Rabbi’s Monthly Message

This July, our country turns 250-years old. And after all that time, we are still a work in progress.

It is a strange anniversary to mark. Unlike many celebrations – birthdays, graduations, etc., we are not gathering to celebrate a finished project. Instead, we are gathering to recommit ourselves to an unfinished one — and to ask, honestly, what it means to love a country whose promises remain, in places, unkept. Similar to the idea of turning Torah over and over again as we seek to uncover its deeper meaning, we continue to turn our nation over and over again as we seek to uncover its promise.

I want to bring an old story to this question, because it is the story I keep returning to when I think about what it means to hold a tradition — or a nation — accountable to its own ideals:

The Talmud (Bava Metzia 59b) tells of a dispute among the sages about the ritual purity of an oven built by a man named Achnai. Rabbi Eliezer stood alone against the majority. He was certain he was right, and he summoned the heavens to prove it. A carob tree uprooted itself and flew across the courtyard. A stream of water reversed its course. The walls of the study house leaned in to confirm his word. Finally, a voice came down from heaven itself: Why do you argue with Rabbi Eliezer, when the law always agrees with him. And Rabbi Yehoshua stood up and said: lo bashamayim hi — it is not in the heavens.

The law, he insisted, was no longer God’s alone to settle by miracle. It had been handed to human beings — to argue over, to reason through, to get right by the slow and stubborn work of human judgment and growth. Heaven could send all the signs it wanted. The sages would still have to decide for themselves.

I think America works the same way – save the miracles of rivers flowing backward or trees flying around. Our founding documents were never miracles. They were arguments — about liberty, equality, and dignity — written by people who did not fully live up to their own words, and who left the rest of us the unfinished task of making those words true. They were promises designed to extend forward and to be fulfilled by people not yet born.

Two hundred and fifty years later, we know exactly how far these promises must still travel on their journey toward actuality. We see it in our own community — among neighbors who are still waiting for this country to treat them with the dignity it claims to guarantee everyone. We do not need a voice from heaven to tell us the work is unfinished. We can see it. But here is what I find hopeful in lo bashamayim hi: it is not a statement of despair. It is a statement of trust — trust that human beings, working carefully and in good faith can be given the responsibility to make something true that was originally spoken as an aspiration.

Judaism has never asked us to be finished. It asks us to keep learning — lilmod u’lelamed, to study and to teach — because a tradition that stops growing stops living. The same, I think, is true of a country. Patriotism, at its most serious, is not the belief that we have arrived. It is the discipline of staying in the argument: of insisting, year after year, that kol adam — every person — is created with dignity, and that this dignity is not a future hope but a present obligation.

So, this July 4th I am not interested in choosing between gratitude and grief, pride and protest. I want to hold the whole of it: grateful for a 250-year-old argument that is still worth having, honest about how much of it remains unsettled, and committed to the belief that the work of getting it right was given to us, not to the heavens.

Kol Tuv,

Rabbi James

rabbijames@gmail.com