In 1789, congregants of the Virginia's Beth Shalome synagogue were proud when George Washington became their nation’s first president. They were so proud, in fact, that they tweaked a Jewish prayer in his honor, even weaving Washington’s name in Hebrew through the prayer’s middle lines. As the prayer went, they praised Hashem for having “placed the President of the United States to act as [their] leader,” and expressed hope that “he act justly towards us, gladden and bring joy to our hearts, May he lead us along an honorable path…”
This appreciation, however, was not a one way street. Washington and many other presidents throughout our nation’s history have shown appreciation for Jews and the stories of the Torah, which have served as America’s lyrics of liberty and led the United States on its own march of progress. This President’s Day, we’ll explore how George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan each tapped into the Torah’s wisdom, leaning on it during their time in office as a guide for our nation.
For Washington, the year after the Beth Shalome prayer he wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Savannah, Georgia, expressed his thanks for congratulating him on his election. He also expressed his desire that the “wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land - whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation - still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven.”It was not a coincidence that Washington drew inspiration from these Jewish stories. Like Moses leading the Israelites from an oppressive Pharaoh, Washington helped lead a miraculous deliverance from an oppressive British monarchy, and saw in his nascent nation a biblical Israel reborn on American shores. For those who built the first American colonies had crossed their own Red Sea, survived oppression and exploitation, and emerged liberated thanks to Heaven’s help. Our first president hoped that America, then, which was forged in a faith evoking that of Israel in the Torah, should merit God’s continued protection. Or, as he called it, that it should receive the “providential agency” of the “wonder-working Deity.”
Abraham Lincoln, too, understood the story of the Israelites as an exemplar Americans should seek to imitate. In a February 21, 1861 address to the New Jersey State Senate, Lincoln evoked Hashem’s charge to the Jewish people to be an am segulah (Exodus 19:5), a community chosen to bring Heaven down to Earth through modeling morality. In recalling America’s own early years, Lincoln mused:
I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for; that something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come; I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.
Israel, Lincoln understood, had been chosen by the Lord to be His covenantal partner, obedient to God’s law in the Torah. And while it possessed no national Torah, America instead had its great purpose expressed in its founding principle, granted by that very same God: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
As Rabbi Meir Soloveichik has reflected:
Lincoln’s words bespeak a localized love of land and history. He is moved to stand where once Washington walked; he reverentially reflects that in Trenton he feels himself on sacred soil. And yet, as he considers the miraculous nature of the Founding, he joins his love with a recognition that America bears a mission not for itself alone—a mission greater than independence, which makes Americans an “almost chosen people." In invoking biblical Israel, Lincoln implies that, as Abraham’s destiny was linked to a land but formed first and foremost in covenantal dedication to a set of ideas, so something similar could be said of America.
Thus Lincoln, like Washington before him, sensed in the American story a country whose character reflected the covenant of the Jewish people with our God. Just as Israel emerged from a founding document, the Bible, which asserted the inherent freedom and dignity in humans created in the divine image, America was forged from the Declaration of Independence which asserted that same principle.
Later presidents would also emphasize the Torah’s importance in the American national psyche. At the turn of the 20th century, in a December 30, 1900 address in Carnegie Hall to the Young Men’s Christian Association, Teddy Rosevelt emphasized how crucial it was to obey “the Decalogue and the Golden Rule,” claiming that these young men “must stand as the foundation of every successful effort to better either our social or our political life.” In 1904, while running for reelection, when Roosevelt was told by advisors to emphasize his devotion to the Constitution, he believed such an assertion was so blatantly obvious that he responded, “The only trouble is that I am ashamed to say it. It is a little like repeating my adherence to the Ten Commandments.”
This penchant for Jewish principles stayed with Roosevelt till his final years. During World War I, two years before he would pass away, Roosevelt offered a remarkable reflection on how deeply Jewish ideas had shaped the spirit of the US: “The most perfect machinery of government could not keep us as a nation from destruction if there is not within us a soul,” he wrote. “No abounding material prosperity shall avail us if our spiritual senses atrophy. The foes of our own household shall surely prevail against us unless there be in our people a morality not very widely different from that preached by the seers and prophets of Judea when the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome still lay in the future.”
Fast forward, towards the end of the 20th century, and President Ronald Reagan gifted Torah lovers something unexpected: 1983’s “Year of the Bible.” He cited both the Old and New Testament in his announcement, declaring: “It’s my firm belief that the enduring values, as I say, presented in its pages have a great meaning for each of us and for our nation. The Bible can touch our hearts, order our minds, refresh our souls.” He also believed in the nation’s chosenness. Reagan also remarked on America’s chosenness: “I’ve always believed that this blessed land was set apart in a special way, that some divine plan placed this great continent here between the two oceans to be found by people from every corner of the earth—people who had a special love for freedom and the courage to uproot themselves, leave their home-land and friends to come to a strange land.”
Reagan’s emphasis not just on the New Testament but also on the Hebrew Bible was appreciated by the American Jewish community. And it aligned with Reagan’s support for the movement to free Soviet Jewry as well. Natan Sharansky, then imprisoned in Russia and having heard about America’s “Year of the Bible,”referred to his study of the Psalms while he was behind bars as “Reaganite Readings.”
Thus across generations, US Presidents have leaned on our Torah as a guide for our nation. George Washington expressed his belief that America was protected by Providence, just as Israel had been in escaping from and defeating Pharaoh. Abraham Lincoln articulated America’s national mission as being, intentionally, that of an almost-Jewish people. Teddy Roosevelt reiterated the Torah’s values of justice, righteousness, charity, and humanity's inherent dignity that shaped America’s own. And Ronald Reagen vaulted our holy book to the center of our nation’s collective consciousness.
As the story of America turns 250 this year, the Torah is well over 2,000, and will no doubt continue to be here for our country to rely on. It’s a reminder, not only for presidents but for all our country’s citizens, of its never-ending power to bring joy to our hearts and, importantly, to lead us along an honorable path.
Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern serves as the senior advisor to the provost as well as the deputy director and chief strategy officer of the Zahava and Moshael J. Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. He is the editor or author of nineteen books, including Jewish Roots of American Liberty: The Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story and the upcoming Two Nations Under God: How (Biblical) Israel Inspires America, both of which received a National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Among his other books are The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada, Esther in America and Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.
