We the People: A Covenant at 250

As America approaches its 250th birthday, we Americans seem to have no shortage of reasons to argue with one another. Our politics are louder and more corrosive than our conversations. Our disagreements often seem deeper than our common ground. We increasingly sort ourselves into tribes that appear to speak different languages, consume different facts, and imagine different futures.

But anniversaries offer us an opportunity to remember not just where we have been, but who we aspire to become.

The United States is unlike almost any nation in history. It was not founded upon a shared ethnicity, language, or ancient homeland. It was founded upon an idea that a people could choose, together, what kind of nation they wanted to become. That idea was enshrined in three words: “We the People.”

We have said them so often that they’ve lost their impact. But when they were first stated they were genuinely radical. And they still are today! They don’t simply locate power in the citizens. They place responsibility there too. They declare that a nation is not merely a collection of individuals pursuing personal interests, but a community that accepts a shared obligation for a common future.

As a Jewish educator, I have spent many years thinking about a similar idea, though we call it by a different name. We call it covenant. It is the foundation of Jewish peoplehood itself, going back to Sinai. It is not a contract between individuals protecting what is theirs, but a binding mutual responsibility, each generation renewing a promise that the generation before it made and the generation after it will inherit.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z”l wrote about exactly this distinction, and he saw something in America that I think most Americans, Jewish or not, rarely stop to notice. A contract protects what is mine. A covenant asks what we owe each other. Contracts create transactions. Covenants create communities. Sacks believed America, at its best, was founded not merely as a legal compact but as something closer to what Jews have always understood covenant to mean. It is a moral commitment that binds strangers to one another and that each generation must actively renew or lose.

I find it moving that a British rabbi, steeped in three thousand years of Jewish covenantal thinking, looked at the American experiment and recognized something deeply familiar. It tells you something about what this country aspired to be from the beginning, and it tells you something about why Jews, throughout our history in this country, have found in America’s founding language an echo of our own.

This idea feels especially important right now, when we are somehow more divisive and less connected than ever. Democracy was not designed to produce uniformity. The founders argued fiercely among themselves and expected we would too. But they also believed that someone who votes differently may still love this country as deeply as you do.

We need to remember and embrace that more than any political label, Americans are parents, sons, daughters, and neighbors who will show up when things go wrong. That is the real fabric of America, and it always has been. Ordinary neighborhoods, congregations, schools, and people quietly living out their lives in the promise of America.

America’s story has never been one of perfection. Our founders knew that, hence the concept, “to form a more perfect union.” It has been one of renewal, each generation inheriting a remarkable framework and having to bring the moral energy to keep it alive. We have done that before, in moments far harder than this one. Jews know something about that kind of renewal too. It is, in many ways, the central practice of Jewish life.

At 250, the better question isn’t, “What has America done for us?” It is, “What kind of citizens do we choose to be?”

That is what “We the People” has always meant to ask each of us. And it is, in its own way, a question Jews have been asking ourselves for a very long time.