D’VAR TORAH
Parashat Pinhas, Happy 250th Birthday America
Pinchas, Kallen, and the Covenants We Embrace
America at 250
Parashat Pinchas opens with the strangest reward in the Torah. A young priest commits an act of shocking zealotry, and God responds not with a medal for combat but with a marriage-like bond: הִנְנִי נֹתֵן לוֹ אֶת־בְּרִיתִי שָׁלוֹם — “I hereby grant him My covenant of peace. It shall be for him and his descendants after him a covenant of eternal priesthood, תַּחַת אֲשֶׁר קִנֵּא לֵאלֹהָיו, because he was zealous for his God” (Bamidbar 25:12–13).
Read it carefully and you see the Torah performing an act of alchemy. Kanaut — zeal, the hottest and most dangerous of human fuels — is not celebrated and not extinguished. It is converted: into brit, into kehunah, into olam. Into covenant, service, permanence. The parashah then spends the rest of its length showing us what converted zeal looks like: a census, counting every family of a new generation; five daughters petitioning to inherit; a successor receiving the laying-on of hands; and finally the korban tamid, עֹלַת תָּמִיד הָעֲשֻׂיָה בְּהַר סִינַי, “the regular daily offering instituted at Sinai” (Bamidbar 28:6) — passion domesticated into constancy, fire banked into an altar that never goes out. The message of Pinchas is that the highest form of passion is not the spear. It is the long, faithful, daily commitment. In a word: the highest form of zeal is marriage.
Hold that thought, and come to the harbor of New Amsterdam, September 1654. A small French vessel arrives carrying twenty-three Jews — men, women, and children — refugees from Recife, Brazil, where the Portuguese reconquest had put an end to a brief Dutch experiment in tolerance and put the Inquisition back at their heels. They arrived destitute; the ship’s master sued them for the unpaid fare. And the governor, Peter Stuyvesant, wanted no part of them — he wrote to his masters at the Dutch West India Company asking leave to expel this people he described in the ugliest of terms. The Company — nudged, we should note, by Jewish shareholders in Amsterdam — wrote back: let them stay, let them travel and trade, so long as their poor do not become a burden but are supported by their own. And so the first Jewish community of North America was founded on a rejection letter, a lawsuit, and a promise to take care of its own.
Here is what moves me about those twenty-three, on this weekend of America’s 250th. They were not conquerors and they were not missionaries. They were, in the deepest sense, suitors. They arrived with almost nothing and proposed a relationship — to a continent that had not asked for them and a governor who did not want them. And the relationship they proposed was covenantal on both sides at once: we will remain who we are, a people bound to the God of Israel and to one another — and we will bind ourselves faithfully to this place, its burdens and its promise.
Within a few years they had won the right to stand guard on the city’s wall like other burghers. Within a generation they had a cemetery, then a congregation, then Hebrew documents, ketubot and their addenda, drying on American soil. The oldest continuous romance in American life had begun: three hundred and seventy-two years, and counting, of Jews falling in love with America and asking America to love them back as Jews.
The prophet Hoshea gives us the language for this kind of bond — the words we say every weekday morning as we wind tefillin around our fingers like a wedding ring: וְאֵרַשְׂתִּיךְ לִי לְעוֹלָם, “I will betroth you to Me forever; I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and justice, in kindness and mercy; וְאֵרַשְׂתִּיךְ לִי בֶּאֱמוּנָה, I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness” (Hoshea 2:21–22). Betrothal — erusin — is the Torah’s model of chosen permanence: a bond entered in freedom that then asks everything of you. That is what the twenty-three began in 1654. Not assimilation, which is the end of the self; not separatism, which is the refusal of relationship; but betrothal — to God, to the Jewish people, and, remarkably, to America too.
Over two plus centuries the romance deepened without a theory. Then a rabbi’s son wrote one. Horace Meyer Kallen, born in 1882 and brought to Boston at age five, fled his father’s Orthodoxy as a young man — until Harvard, of all places, sent him back: his professor Barrett Wendell showed him how deeply the Hebrew Bible had shaped the Puritan mind, how the Hebraic tradition ran through the very formation of the American character. It was America that returned Kallen to his Jewishness. And Kallen returned the favor, giving America the truest theory of itself it has ever had.
In 1915 the fashionable idea was the Melting Pot, and the uglier idea beneath it was coercive Americanization — the demand that immigrants dissolve, that Jews in particular cease to be a distinct people; Kallen’s own senior colleague at Wisconsin argued for restricting Jewish immigration precisely to end the Jews as a distinct strain in American life. Kallen answered in The Nation with an essay whose title says everything: “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot.” The melting pot, he argued, is not democracy — it is democracy’s opposite. Whatever else a person changes in the New World, “he cannot change his grandfather.” Our inwardness, our inheritance — the tents of Jacob — persist; and a democracy worthy of the Declaration does not repress that inheritance, it liberates it.
He posed it musically: force the many voices of America into unison and you need the methods of empires — what the czars did to the Jews of the Pale. Unison is un-American. The alternative is harmony: an orchestra of peoples in which each instrument keeps its own timbre and precisely thereby enriches the whole. Not a melting pot — a symphony.
Recent scholarship has made clear: cultural pluralism was not merely an American idea. It was a Jewish idea with global reach — one expression of a worldwide project of Jewish thinkers, from the Russian Empire to Vienna to Ottoman Palestine, seeking full integration into modern states without surrendering Jewish peoplehood. Mendelssohn separated religion from the state so that Jews could enter modernity; Kallen’s generation separated nationality from the state so that Jews could remain a people within it. Cultural pluralism is one of world Jewry’s great gifts to political thought — and America was the soil where it took root. And the vision did not stand still.
Kallen’s early pluralism was fairly charged with blindness to Black America — and there was teshuvah in the sequel: by January 1919 he stood at Carnegie Hall at an NAACP mass meeting on the future of Africa, alongside James Weldon Johnson and the platform of W.E.B. Du Bois — who himself wrote that the African movement meant to Black Americans what Zionism meant to the Jews. And John Dewey, gently correcting his friend, perfected the idea: not assimilation to Anglo-Saxondom, but “genuine assimilation to one another” — each group keeping its traditions precisely so that it has more to give the rest. An unfinished, self-correcting, ever-widening vision. Is there anything more Jewish, or more American, than that?
Do you see what Kallen really wrote? He wrote America’s ketubah. He took the arrangement the twenty-three had improvised in 1654 — we remain ourselves and we bind ourselves to you — and he made it the law of the relationship: America’s very promise, he argued, is that you may enter the covenant of this nation without divorcing the covenant of your grandfathers. Two betrothals, not one. It is parallel to Isaiah Berlin’s conception of freedom. The freedom of this country is not merely freedom from — from the Inquisition, from the Pale, from the czar. It is the freedom to: the freedom to commit, to bind, to covenant — with the God of Israel, with the Jewish people, and with the United States of America, all at once, each bond strengthening the others.
I will not pretend the romance is untroubled. We live in a season when the two ancient solvents of Jewish life in every diaspora have both returned in strength. Assimilation whispers its old seduction: the melting pot never really closed, it got rebranded. And if the Tanakh warns against syncretism it is for good reason. The temptation of believing that we can be loyal and aligned to more than just the One God of the Universe is a feature of modern America.
And antisemitism, which many of us honestly believed ourselves that we would never see again, and oh how it is so painful to see our children and grandchildren experience it, has come roaring back — on the street, on the campus, on the screen — telling us the opposite lie: that we were never really party to this covenant at all, that the betrothal was one-sided, that America’s promise was not made to us. One voice says: you may stay, if you cease to be Jews. The other says: you may be Jews, but you do not belong here. They are the melting pot and the ghetto, Stuyvesant’s two options, back for another round.
And here Kallen hands us more than comfort — he hands us our assignment. If cultural pluralism is the truest theory of America, then the Jews are not incidental to it; we are its test case, the people on whom the theory was first worked out. Every time we refuse the melting pot we are defending the Constitution’s deepest premise on behalf of every people in the orchestra.
When we as Jews insist on remaining fully Jewish and embrace our covenental peoplehood, the symphony itself has a section that helps inspire the others to play their scores more beautifully. Our particularity is our patriotic music.
And Parashat Pinchas tells us exactly how covenants survive such seasons. Not by the spear — zealotry as rage is the raw material, never the finished vessel. And not by walking away — the daughters of Tzelophchad teach that when the arrangement seems to exclude you, you draw nearer and petition, you do not withdraw: וַתִּקְרַבְנָה בְּנוֹת צְלָפְחָד, “the daughters of Tzelophchad drew near… תְּנָה־לָּנוּ אֲחֻזָּה, give us a holding” (Bamidbar 27:1, 4). Covenants survive by the tamid — the daily offering, morning and evening, בְּמוֹעֲדוֹ, “at its appointed time” (Bamidbar 28:2), rain or shine, favorable polls or fearful ones. Marriage is not sustained by the wedding; it is sustained by the ten thousand ordinary mornings after.
So it is with both of our betrothals. The Jewish one is renewed every time we set the Shabbat table, teach a child her alef-bet, show up for a minyan, stand with Israel, wind the strap around our finger and say Hoshea’s words like vows. And the American one is renewed the same way — every time we vote, serve, build, testify, give, argue for this country’s promise while holding it to that promise, refusing both the melting pot’s amnesia and the ghetto’s despair.
That is the dynamism of the Jews of modernity — the audacity to hold multiple covenants with total fidelity, to be a hundred percent Jewish and a hundred percent American and to insist, with Kallen, that the arithmetic works because covenants are not zero-sum. We are the people who answered every era’s demand to choose between with a stubborn, creative both. And we merit to live in the one nation on earth that was founded — imperfectly, unevenly, but really — on the premise that we should never have to choose.
So on this 250th birthday of the Republic, here is the charge, and it is simply the parashah’s charge: choose it all, and choose it daily. Embrace your roots — the texts, the language, the memory, the grandfather Kallen said you cannot change and should not want to. Embrace the heritage — not as a museum but as a practice, a religion lived, an altar tended tamid, daily. Embrace the people — here, in Israel, everywhere the orchestra of Jacob’s tents is playing. And embrace the American dream — not as a fallback for when Jewishness feels heavy, but as the other ring on our finger.
הִנְנִי נֹתֵן לוֹ אֶת־בְּרִיתִי שָׁלוֹם — “I hereby grant him My covenant of peace.” May the zeal of our moment be converted, as Pinchas’ was, into brit — into covenant, constancy, and peace. And may the romance that began with twenty-three weary souls in the New York harbor become, in our hands, a marriage worthy of another 250 years.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Bolton
