Such is the argument of the American-Jewish theologian Rabbi Dr. Elliot Dorff. Just like Spiderman experiences the fateful radioactive spider bite, or Batman witnesses the murder of his parents, so too do nations tell stories about their founding: not just about how they were established, but equally, about how to understand their identity.
The Romans told the story of Romulus and Remus: twin brothers born to the god of war and raised by wild wolves. When a dispute arises between them, Romulus kills Remus – and on the site of the murder establishes the city of Rome. And indeed, throughout its history, the Roman Empire would be marked by the wolf-like spilling of blood.
By contrast, the Jewish people’s origin story, Rabbi Dorff argues, is about moving from degradation to dignity. After more than 400 years of being enslaved in Egypt, the Israelites are redeemed from bondage and brought to Mount Sinai. There, they receive the Ten Commandments, and are repeatedly taught: You shall be holy – for you were once slaves in the land of Egypt.
As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of our founding, an old debate has resurfaced about how best to understand our nation’s origin stories. There are those who would want to emphasize the vision and achievements of the founders: highlighting the nation’s founding ideals of liberty and equality – and, in some cases, obscuring the founders’ moral failures. Others insist that those failures are not peripheral but foundational, making it difficult – and, in some cases, impossible – to regard the nation's beginnings as a source of inspiration or hope.
But each of these approaches, taken to its ideological extreme, presents an overly simplistic version of the American story. They reduce the conversation to a binary choice: asking us to regard the nation's founding either as perfect or failed – either worthy of celebration or deserving of condemnation.
This is not a very Jewish approach.
We Jews don’t believe that human beings are either good or evil, either saintly or sinful. This, argues the late Rabbi Dr. Eugene Borowitz, might be the primary distinction between Judaism and Christianity. Classical Christian theology believes that human beings are born sinful, and can only be redeemed from sinfulness through faith in Christ.
Judaism, by contrast, believes that human beings are born neutral, a blank slate. In the daily morning prayers, we read: Elohai, n’shama she-natata bi t’horah hi, “O God, the soul that You have given me is pure.” And alongside our pure, neutral, blank-slate of a soul, we are also given two inclinations: the yetzer hara and yetzer tov – our aggressive inclination and good inclination. In any given moment, we are free to choose which of these inclinations to follow. That is to say: we are not fundamentally good or fundamentally bad. Rather, we are an amalgamation of both: complex creatures, who sometimes do good and sometimes do not.
What Judaism teaches about the individual, we might be wise to apply to society. The United States, of course, is not unblemishedly virtuous – but neither is it irredeemably corrupted. Our country’s history, rather, is complex: with times throughout the past 250 years when we have lived up to our founding aspirations of life and liberty, and other times when we have not.
The United States is both the Land of Opportunity – where my immigrant ancestors found economic success, where civil liberties are enshrined in law, where our founding document declares that all people are created equal – and also, is a nation that has committed grave injustices: enslavement, the dispossession of indigenous peoples, a deadly contemporary conflict over immigration and deportation, and much else. And, it has always been a nation of striving: where suffragists, the civil rights movement, advocates for LGBTQ equality, and many others have courageously helped our country more fully live up to our ideals.
Last month, the Broadway show Ragtime was honored with the Tony Award for the Best Revival of a Musical. And perhaps what has so deeply resonated with audiences and with critics is that the show refuses to tell a binary story about this country: that we are deserving either of celebration or condemnation. Rather, it tells a multifaceted story of America: a place where great ideals can be realized, and where there is still much work to do. As the musical’s opening song puts it, ours is a complex country: a nation of both “riches and rags, and rhythm and rhyme” – if only we can acknowledge it all.