4th of July Special: R. Ethan Tucker: 250 Years of Judaism in America

For millennia, Jews had a story about where they were in history.

And tonight, what I wanna do with you is to highlight how America changed that story.

Years ago, I remember sitting with an Israeli colleague who was describing her encounter with the children's book Rivka's First Thanksgiving.

The book was written in two thousand and one, but it's set in nineteen ten in the United States, and it tells a story of a nine-year-old Jewish immigrant who is persuading her family and her rabbis that she should be allowed to celebrate Thanksgiving, which she learned about in school.

And in response to the elders' resistance, the young girl says, first source on your outline sheet, "You do not seem to understand that immigrants came to America to escape from mean, wicked people who hurt them and their families.

That is why the Pilgrims came, and that is why the Jewish people came later.

The Pilgrims were thankful, and I think that we should be too," signed by Rivka Rabin.

My Israeli colleague said that upon reading this book, something clicked for her that she had never understood before.

For American Jews, the United States was the Promised Land.

Not just another diaspora to ride out, not a Gentile government granting them more favorable terms, but a kind of different end to Jewish history.

I felt at the time, and still feel, that this was an overstatement, especially of this children's book, but the reaction stuck with me, and it did capture something deep.

Because Rivka's letter in this book indeed presents herself as a modern-day Pilgrim, seamlessly integrated into the story of America.

And it made me realize how much I, personally, never thought of myself growing up as a Jew who happened to live in America.

I thought of myself as a Jew and as an American, and I never imagined it any other way.

And so as we're gathering tonight to reflect on the upcoming United States sesters centennial, I wanna revisit some obvious truths about Jewish life in this country, ones that we take for granted but should not.

And I want to think about how the Aggadah and Halakha of American Jews has been upended by our experiences here, and to reflect a bit about what it will take for us to invest in the next chapter of a robust Jewish life in the next quarter millennium.