The New Jerusalem and the New Rome- a journey to discover America’s soul

As the United States celebrates its birthday, no less its quarter-millennium mark, I am driven to consider what this nation means from my perspective.  And that perspective is shaped by the forces that shaped who I am: my Judaism, the journey of my mother from communist Czechoslovakia, and the mundane life of a young kid growing up in the suburbs of a blue-collar, East Coast American city.

An American childhood

The late 1960s, when I gained awareness of the society around me, was still a deeply patriotic world in the suburbs.  Yes, we saw the images on TV of Vietnam, and we had our moments.  I remember sitting on the porch of my parents’ home as a seven-year-old seeing the glow on the horizon as Baltimore burned in the 1968 riots. But it was a surreal aberration from the more pervasive feeling of pride as we pledged allegiance and sang “My Country Tis of Thee” every morning in in school, as we gathered in the front yard of my house to watch the July 4 fireworks at Luskins on the hill opposite us, as we went to the train museum to see the raw, unrivaled monsters of industrial power that drove American greatness, as we came back from trips to Europe relieved to see the muscle and size of American cars, as we went down to Norfolk to see our fleet and as we watched military aircraft coming in over our house on weekends into Martins airfield north east of Baltimore. As a kid, America was not an idea; it was its own world which had its warts but was also the only place on earth one would want to grow up as a child.

Yes, we traveled to Europe at times, but that was never home. I had cousins and grandparents in Europe, and we saw them often in the summers, but my brothers and I were the American kids. We saw how our cousins were fascinated by everything, every aspect of being an American. “Is it like that in America?” was a constant question. We were for them from America, a magical land.  All of my cousins knew so much about my country, though they had never set foot in it.   We may have been an oddity for them at the time, but we were also in some way treated as special; we were from the land of wilderness, of cowboys and Indians, of American soldiers and inventors. We were not from a normal country; nor from just another country.  America was not another land.  It was even for kids in Europe an enchanted land that seized their imagination.

And then as kids we also had letters marked par avion that came from a land in the distance about which we knew nothing. It was where Jediček and Babička, my grandparents, lived – people about whom we knew nothing and never met. It was a land I vaguely knew was troubled. My mother rarely spoke of it, but once in the summer of 1968, vacationing in Canada, I remember the innkeeper telling us we should come and watch the TV ‘’since there were some troubles” in the land from which my mother had come.

It was the only time I saw my mother cry as she watched the images coming in from Prague. It was my first real exposure as a kid who knew only freedom to a world without freedom. And the introduction to the issue of freedom, or lack thereof and evil, landed on me not intellectually, but in my gut as only the tears of one’s mother could burrow into one’s soul.

I eventually met my grandmother for a week in 1972 as the Czechs allowed her a short visit under Détente, but I never met my grandfather and did not even know I had an aunt until 1989 when the Soviet empire fell.  It was perhaps my first lesson in the indispensable nature of America as the arsenal and bottom line of humanity and freedom. I knew my mom could travel whenever she wanted, but my grandparents seemed trapped in some sort of prison.  I may only have been seven, but I understood the world was divided between good and evil, freedom and tyranny, and a good land and dark, wounded world. After that, there was an edge to the flag, to the fireworks, to the Pledge of Allegiance and the anthem at the ballpark beyond Wild Bill Haguey’s from Section 34 making the Giant “O” with his body at “Oh, Say can you see.”   I knew implicitly that all those ships I saw in Norfolk, all those planes I saw flying overhead in Baltimore every weekend, the military national guard convoys on the Baltimore Beltway on Sunday mornings I saw, even the low thuds I would hear on quiet summer nights from the distance at Aberdeen military proving grounds, were what stood between my idyllic life and the hell in which the grandparents I never knew lived. It was a kid’s understanding of freedom, tyranny, and the exceptional nature of America, but it was real and personal.

And we also knew, watching the Apollo moon landings, what it meant to be a land that scoffs at frontiers and seeks to plunge into the unknown. But we were also riveted to our TVs as the Apollo 13 moonshot became catastrophic. We learned that America would do anything to save its astronauts, and we appreciated and celebrated these heroes as individuals for their grit and determination. Americans were great collectively as a space program, but Apollo 13 taught us they were great as individuals.  But it taught us something even more profound, even as a kid: the magnitude of the goal of reaching the moon, which had seized our imaginations, had suddenly reduced to a very small goal which seized every fiber in our bodies and souls: coming home.  This was another aspect of America I had not appreciated. America was great as it reached for the stars, but it never forgot that it was greatest not in its grandness, but in its remembering that home was the most important.  Apollo 13 had left a mark on my generation as deep, or even deeper, than Apollo 11. For Americans, even kids, coming home mattered more than conquering the heavens, and lofty glory meant far less than individual life, family and home – a point made many years later explicitly – at the time I do not believe I fully understood it, but only felt it implicitly –in a lecture about Genesis and America by Rabbi Meir Soloveichik who captured in words what we all felt so profoundly in sentiment.

The next intrusion of the idyllic life of an American child was in 1973.  It was my introduction to the special bond between America and Israel. We woke up early on Yom Kippur, getting ready to go to synagogue, when my father, ashen faced, said that war had broken out in the Middle East.  Being largely detached from that whole world, I innocently, as a 12-year-old, asked, “Who are the good guys?” I knew we had distant family in Israel, and I knew as a Jew that the scrolls (book) we read in synagogue and the prayers we said all talked about Jerusalem and Israel, so I sort of knew the answer to my own question.  I also remember the deadly silence on Jim McKay’s face a year earlier in the Munich summer Olympics as he said simply, announcing the massacre: “They are all gone; they are all dead.” So, I knew that this was the next chapter of that horror. But the next two weeks were dramatic and shook us all.  As it became apparent that the war had caught Israel off guard and Israeli forces were in retreat on all fronts, my older brother – who was far more versed than I in politics – asked if it was a trap the great General Moshe Dayan had laid for the Egyptians and Syrians.  But my father, who lived his childhood in Switzerland only meters away from the dark shadow of the Holocaust, was shaken and said he doubted it.  He was seized by the fear that a great tragedy was about to befall the Jewish people yet again in his lifetime.  We were all glued to the TV, watching as the war turned and the tide reversed.  But we also watched the increased national guard convoys on the Beltway in real life, and then the images of American aircraft ascending on their way to Israel loaded with weapons to restore a beleaguered and battered army. Again, it was a personal lesson in the dissonance between my idyllic life as a kid and the great battle between good and evil, between freedom and those who wish to extinguish it, and how my country, the United States, was the backstop of all who fought for freedom. And while the Israelis fought alone and asked for no foreign troops to save them, the war was also a lesson that as Jews, America had mobilized and helped the defense of the Jewish people; the first nation that had done so as a goal for its own sake.

Two years later, another dramatic moment came.  Driving to my friend’s farm in northern Maryland, we listened on the radio as Saigon fell.  My friend’s parents had fled communist China.  I saw how the great divide of freedom versus those fighting against tyranny was not only about Europeans and Jews.  That night I watched the images of desperate Vietnamese clinging to the landing gear of US military transport aircraft as they ascended, with many falling off to their death.  Even for a 14-year-old, it was impossible not to be overwhelmed by the sheer despair of humanity as it sought to flee forces of slavery descending upon them. And how even the landing gear of a departing aircraft represented for them their only hope, the ultimate choice to desperately seek freedom or meet death.

For many in my generation, while most retreated into their own worlds after the exhausting upheaval of the 1960s, some of us understood, by our late teens, personally and deeply, that the United States was not a normal country.  It was the embodiment of human freedom; that the Revolutionary War songs (such as Chester) were real, not rhetoric.  And it was the moment that the United States celebrated its 200^th birthday. It was as if everyone had had it with cynicism and questioning of America.  It was an outpouring of patriotism that swept every city, every neighborhood, every school.  It may have been 1976, but it was the first sign that despite Vietnam and the oil shock, despite the 1968 riots and demonstrations, it was the beginning of a patriotic revival that eventually led to the high-tech classic Western, Star Wars, as well as to the Lake Placid hockey team’s Olympic victory, and to the Reagan Revolution.

It taught me yet another lesson about America and its free people: no matter what hole we were in, we will find a way to pick ourselves up.  The gap between the fall of Saigon and the election of Reagan (“Morning in America”) was only a short five years. It was only a year from the Desert One debacle in Iran. Had I not understood it until then, I did at that point: Americans never give up. President Carter talked of a national malaise and the limits of America; he was decisively rejected. Star Wars was more than a movie; it was an allegory of one of our darkest moments of the indomitable nature of the American spirit.  We were, as a nation, Luke Skywalker.

College, patriotism and the idea of America

Childhood had laid a strong foundation in the heart for both appreciation and curiosity about politics, freedom and tyranny, and America.  After a trip to Israel, being exposed for the first time to the country, I also could not help but note that the American story was also part of my faith and Judaism.  I had traveled in most of Europe by the age of 16, but my first trip to Israel felt more familiar than those countries, even though I had spent many summers in Europe.  There was something in common that I, as an American, felt with that far-away country that transcended just my being Jewish.  There was something sort of American about Israel.  Why? Was it the magnitude of what they were trying to do, which reduced to their glorification of nothing grander than their daily lives?  Was it that they were a frontier people, conquering the desert and braving wars just to come home not to celebrate glory but to be allowed to be boring? Was it that they never gave up? Or that they plunged into the unknown with relish but stayed grounded to their friends and family in the end? Was it the bewildering array of ethnicities, much like the communities of major American cities from Chicago to Baltimore that were bound not by one homogenous cultural habit, but by a common idea, a mystic chord of memory as Abraham Lincoln had described it? What bound the Israelis, really the Jewish people, together, and why did it seem so similar to what bound America together? And what seemed to bind the Israelis to the Americans in their imagination? Israel at the time was popular in Europe, hard as it is to imagine today, but there was something different and special about the bond with America.

So, as childhood yielded to college and beyond, a new journey began driven by the curiosity of what America really meant as an idea, as an intellectual construct, as a historical phenomenon, and what it meant to my faith as a Jew. Over the next two decades, themes emerged that put intellectual flesh to the naïve impressions that had laid the foundations of my understanding of America in childhood.

Civic virtue, America and Rome

The journey started just before college, as a high school social studies teacher once asked my class: “Rome rose but then fell.  Do you guys think America is still rising or are we on the decline?”  It was the late 1970s, and it was a question that, unbeknownst to me at the time, captured not only what had been an undertone of American thinking since conception – to compare our Republic to Rome’s and identify if there was an inflection point of civilizational failure that we either reached or could identify and avert. This question is not often asked anymore, but I was still of a generation for which this was not a strange or incomprehensible question, but a very American question. A graduate school professor (Michael Vlahos) in university a few years later taught a course I took that was dedicated heavily to addressing the very question: how was the comparison to and contemplation of Rome a pillar of American society and what did it tell us about ourselves.  Another great professor, Michael Ledeen, I came to know only a couple of years after that, as well as my first employer, Ken Jensen, opened the inquiry to Machiavelli, Gibbon, Burke, and others, which taught me this was a central theme and core pillar of American intellectual society.  America was Rome, but was determined not to plunge toward perdition as did Rome.

As one travels along the East Coast, many cities derive their names from Roman and Greek culture.  Syracuse, Athens, Ithaca, Cincinnati… The list could go on for an hour.

Americans strongly rejected the idea of historical determinism – either that a hidden force sets an arc of history and nations must align with it or be crushed by it, or alternatively, that nations are organic bodies that inherently have birth, growth, maturity, decline, and demise.  Americans believed that individual and human virtue, or lack thereof, drive the ebb and flow of history. History is written by men and ideas, not invisible forces.

Rome for Americans was a template, a map.  Rome rose, thrived, decayed, and fell. America can follow Rome’s path and rise to a great power comparable to Rome – a concept widely felt in America long before it had emerged as a great power – but it will reach an inflection point at which its trajectory will begin to decline.  The key to American culture, politics and morals – which believed, as did Gibbon, that history is written by men and not inscribed by invisible force greater than man –was to identify that point and make the moral and leadership choices to avoid the downward turn.  To avoid Rome’s fate, we must understand what made Rome great, and to reject that which led to its decline.

For America’s first two centuries, the figure of Cincinnatus stood tall and embodied what we hoped was the American spirit: the farmer ethic. Americans were independent; others relied on him, not vice versa. He is a foundation and the embodiment of freedom and individuals.  Society is informed by the fundamental value of independence from the state.

George Washington belonged to the Society of Cincinnati, as did many of his comrades, which was an entire organization devoted to the preservation of the values of Cincinnatus, but virtually all early Americans identified with the ancient mythology of Rome under Cincinnatus, and how the corruption of his agrarian virtue led to the decline and fall of the republic, and will do so in the US. A fundamental article of identity for the first 200 years, and still reverberating today, is the idea that the foundation of strength comes not from fortune or power, but from conviction, independence, and the willingness to fight for it. Rome was great when it embodied Cincinnatian virtue; it decayed and fell when it abandoned them even though it had vastly greater domains, wealth, assets, population and resources.

Being a connoisseur of American movies, compromise is rarely a positive word in the American lexicon because of this. There are few heroes in American movies who are great compromisers and mediators.  The theme is almost universal: the person with conviction—a person with strong civic virtue—stands up to the forces of power and moral rot and wins.  Whether it is Frank Capra or Clint Eastwood, this taps deep into the American DNA.  This constant obsession with civilizational greatness or rot is deeply anchored in the concept believed to have emerged from Cincinnatus himself.

By that, Vlahos meant how could the sense of civic virtue which agrarian, pioneering, individualistic and independent-minded ethos of the early settlement be maintained as a modern, urban society? There is no romance with the soil, but with the idea of a self-contained, individualistic and fiercely independent unit.

I would add to this that Americans saw themselves as the next great chapter in the Renaissance, which was the balancing of faith and reason.  It was understood that the downfall of Rome – and indeed the inherent demise of Greco-Roman culture – was in fact a rot of the soul which was repaired in the Renaissance by several factors:

1. The welding of faith (Christianity) to the core of reason (Greece and Rome) to form an Athens-Rome-Jerusalem base of civilization.
2. The Americans looked to great thinkers of the Renaissance for inspiration. The Sistine Chapel done by Michelangelo was an imagined replica of Solomon’s temple – which again in part contributed to the sense that the spiritual center of America would be a sort of new Solomonic temple. But at the same time, Machiavelli wrote his seminal work, The Prince, which drew from the wisdom of the Bible in the Moses story and insights of Tacitus, that warned of the fall of the moral foundations of the Roman empire that led eventually to its physical collapse.

The mooring of America to Rome, thus, and the quest to avoid the moment of rot that destroys civic virtue, led ultimately to the next pillar:  Jerusalem and the concept of America as “the New Jerusalem.”

America as the new Jerusalem

If you read American speeches, you’ll find much of the imagery comes from the Bible.  The monuments of Washington DC, where presidents have their memorials, contain on their walls excerpts from these various speeches, and in it, you will find the reach of the Bible.  John Winthrop on the ship Arbella, the lead ship of the convoy of pilgrims coming to the Massachusetts colony in 1630 said as his vessel approached the shores of America: “a city on a hill cannot be hid… [and] as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”

That city is a spiritual “beacon” which shines a light onto nations.   It was the new Jerusalem. And that realization finally began to answer my question that had arisen in my first trip to Israel; what was the bind between Israel and America that was different, why did Jerusalem resonate so much more for me as an American than other cities?

The city of Winthrop’s is conceived of as the New Jerusalem.  While his statements seemed to lose some currency in the following two centuries, they were strongly echoed in the mid to late 1800s and continue to be echoed today. In his Farewell Address, for example, Ronald Reagan said in January 1989:

“I’ve thought a bit of the “shining city upon a hill.” The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, … in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; …And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

It is the Christian vision of Jerusalem – a city whose essence winas ideals, ideals which formed a covenant grounded to the idea of the divine foundation for the rights of the individual as given at the center of that city on Mount Moriah.

It is in this context that one must understand the original idea of the capital, which came to be named Washington, DC.  The US consciously chose its capital concept in Washington by replicating the choice of Jerusalem by King David.  Jerusalem was to be both a physical neutral meeting ground upon which the 13 newly minted colonies – or states –could meet. Throughout, America saw itself as the new Israel, and its creation as a spiritual resurrection of Jerusalem.

But the depth of connection is far greater. Rome without Jerusalem did not survive. Pagan Rome by the third and fourth centuries AD had faced several centuries of decay. Its soul – the vague and somewhat undefined body of public virtue of the Cincinnatian Republic – had long vanished.  It suffered a declining population, collapsing family structures, stalling economic activity, an increasing inability to halt invasions, a loss of civic virtue and citizen morale, and, eventually, implosion. As the great Roman historians Livy and Suetonius noted two millennia ago, Rome, since the decline of the republic of Cincinnatus, had no soul and thus was in terminal decline. The power could mask the decline for a while, but it was a relentless trend which eventually consumed the empire.

Rome of late antiquity was on the verge of yielding to final collapse and a dark age by the third and fourth century, but the rise of Christianity, even in the midst of Barbarian invasions, appears to have reinvigorated the Roman world, halted the declining trends, built the greatest cities of the time, and created conditions by the 7th and 8th centuries which can only be considered the proto-renaissance. It is unclear whether Constantine’s decision to embrace Christianity may have been an expression of faith and caused the turnaround or was a foresighted political move devoid of genuine faith to tap into the already obvious dynamic nature of Christian populations (Jewish populations were smaller at the time, but experienced similar dynamic trends as the Christian cousins).

Either way, late antiquity represented a tremendous turnaround and resurrection of Rome by wedding it to a new soul: Jeremiah’s vision of Jerusalem. Many aspects of the Renaissance – including its scientific brilliance – which took hold with earnest momentum starting around 1100-1300 in Europe were already visible by the 7th and 8th centuries.

The essence of the Renaissance was the rediscovery of man and free will, and with it, man as the agent of moral choice.  And with free will, so too was the understanding that the movement of history was both a matter of divine plan and a matter of human agency. In the Renaissance, there were no predetermined arcs of history, no larger plans that stripped man of the ability to act on his own and left him devoid of the need to make moral and practical choices.   The Renaissance was, at its core, anchored in the balance between reason and faith, between the omnipresence of God and the free will of man, and between the mundane and the divine.

Whereas the Enlightenment, which followed the Renaissance, eventually placed reason above faith (mirroring the absolutism of the Dark Ages, in which faith excluded reason), and eventually sought to eliminate faith altogether in the modern era, in the Renaissance faith remained a foundation. Such faith ensured that man himself and his life altogether were understood as the result of divine creation, and thus the fundamental nature of man — in both his flawed and divine attributes — was immutable except by God. It was the barrier to human attempts to change the nature of humans, or to claim the lives of other humans as their possession or arrogate their soul to theirs – the removal of which in the modern era has led to horrific slaughter from the French Revolution through Auschwitz to the Gulags.

The mechanism of the ark as a vehicle to remind man of both his specialness and his limits lies at the core of the idea of Jerusalem as the soul.  Political structures and power were to be defined around accepting man for what he is and harnessing his nature, not arrogating to man the rights of God and then attempting to change the very nature of man. It was not the realm of man to judge creation as flawed and assume responsibility and power to redo it – which lies at the heart of Gnosticism, which ultimately gave rise to the politics of Robespierre, Stalin, and Hitler. The idea of Jerusalem was to remind mankind that the roots of human nature were to remain the realm of the divine and only the divine — a lesson forgotten at devastating cost in Europe since the French Revolution.

The role of these aspects of the image of Jerusalem underpin the foundation the body of ideas of the United States, namely the idea of divine protection both of man’s natural right and penchant for inherent ambition (which in the English case was manifest in the divinely-protected right to property and in the US context in the “pursuit of happiness”), but also of man’s limited power and enforced humility.

Conclusion

It was this realization that drew a direct line from ancient to modern Israel, and from ancient Israel to the new Jerusalem of America, which, as was Israel, a direct descendant of the continuum from Mount Moriah to Mount Sinai.  America was exceptional not because it was powerful or large, or because we were arrogant, but because it was indeed forged consciously as a derivative of the original covenant with God.

It was this realization that also explained why Jews, Israelis as well, were so attracted to America.  If freedom began at Mount Moriah, and the community of a single free nation was forged from tribalism by a common constitution handed down at Mount Sinai, and that the whole story of Exodus was seen by America’s founding fathers as an allegory of the creation of the United States – Benjamin Franklin even sought to portray Exodus and Moses on the seal he designed for the American Republic – then it is no accident then why Jews see something familiar and comforting in America, and I, as an American kid visiting Israel for the first time, felt something familiar in that alien land.

Simply, America is not a normal country for Jews. In essence, it is freedom, as was the forging of Judaism 3500 years ago, and thus the fortune of the Jewish people, tied umbilically to the fortune of freedom, is therefore also now tied to the fortune of the United States. As America thrives, Jews and Israel thrive. As America falters, Jews and Israel are besieged.

For me, on this 250^th birthday of America, this blessed land is thus neither only the New Rome, Athenian democracy, nor just the New Jerusalem, nor only the spirit of Apollo 11 and 13, nor just the savior of Israel in 1973 or the antithesis in the dark dialogue, or better described as conflictual debate, the West has held with tyranny. It is not only the arsenal or freedom and the backstop against evil.  It is, first and foremost, a land with a divinely inspired soul and an exceptional role in human history. It is not only a friend of the Jewish people, but the Jewish people are now intertwined with its fate.

May Americans never forget these building blocks that I encountered in my journey, borrowed in heart and mind,  from the 200^th to the 250^th anniversary, and may those now in their youth celebrate their next 50 years as a nation that recommits to its foundations and reaches heights even greater than those hitherto reached.