Consider for a moment the purpose of a birthday celebration. We gather to rejoice in the being of the person whose birth we are commemorating. We are grateful and happy that this person came into the world and into our lives.
Tomorrow we celebrate the birthday of our nation, born 250 years ago.
On birthdays, it is appropriate and expected that we celebrate the one whose birth we are commemorating. We share kind words and often gifts and eat something sweet.
On the eve of this 250th birthday of our nation though, many Americans are carrying real worry about the state of our country. That sense of concern is reflected in a recent Gallup poll that demonstrates that Americans’ optimism about their own future has fallen to its lowest point since Gallup began asking the question nearly twenty years ago. And a second poll from Emerson College, replicating a question first asked in 1976, found something even more striking: hope for the country’s future hasn’t moved much in fifty years, but pessimism has nearly tripled, from 15% to 41%. That is the widest gap between hope and dread this question has ever recorded.
Economic anxiety. Political division that feels sharper by the week. A rise in antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment many of us feel in our bones. Primary results in New York and elsewhere that unsettle not only supporters of Israel, but anyone uneasy watching parts of our politics drift toward defunding the police, or toward a kind of movement politics, like the Democratic Socialists of America, that seems to carry real antipathy toward America itself.
But since now is a time of celebration and since some amongst us might need help celebrating, we have the good fortune of our weekly Torah portion that can show us the way.
There are two wonderful lessons from Parashat Pinchas that point us toward gratitude.
Our portion opens in the aftermath of an act of disconcerting zealotry. Pinchas witnesses an act of sacrilege (look it up if you like – it’s rather X-rated). In a moment of vigilante justice, Pinchas strikes the offending party, killing them.
God’s response is not to celebrate the zeal. God grants Pinchas a brit shalom, a covenant of peace. Read that carefully: the reward for zealotry is not more zealotry; it is peace. Torah takes a man whose instinct was force and redirects him, permanently, toward peace as the higher value. We live in a moment when some people, literally and figuratively, want to burn things down, including, it seems, some of the very things that others cherish about our American history and values. Our tradition’s answer, even to righteous-seeming anger, is not to indulge it. It is a covenant of peace.
A few verses later comes the second lesson, and I find it even more instructive. The five daughters of Zelophechad have a genuine grievance: their father died with no sons, and under existing law, his portion ofthe land would go to others and not to his own next of kin. So here’s what they do: they bring their grievance, respectfully and persistently, to Moses and the whole community. And as a result, the law changes. God tells Moses:
כֵּן בְּנוֹת צְלׇפְחָד דֹּבְרֹת
“The daughters of Zelophechad speak justly.” (Numbers 27:7) This is what legitimate change looks like, rooted in our Torah three thousand years before it became a cornerstone of American democracy: the right to petition, to be heard, to change unjust law through process rather than force. It’s deeply Jewish and deeply American, and it’s worth remembering on the eve of a 250th birthday.
One more thing to share, playful rather than scholarly. Parshat Pinchas begins in Numbers, chapter 25, verse 10. If we travel back one book of the Torah to Leviticus 25:10, we find words that are particularly resonant for us as Americans. We read:
וְקִדַּשְׁתֶּם אֵת שְׁנַת הַחֲמִשִּׁים שָׁנָה וּקְרָאתֶם דְּרוֹר בָּאָרֶץ לְכׇל־יֹשְׁבֶיהָ יוֹבֵל הִוא תִּהְיֶה לָכֶם וְשַׁבְתֶּם אִישׁ אֶל־אֲחֻזָּתוֹ וְאִישׁ אֶל־מִשְׁפַּחְתּוֹ תָּשֻׁבוּ׃
“And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land to all its inhabitants: it shall be a jubilee for you; and you shall return every man to his possession, and you shall return every man to his family.” (Lev. 25:10)
These words of course were cast onto the Liberty Bell itself in 1753: “proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”
The happy coincidence of Numbers 25:10 and Leviticus 25:10 points us to a lesson: let us celebrate the liberty America represents and endeavor to rededicate ourselves to the work of ensuring that liberty for us as Jews and, more broadly, for all Americans, and more broadly still, for those outside our nation who continue to see us as a beacon of hope for what a vibrant, diverse, mature democracy can look like.
Notwithstanding our real concerns, this is a moment to rejoice: the promise of this country, the freedom we have enjoyed here and continue to enjoy, and my trust that by standing up for that freedom, alongside our allies, and by the grace of God, we will continue to celebrate it for many years to come.
The Liberty Bell
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yoshi