The Sacred Documents

Antonio Garcia Martinez is a convert to Judaism.  He writes in a piece today about the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, which celebrates the ending of the annual cycle of reading from the Torah and the beginning of the new cycle.  He relates it to the importance of the American founding documents.  If one removes those documents - the Declaration and the Constitution - from their centrality to the meaning of America and try to substitute other dates or other documents as foundational our country can not sustain itself.  His substack newsletter is worth subscribing to.

As rabbi Arthur Green put it: “Judaism is a civilization built around a text.”

Likewise, the United States of America is a nation-state built around one.

A creedal nation revering sacred documents handed down by prophetic founders, interpreted via exegetical responsa by a rabbinical court, is the biggest secular reboot of Judeo-Christian thought ever. Our political strife resembles religious wars because they effectively are, as the nation defines itself anew with every passing generation. The citizenry seethes in constant discord, finding some breathing room in far-flung federalism, until one side exploits some instrument of the Federal government—the Supreme Court, or the Army if necessary—to impose its interpretation of the sacred document on the other. It’s not too much of a stretch, and seems less so with every passing day, to compare the current Red/Blue split as something on the order of Sunni versus Shia or Catholic versus Protestant: the bitter contest to define a difference often blurry to outsiders.

Therein lies the problem with the covenantal approach to nation-building: ‘chartering’ freedom as secular scripture means the other bastard gets it too. Cornerstone freedoms such as those of speech and religion counter every human tribal reflex. Deep down, nobody actually wants freedom of speech, religion and assembly. They say they do, but bring up the appropriate bogeyman and that bogeyman’s public marches and Facebook pages and whatnot, and it all goes out the window. Suddenly my inviolable freedom of speech is that guy’s ‘misinformation’; my tweets must be duly amplified via algorithmic feeds, that other bastard’s tweet must be suppressed to save the republic.

The only way to create a truly liberal state is to erect a (meta) religion out of tolerating all religions, an uber-tribe tolerating all tribes. Which is why the United States, the country that granted its citizens the wildest and most uncontrolled set of freedoms--Guns! Say what you want! Organize what you want!--had to create a cult of freedom that venerated the Bill of Rights almost the way the Jews do the Ten Commandments. We have to love our founding documents, and the sacramental freedoms they represent, more than we hate our our political enemies for the American Experiment to function.

From the viewpoint of this civic religion, wokeness and its maniacal push to divide a syncretic nation into fanciful constituent parts can only be considered a bizarre heretical paganism that somehow crept into the political temple. Only a country whose amnesiac memory is unsullied by existential ethnic violence thinks it wise to solve issues of racism by feverishly heightening feelings of either unforgivable blame or angry victimhood. The drastic remedy often proves far worse than the affliction; better to push our fellow citizens to fuller and better realizations of our founding principles, as the biblical prophets did the Israelites, than tear up our national covenant in favor of false idols.

On this Independence Day, consider shielding your gaze for a moment, and reciting the foundational belief of this covenantal nation, the profound statement that started it all: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal…