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As a Jew I have been thinking for the past week of the significance of the events of the second century B.C.E., where the Jewish rebels undertook their revolt in the context of Hellenistic empire and culture. One way to see it: a group of Jews took back the Temple from a ruler who had violated the terms of an equilibrium that had lasted more than three centuries, an equilibrium where the empire acknowledged Jewish status and self-rule and the minority acknowledged the claims of empire and their small place within it.

Another way to see it: the few years of the Maccabean war were part of a longer process of the Jews defining their place within the imperial world politically and culturally. Not just as a small national group, a drop in the bucket, but as a group all over the Hellenistic world, a contributor and even at times a partner in shaping the Hellenism that was not static but that itself changed as it encountered different groups, the Jews among them.

The Vice President said was that you don’t have to be Christian to have a place in America, but you do have take a side for the values and the redemptive process he labels Christian. There was a lot beautiful in how he described that, a lot that I would say too in my own way. The difference between the Vice President and me is this: Well, first he said some things inaccurately about both faith and non-faith, and took some awful cheap shots at Somali-Americans and others.

But the bigger difference between Vice President Vance and me: I recognize that he sees the values and the redemptive process in light of his faith’s story, and that I see those same values and that same redemptive process in my own religious idiom, and that a lot of people see them in other idioms secular and religious. None of them is any less a commitment, a soul-commitment, than any other. None is a denial of any other. I take that whole picture as the given, as a core component of the genius of America.

The Vice President sees the first interpretation of Chanukkah I wrote above. I see them both. The difference matters.

As I finish up a festival that has resonated for Jews, Christians, and others in America as fundamentally about religious freedom against the oppression of a tyrant, I ask the Vice President and those who cheered him to try to know what I know about this country, and about the stories he quotes and I quote. That we can all bring our faiths if we wish to the public square, or not, without having to label the country as one or the other. That we can all try to enrich the telling of the story of America in our own ways, without insisting that one particular version of the Christian story is the foundation and all the rest are derivative or mere imitations.

My own American philosophy, my song to America, flows from many sources: philosophical and widely shared; uniquely Jewish in Torah and the Jewish story in this country – and Christian, from colleagues, intellectuals, and teachers personal and national.

Vice President Vance, as Chanukkah has now passed and Christmas is nearly here for most Americans, I say to you: My relationship to you, and the relationship of Jewish Americans to Christian Americans, are not like the simple version of the equilibrium worked out after the Maccabean war within the Hellenistic empires. You don’t have to tell me that America is a Christian nation, ask for my applause or notice if I don’t. Let’s tell it to each other differently. Then you can have your nation grounded in Christian truths as I have mine grounded in Jewish ones, and it will be the same nation, yours and mine together, and neither of us will have to deny the other’s story to be absolutely committed to our own.

NB See you Mr. Vice President for a conversation at our synagogue anytime as you contemplate your run for president. (Drop a note to info@howtobepresident.org.) Wishing you and your family a Merry Christmas.