“I believe in America.”
That is the opening line of the greatest movie I’ve ever seen, the Godfather.
It is spoken by a character with the fabulous name: Amerigo Bonasera, “America, Good Night.” He loves his adopted country. “America has made my fortune and I raised my daughter in the American fashion,” but something terrible happened. Her WASP boyfriend sexually assaulted her. Bonasera “went to the police, like a good American.” But the well-connected boy gets off with a suspended sentence. “He went free that very day!” Now Bonasera seeks the kind of help only Don Corleone can offer. Until now, he has been an Italian-American solid citizen, keeping his distance from the Mafia. But when America lets him down, he turns to someone who – yes, is a criminal – but represents his people. Don Corleone promises solidarity: “If by chance an honest man like yourself should make enemies, they will become my enemies.” And he demands reciprocity. “Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me.”
Those first 5 minutes tell the whole story of the Godfather and the whole story of America. They say: this is a story about ethnicity, solidarity, identity, loyalty, family, intermarriage. About how an immigrant community succeeds or fails at becoming part of the great American project, how it assimilates or refuses to, and how America welcomes and betrays.
Those themes are on my mind as well, as an American Jew in 2026, worried for this country, and worried for our community. I believe in America. But some days I wonder, does America believe in me?
In this year of momentous anniversaries – the 250th birthday of the United States, 25 years since September 11 – I thought it would be wise to reflect on our nation, our city, and what lies before American Jews. Usually, I speak about ideas and values from our rich tradition. Today I will talk less about holy books. Instead, I want to think aloud about being American Jews in the new year 5787. In very uncertain times, I want to help us continue to believe in America, and believe in our place here. Let’s ask ourselves: What is it about this country that we believe in? What do we aspire to? What inspires us? And what frightens us?
Let’s go back, 25 years and one day: September 11, 2001. A beautiful cloudless day. The light of a clear blue morning. Not even one month earlier I had begun my new job, as the young, 35-year-old rabbi at Ansche Chesed. Maybe 8-10 days earlier, my then three kids, aged 7, 4 and 2, and I rode the subway to Brooklyn Heights and walked back over the Brooklyn Bridge, looking at those twin towers in the distance. We crossed lower Manhattan and got ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s in the concourse beneath the World Trade Center.
Early in the morning of September 11, I went to vote, because it was primary day. When I returned home, Amy told me a plane had struck the north tower. I thought: what a horrible accident. How could a small plane fly into a giant building? Then I turned on the TV, and at 9:02, I watched live as a Boeing 767 hit the South tower. At that time five early childhood programs met here in the synagogue and probably 100 parents were gathered around a TV we had set up in the lobby. (Back then you could not watch the world on your phone.) One woman was absolutely hysterical. I took her into my office. Her husband worked in the towers. She could not reach him by phone. I held her as she panicked and sobbed. I have no idea who she is or what happened to her family. I think about her all the time. I hope she remembers me kindly.
That night several hundred people convened in Hirsch Hall. I don’t remember how we got the word out, because our listserv went through hardware in the Trade Centers and emails were out of commission for quite a while. Maybe people just figured it was obvious we needed to grieve together and worry together. That night I said something that was a total cliche. I don’t even know exactly what I meant by it. I said: Nothing will be the same ever again. Everything will be different now. It was trite, and it was true.
Who were we that day and in the weeks afterward? Some of it was beautiful and brave. People fed first responders and those working on the pile. People volunteered at Ground Zero, especially mental health professionals, caring for traumatized hearts. Fire fighters with their engines poured into New York from everywhere in America. People lined up to donate blood, but there was no one who could be saved with a blood donation.
In this cold city, we showed each other a little extra warmth, at least for a while. Maybe we learned something of the preciousness of every life, thanks to those “Missing” posters people made of their loved ones. Manhattan was covered with sheets of paper with faces, names, details, taped to buildings and bus stops. Have you seen my father? My sister? Have you seen my child? Those posters were totally futile in terms of finding anyone. But they were totally powerful in touching our hearts.
Those days saw real heroes. You may have heard of Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old trader who worked on the 104th floor in the South Tower. His personal quirk was that he always wore a red bandana his father had given him as a child. After the plane hit, Welles descended to the 78th floor, where he found a group of people injured and disoriented, with no clue what to do. Literally carrying a woman on his back, he led them to a working staircase, and brought them down to a lower floor where they could evacuate on their own. Then he tied the red bandana over his face to ward off the smoke and dust and went back up – twice – to retrieve others. Welles Crowther helped 18 people escape alive before the tower collapsed upon him. Ultimately, his body was identified thanks to his red bandana. I believe in an America that raised Welles Crowther.
September 11 was a tragedy for thousands of Americans. But it was very good to Bruce Springsteen. On the afternoon of 9.11 he was walking along the ocean in Sea Bright, New Jersey, when a car passed by and the driver called out, “Bruce, we need you now.” The music he made in the wake of the crisis helped many people rise up and wait for a sunny day, and transformed him from killer rock star to America’s healing bard. One of his 9.11 songs is a hymn to firefighters. A bereaved family member sings: “I need your kiss. But love and duty called you someplace higher. Up the stairs. Into the fire.” That song is built around a prayer, in which. Bruce chants: “May your strength give us strength. May your faith give us faith. May your hope give us hope. May your love give us love.” אמן כן יהי רצון/Amen. Ken yehi ratzon. I believe in Bruce Springsteen’s America. And perhaps not coincidentally, his son Sam is a firefighter in Jersey City.
But there are other less admirable aspects of our national character and problems of our own making, which 9.11 caused or may have worsened, certainly the last decades have worsened. Twenty-five years on, America has become crueller, angrier, greedier, and more corrupt. Much less beneficent, less unified, less respectful. Can we still believe in this country? I do. I believe in America’s capacity to recover the better angels of our nature. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then an unsuccessful Senate candidate from Illinois, describing a nation that both enslaved and opposed slavery, quoted Christian Scriptures [Matthew 12.25] and said: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” We cannot survive as a country if we don’t share the house with people we think are wrong. When he took office as president, three years later, Lincoln called our hearts to open. “We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies.” That is not the spirit in our country today. If it persists, we are sunk.
But I believe in America because I know we still have in us the ability to argue, disagree, and respect and value each other. We have to recover that in ourselves because it is the indispensable premise of democracy: that your fellow citizens, in good faith, want to contribute to a better society. I live here too. I know that right now, that’s a big lift. But there is no alternative.
September 11 brought us problems of our own making. That day ushered us into the Homeland Security era, with immense government surveillance power, and the idea that civil liberties must yield before vigilance about real threats. I am not confident that we draw those lines well.
It ushered in the age of paranoia about air travel. We’re still taking off shoes and belts and bringing a maximum of 3.4 ounces of liquid in a carry-on bag. Because everyone knows what kind of havoc you can wreak with 3.5 ounces.
It brought us into grueling wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing some 7,000 American soldiers, wounding 50,000 more, and killing some 400,000 people from those countries. Some aspects of those wars were probably necessary. I am not sorry that Navy Seals killed Osama Bin Laden. But an awful lot was not necessary, and on balance, in our rage for vengeance, America broke more than it fixed.
That day brought us into an era of increased xenophobia and especially Islamophobia. Developing a prudent immigration policy is a hard problem, not an easy one. But it’s horrifying that the most anti-immigrant official in the White House is a Jew whose great-grandfather immigrated from Belarus in 1903, similar to most people in this room. That’s a shonda, a total disgrace.
Obviously, violent Islam is real. Al-Qaida, ISIS, Hamas, and Hezbollah are not your friends. If they don’t kill you personally, it’s not because they don’t want to. They have caused so much misery and must be fought with military might.
And it is a shonda that last month, a sitting Jewish Congressman, Randy Fine of Florida, spoke to the Republican Jewish Coalition convention and said the United States should fight the growth of Islam because that religion is incompatible with American society.
No sir. I do not believe that, and it is not something a Jew should ever say. I believe in the America that has a good – not a perfect – but a good record of extending equal citizenship across diverse communities in a nation of immigrants. We’re human. We sin and fail. We must reckon with our capacity for racism. But we have an admirable history of building the society George Washington described in his letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790. Our first president said:
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed their natural rights. For happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they, who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens,
This is not the reigning spirit in our country today. But it is our foundation and the rock from which we are hewn and to which we must return. So Jews, in the coming year, believe in America. Be loyal to your community, but banish your hostility and suspicion, open your hearts and doors to your fellow citizens. Because that is the meaning of perhaps the most famous passage in the entire Talmud. At last, I give you some actual Torah for Rosh HaShanah [Shabbat 31a]:
A gentile came before the ancient sage Hillel and said “Convert me on the condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I stand on one foot.” Hillel converted him on the spot and told him:
דַּעֲלָךְ סְנֵי לְחַבְרָךְ לָא תַּעֲבֵיד — זוֹ הִיא כׇּל הַתּוֹרָה כּוּלָּהּ, וְאִידַּךְ פֵּירוּשָׁהּ הוּא, זִיל גְּמוֹר.
“What is hateful to you do not do to another. This is the whole Torah. The rest is its elaboration. Now go and study.”
And I am pretty sure you find it hateful, I find it hateful, how much Jew-hatred there is in America today.
Let’s get this out of the way: I am suspicious of anti-anti-semitism. Our people has an overactive impulse to find Jew haters everywhere we look. Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. I know and respect – but disagree with – people who think Israel should dismantle its Jewish character. You and I all know anti-Zionist or non-Zionist Jews who celebrate Shabbat, who study Torah, who do lots of mitzvot. We all share a home with people with whom we disagree. Being bi-nationalist or pro-Palestinian is not necessarily anti-Semitic.
But a whole lot of anti-Israel criticism is, in fact, anti-semitic, and for many vicious voices, opposing Israel is just a convenient way to lay bare their hostility. Here is a handy trick for distinguishing between good faith critique and Jew hatred. You know it’s Jew hatred when it employs the classic tropes: hidden cabals, responsible for all wickedness in the world, manipulating governments and economies for their own nefarious purposes. When the Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar said: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel,” that does not sound like a good faith critique. To the extreme right, Jews represent communism. To the illiberal left, we are capitalist bloodsuckers. We have enemies to our right and to our left. Both are dangerous. For centuries, we ate the blood of Christian babies. Now it’s the blood of Palestinian children. If you see people advocating for peaceful co-existence and an end to the horrifying violence of a 100-year conflict, it’s probably a good faith critique. If you see people “exhilarated” by the Hamas attacks on October 7, as a Cornell professor was, that’s Jew hatred. You know it’s Jew hatred when they tell you to go back some place. Back to Poland. Back to Israel. Back to Brooklyn.
I find the whole last ten years frightening for American Jews. We still live in the shadow of the shootings in Pittsburgh in 2018, by a white supremacist who had just posted that evil Jews were bringing evil Muslims into the country. We live in the shadow of the shooting at the Washington Jewish Museum last year, by an attacker chanting “Free, Free Palestine.” We begin the new year in a country in which most hate crimes – assaults, vandalism – are directed at Jews, even though we are 2% of the population. In New York, the most Jewish city in diaspora, where we constitute 10% of the population, just four months ago, synagogues in Forest Hills, Queens, were vandalized with swastikas and the words Hitler and “kill Jews.” I don’t need to total up the statistics or recount every incident. This is real, and I am worried where this will lead.
There are two modern answers to the question of where Jews should live. One says, we cannot trust other people ever again. After centuries of oppression, culminating in the mass murder of the Nazis and the cultural erasure of the Soviets, we have to leave them all behind. It’s time for Jews to gather together in a Jewish country. The other response says, despite it all, we can thrive in an enlightened, liberal, and generous pluralistic democracy that welcomes many different peoples into a symphony.
You all know how deeply I identify with Medinat Israel. Most Jews live there. They have lots of problems and have made terrible mistakes. They also have great accomplishments. They have rescued countless Jewish bodies from those who would kill them. They have great virtues and goodness. The best Israelis are the best people I’ve ever met. They have built an extraordinary Hebrew-speaking society, creating Jewish culture, living Jewish values, and Jewish tradition. My heart lives there. My daughter lives there. I am an emotional citizen of Israel.
But I am an actual citizen of the United States. This is the home I have chosen and continue to choose. I believe in America, with all its possibilities. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the leading Orthodox rabbinic authority of the 20th century, who lived through World War I in Europe, who lived under Stalin, who immigrated to America in 1937, by the skin of his teeth, living the rest of his life on the Lower East Side, said, there has never been a country like America. It is a מלכות של חסד/malkhut shel chesed, a state of kindness.
That is totally correct. In the long history of the Jewish people and its exile, no place has been as beneficent and welcoming as the United States of America. The classical challenge for Jews has been to live under authorities – sometimes better, sometimes worse – who hated us. The American Jewish challenge has been to live among people who loved us so much that they wanted to marry us, read our books, watch our movies, listen to our music, and wanted us to do their taxes. The question for American Jews is: is this still a מלכות של חסד, a state of kindness? And how do we help make it so?
I borrow my answer from the obnoxious slogan of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017. I am sure you remember and can summon up the image of yahoos, wearing frat boy polo shirts, holding tiki torches they got at Home Depot, chanting “the Jews will not replace us.”
To which I can only respond, “you will not erase us.”
Every expression of Jew hatred, every violent act, every graffiti, every cruel and stupid verbal assault, is a call for Jewish erasure. It is a claim that the world would be better without us. You know it’s Jew hatred when people just want you gone.
But you will not erase us. We will thrive as Jews. The only answer to Jew hatred is Jewish living. That is the only answer. There is no other one. Our enemies don’t want us to be us. So be us.
In February, Bret Stephens of the New York Times said we should take all the money the Anti-Defamation League spends on tracking anti-semitic incidents and combating bigoted speech, and divert it all to Jewish schools and communities. In fact, the ADL does important work, too, and we should be glad that they and their partners monitor the dark web. They have helped law enforcement thwart violent attacks. But Stephens is right when he said that living your culture with gusto, with pride, with שמחה של מצוה/simcha shel mitzvah, joy in doing the commandments, is much more important than fighting your enemies. Excessively focusing on what the haters do produces a culture of victimization. It makes us fearful and helpless. And that is no way to be a Jew.
My friend Hindy Poupko at the UJA says: “Anti-Semitism is part of the Jewish story. It’s not the author of the story.” Amen. The authors of the Jewish story are God, Moshe Rabbenu, and you and me. We write our story when we build communities of moral and spiritual purpose. When we build communities of care, and culture. When we give Tzedaka, and visit the sick, and dance at a wedding, and bring babies into the covenant. When we study the Holy Torah and do mitzvot together. When we treasure the precious heritage we received from the past and bequeath it to the future.
You know we are 2% of the American population, and .002% of the world population. You know what that makes us? The lucky ones. And America is lucky to have us.
Sometimes it doesn’t know that. When the first Jews arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, Peter Stuyvesant tried to throw them out. The Dutch East India Company told him no. In 1862, Ulysses S. Grant tried to expel the Jews from Mississippi, Tennessee, and Illinois, accusing them of being war profiteers. Abraham Lincoln told him no. America has been our Malkhut shel Chesed, our welcoming state of kindness. It has believed in us. And I still believe in it.
I want to close with one last valentine to this great country. As I said earlier, try to think back 25 years and one day, to that terrible event, but also that on a beautiful day, on which New York was bathed in the light of a clear blue morning.
We just recently lost such a great musician, a great actor, a great songwriter, an ethereal voice, and – in every account that I read – an exceptional human being. I figure, if America could produce Dolly Parton, well then I believe in America. So I want to think back to that cloudless blue sky, and give Dolly the last words:
It’s been a long, dark night/I’ve been waiting for the morning
It’s been a long, hard fight/I can see the new day dawning
I can see the light of a clear blue morning/I can see the light of a brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning / Everything is gonna be alright / It’s gonna be OK.
Shanah Tovah!
