the Sea, Thereby Causing the Same to Overwhelm Pharaoh.” (The Continental Congress chose instead the Masonic-inspired seal that’s now on every dollar bill.)

In 1790, Jews’ own hope for a fully “enlightened” citizenship in America that they hadn’t yet achieved in Europe was ratified in George Washington’s letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, which affirmed the new republic’s full tolerance of “the stock of Abraham”.

In 1809, John Adams, a descendant of New England Puritans and by then a former president, wrote, “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize Men than any other Nation. If I were an Atheist and believed in blind eternal Fate, I should still believe that Fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential Instrument for civilizing the Nations.” Adams employed that “instrument” to advance something like the Hebrew covenant, writing, in what is still part of the preamble to the Massachusetts constitution, that “The body politic is … a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.”

Note what that entails: Covenants require extralegal agreements, or traditions of trust, even among competing participants, as much as they require laws that can easily be undercut by the laws’ own enforcers unless they also rely on a strong, nourished consensus that favors the rule of law itself. That consensus relies, in turn, on an overriding sense of trust. A civic-republican society that’s as pluralist as ours can’t rely on semi-sacred ties of “blood and soil” or on ethno-racial, quasi-familial bonds that sustain a sense of intimacy among people who share what historian Benedict Anderson called “Imagined Communities.” Rather, a civic-republican society needs a covenant, a semi-spiritual agreement among autonomous individuals to hold one another to certain public virtues and norms that neither the liberal state nor “the free market” alone can nourish or defend. Something additional, or foundational, is required: a civil society that reinforces the “social compact” sought by Adams. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A civic-republican society is secured not only by institutional and legal authority but also by understandings that cannot be legislated. Such a social compact cannot be rooted ultimately in ties of blood and soil.

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In 1869, the British critic Matthew Arnold observed that Protestant Americans had internalized Hebraism’s scourging demands for “conduct and obedience” and “strictness of conscience”:

“To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number… who say and do not, to be in earnest – …. this discipline has been nowhere so effectively taught as in the school of Hebraism…. [T]he intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and of the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal, and which inspired the incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith — the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen — this energy of faith in its ideal has belonged to Hebraism alone.”

“From Maine to Florida and back again, all America Hebraizes,” Arnold wrote, and Hebraic intrepidity and prickly fidelity indeed characterized the training of many American leaders and followers at college-preparatory schools like the Groton School, whose founding rector Endicott Peabody was a descendant of Puritans – ironically, of a Puritan rogue, John Endecott, whose brutality toward indigenous peoples thankfully wasn’t sustained by Peabody or by a later relative — Endicott “Chubb” Peabody — who was governor of Massachusetts in my own lifetime. One of the Groton School Rector Peabody’s students, Franklin D. Roosevelt, continued to correspond with him from the White House. In 1912, FDR’s older cousin Theodore Roosevelt, another of Groton’s founders, had challenged the presidency Woodrow Wilson, himself a latter-day Puritan, by thundering at the Republican National Convention, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!” (The loudest “thundering” at Republicans’ 2024 national convention came from the theatrical wrestler Hulk Hogan.)

In 1987, the historian Shalom Goldman discovered that George W. Bush’s great-uncle five generations removed, the Rev. George Bush, was the first teacher of Hebrew at New York University in 1835 and the author of a book on Islam, “A Life of Mohammed,” which pronounced the prophet an imposter. In 1844, the Rev. Bush wrote “The Valley of the Vision, or The Dry Bones Revived,” interpreting the biblical Book of Ezekiel to prophesy the return of the Jews to Palestine.

I don’t know if George W. Bush has read his ancestor’s exegesis, but Barack Obama cited Ezekiel in his 2008 speech on race, recalling that at his Trinity Church in Chicago (a branch of the Puritans’ Congregational Church), “Ezekiel’s field of dry bones” was one of the “stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope” — that “became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears.” Obama seemed to want to weave back into America’s civic-republican fabric some tough, old threads of the Abrahamic, covenantal faith that had sustained Kingman Brewster Jr. and Martin Luther King Jr. Now that we’re looking through gaping holes in that fabric, the republic is faltering, as is its founders’ hope that it could rely on “strictness of conscience” and citizens’ inner beliefs as strongly as on their outward performances.

Some of the founders’ hopes, visions, and ancient origin stories animated the civic culture during my childhood in Longmeadow, but that culture has gone missing in the 70 years since Miss Smith implanted a little Puritan and Hebraic discipline in an impressionable nine-year-old. Even John Adams’ covenantal, civic-republican culture seems to have given way to narrowly personalistic strains in evangelical Christianity and in the republic’s Lockean premises, now commercialized and technologized beyond recognition.

Where To?

“The past is never dead; it’s not even past,” wrote the novelist William Faulkner. From the biblical Abraham breaking Ur’s idols to Abraham Lincoln forcing a bloody “new birth of freedom,” and from Kingman Brewster’s and Martin Luther King’s handshake in1964 to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for a “New Covenant” to Barack Obama’s “Change we can believe in,” America’s political culture has often invoked a past whose threads we’d need to re-weave now somehow to keep the republic from dissolving into a neoliberal free-for-all or tumbling into a Trumpian abyss.

Such a re-weaving would require acknowledging, as John Winthrop anticipated, that the vagaries of finance capital and intrusive consumer marketing have hollowed out the civic-republican culture that was planted problematically by Puritans but that sustained what G.K. Chesterton would later call “a nation with the soul of a church,” as indeed it was still doing when I sat on the floor in Ethel Smith’s classroom — a “church” that expected its citizens to be faithful but that didn’t impose a particular ecclesiastical doctrine. If a religion presumes to rule with state power, as Puritans certainly did and as today’s Christian nationalists and Catholic integralists intend to do, religion becomes odious, no matter what its Grand Inquisitors say in its defense. Yet without a faith deeper than legalism, a society will wither and die.

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If a religion presumes to rule with state power, as the Puritans did and as today’s Christian nationalists and Catholic integralists intend to do, it becomes odious no matter what its Grand Inquisitors say in its defense. Yet without a faith deeper than legalism, our society will wither and die.

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The depth of that challenge often takes pundits and politicians by surprise. Civic republican renewal and, with it, democracy’s prospects, can’t be conjured up in newspaper columns. blog posts, cable commentaries, and tweets. It has to be cultivated patiently in early social education, civic organizing, and political outreach envisioned by John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and others. The American civil-rights movement that enabled that handshake between Brewster and King was decades in the making, struggling to find moments of opportunity, sometimes discomfiting comfortable whites with what the late Rep. John Lewis, himself a former seminarian, called “good trouble” that had prompted both anger and admiration when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama a decade earlier.

Neither pundits nor plutocratic investors and managers nourish such faith and action. Who might? I got a clue to what’s required in 2015, when I attended my Longmeadow High School class’s 50th year reunion, three weeks before the publishing industry commenced a huge promotion of Stacy Schiff’s energetically researched, dazzlingly narrated, ideationally empty The Witches: Salem 1692 with a 500-person Manhattan armory gala, dinners up and down Park Avenue, a book tour rivalling Odysseus’ travels or David Niven’s in “Around the World in Eighty Days,” and four feature pieces in The New York Times. I’ve had my say elsewhere about what was wrong with that coronation of Schiff’s (and our) self-servingly damning assessment of Puritans. But not until that reunion in 2015 did I begin to understand how growing up amid remnants and echoes of Puritan ways may have sharpened my reckonings with our civic-cultural crisis.

Probably the only public “sin” we Longmeadow High School students committed came in painting “LHS ’65” in huge white letters on a tobacco barn just across the town line in Enfield. But soon enough we committed sins of the heart and lower viscera that Edwards would have probed. So I was surprised at our reunion to discover that I owed something better to classmates whose Puritan descent had seldom crossed my mind. There I learned for the first time that the family of my classmate Will Thayer, one of our football stars, had come to Massachusetts in the 1630s and that he had become a minister in the Congregational Church, the original Puritan church, and that he’d spent years working with poor residents of Brooklyn’s beleaguered East New York — a neighborhood that, in an unlikely coincidence, I, too, had come to know well.

How had seeds like that been sown in Will Thayer and me in arboreal, funereal Longmeadow? Talking with Will and other classmates — Susan Shepard’s family, I learned, donated part of the land that is Harvard Yard; Clark Shattuck, a deeply reflective, artistic composer, had an ancestor, John Shattuck, who drowned in the Charles River in 1675 while returning from a battle in King Phillip’s War and another ancestor who’d fought in Lexington in 1775; and Barbara Hubbard showed me that her mother’s lineage goes back to William Bradford, first governor of the Pilgrims’ Plymouth Colony — I found myself awash in memories of growing up as a stranger among these kids half a century earlier. And, with due allowance for the fact that the Longmeadow I’d grown up in was hardly the Longmeadow of its Puritan founders, I understood how wrong we are to psycho-dramatize, satirize, and commercialize my classmates’ ancestors. Have we enough courage to assess them without seeing them, as the historian Jane Kamensky rightly rapped Schiff for doing, “in a mirror that reflects most brightly our own self-satisfied faces.”?

I encountered another instance of civic faith as deep as the commingling of Hebraism and Calvinism that I’d encountered in Longmeadow of the 1950s thirty years later, on a wintry morning in 1968, my junior year at the old, all-male, nearly all-white Yale. Plodding along on my way to a class, I noticed about fifty undergraduates gathered silently around three seniors and the university’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, Jr. One of the seniors was speaking against a gusting wind and, it seemed to me, against fear. “The government claims we’re criminals,” I heard him say as I leaned in to listen, “but we say it’s the government that’s criminal in waging this war.” He and the others were handing Coffin their draft cards, identical to the one in my wallet, and they were refusing conscription upon graduation six months hence.

Coffin was there to bless a courage that few of us who were watching fully understood. “Believe me, “he said, smiling, a strand of his graying hair flying in the wind, “I know what it’s like to wake up feeling like a sensitive grain of wheat lookin’ at a millstone.” Although his Calvinist theology was conservative in many ways, it was revolutionary in carrying forward the Hebraic axial break with ancient Ur’s idols and its conviction that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. Something in us grasped at that convinced energy, because we were scared: As far as we knew, these guys were about to be arrested and sent to prison, and we felt arrested morally by their example. Something in their bearing of that reality made them seem as deeply, bravely prophetic as Rosa Parks. As the quiet dignity of her performance had credited her segregationist oppressors with some decency even while exposing their shortcomings, it had reconstituted civic life instead of trashing it. Now, too, as the seniors before us took grave risks to resist the United States government in the name of a civic nation transcending “blood and soil” and even capitalism and Cold War ideology, American civil society seemed to have risen from slumber and to be walking again, re-moralizing the state and the law. As I watched, the silent, wild confusion I was feeling gave way to something like awe.

Some considered those student “demonstrators” foolish, even elitist. A neoconservative professor to whom I described their gestures dismissed them airily as privileged moralists who didn’t want to get their hands dirty in a necessary war. But the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas called acts of witness like theirs “constitutional patriotism,” and he marveled that Americans were resisting the state on behalf of a civic-republican experiment testing whether republics that rely on a higher, deeper faith can endure. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon reminds us that Rome slid almost imperceptibly from republican self-governance to imperial rule when Augustus sensed that “people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.”

As we deplete the stored-up moral capital of America’s original Hebraic-Calvinist covenant, we’re losing its faith that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. Let’s at least give the biblical authors some credit for taking the sublimity of that loss straight up instead of chasing false consolations. Our best hope of transcending realities that seem too much to bear may come at times from seeing them for what they are, not for imagining them as we wish them to be.

Read more from Jim Sleeper on Israel/Palestine:

Israel and the Politics of Paroxysm | Washington Monthly

jimsleeper.com » What Israel’s 2009 war in Gaza should have taught us

And on free speech and history in America::

• The truth about the “campus free speech” crusade and its myths that won’t die
• Billionaires can’t fix college: Jim Sleeper on the real crisis in higher education
• Many Americans want a new national story: How about this one

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