For Israel

the Hebrew Bible and the Birth of the United States

We visited the Library of Congress exhibit about the 350 year history of Jews in America and found it good and scholarly. Though some children were there, taking notes from the exhibit's opening timeline for an obvious class project, the exhibit generally did not cater to children. There's too much to read and look at, and other than some fun TV clips, not much for children to do. I encourage adults to see it, then teach it.

From David Gelernter's related article, "Telling the Story of America's Jews," Commentary magazine, p. 46:

"....the Hebrew Bible furnished a template for democracy. In 1780, for example, while the fighting was still under way, Pastor Simeon Howard of Boston was already pondering the new nation's government. He decided - on the basis of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Jewish historian Josephus - that it must be a democratic republic. Howard's advice was a radical as it was straightforward, as avant-garde as it was Bible-centered and godly. 'In compliance with the advice of Jethro,' he preached in May 1780, 'Moses chose able men, and made them rulers[ over hte Israelites in the desert]; but it is generally supposed that they were chosen by the people. This is asserted by Josephus, and plainly intimated by Moses in his recapitulary discourse, recorded in the first chapter of Deuteronomy' (emphasis added). William Lecky, the eminent 19th-century Irish historian (and no Judeophile), knew well what today's historians have largelly forgotten: 'Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy.' Freedom and democracy are basic to America. The connection between freedom and the Exodus is obvious; to the mind of America, infatuated with the Bible ('the best book in the world,' John Adams called it), democracy, too, was rooted in ancient Israel...."

Yes, I include this snippet in part to express my disdain for any extreme position about the separation of church and state, any position that says that all mention of God in any public venue, including American history classes, is bad. The Bible is fundamental to understanding this country, and that underlying philosophy should and can be discussed in public, in schools, and the Ten Commandments can even be used as the ethical basis for decisions, without turning this country into a theocracy.

posted by ninelives @ 8:15 AM