This was my D’var Torah for June 27, 2026, a week before America’s 250th anniversary, for Parashiyot Chukkat-Balak. Though I don’t reference it specifically, Parashat Balak is an interlude in the complaints of the wilderness, a reassurance from the outside that despite the challenges the people are experiencing they are fundamentally blessed and their project will continue.
Benjamin Franklin Bache was the grandson of Ben Franklin. Franklin had taken his grandson with him on his mission to France during the American Revolution, so it was natural that Franklin would bequeath his grandson all of his printing equipment when he died in April of 1790, along with some money and many books. That October, Bache used his inheritance to start a newspaper in Philadelphia, which he called the General Advertiser, and Political, Commercial, Agricultural and Literary Journal. Eventually he came round to his grandfather’s teachings about clear writing and simplified the name to the Aurora and General Advertiser.
But despite dropping the word “political” from the name, Bache’s paper was deeply involved in the great issues of the 1790s, as a publication in the nation’s capital. Issues such as war and European alliances; immigration; and free speech. Like most major newspapers at the time the Aurora was aligned with a political party, and Bache was with the Democratic-Republicans of Vice President Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
In the year 1798 in particular, editing and publishing a paper in Philadelphia was not for the faint of heart. In fact, for Bache and people like his nemesis John Fenno, publisher of the Federalist-aligned National Gazette, being in the news business at times meant risking your life. Each of the two parties had not just a Congressional delegation in Philadelphia, and allied papers, but street gangs as well. Federalist and Republican gangs roamed the streets looking for people to rough up based on their views of whether the U.S. should ally with Britain or with France.
The temperature was even higher because right at this time of year, before and after Independence Day 1798, President Adams had signed four bills known together as the Alien and Sedition Acts, which conveniently made it illegal to write “malicious” things about the Federalist President, but not the Democratic-Republican Vice President.
So it was that one day in June of ’98, the two publishers’ families actually came to blows on the streets of the capital, Bache himself and Fenno’s son, in the presence of a throng. Both of course ran different accounts of the brawl in their papers, claiming for themselves greater valor and lesser injuries and attacking the integrity and patriotism of the other. Soon Bache was indicted for sedition, and his workplace and home were subject to attack on more than one occasion. The only reason he wasn’t convicted was because of the yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia that summer, which claimed both his life and that of his publishing rival John Fenno.
I know these things largely from a book I pull out from time to time by Richard Rosenfeld called American Aurora, which is both an anthology of Bache’s articles and an imagined diary. And believe it or not the reason I do this is to be reassured. If you read books like this about the 1790s, essentially the first decade of the Constitution, it seems impossible that we would make it out the other side intact as a republic, and it’s astonishing how quickly after 1800 things stabilized, other than of course the ongoing brutal injustice of slavery.
When people say to me that the political situation of America is more awful than it has ever been, I go back and read Benjamin Franklin Bache’s Aurora and say – not really! My opinion is that the 1790s were worse than now at least in some ways. Political party street gangs, my goodness! All the things that were thought to have to function well to make the Constitution work were not strong in 1798: the Federal government, the political parties, the media.
Yet we made it through, and not just barely.
It’s another data point, a possible parallel for our time, though not the kind we usually talk about. No historical parallel is ever exact, which reminds us that our own near future has not yet been determined.
I have been repetitively insistent that this 250th anniversary on July 4, one week from now, is a time for both learning and celebration. I say this knowing it doesn’t feel like it. I remember the bicentennial, and yes I was a kid but I know it wasn’t just kids who were learning and celebrating for months on end. Every child wanted a bicentennial quarter or to see the Freedom Train. We had Schoolhouse Rock’s America cartoons. Kids and grownups too had historical moments from 1776 narrated on TV in prime time every night.
This year is not like that!
We are wondering whether our country can recapture the sizzle of the principles written in our Declaration of Independence and etched on our Statue of Liberty.
We are wondering whether for us as Jews, this country can continue be a place of freedom, equality and pluralism, or even a place of safety.
We are wondering whether as Jews in both the U.S. and Israel we can continue to be the activists of democracy and justice we have often been successfully, during the past 100 years in both countries.
These are our bigger big picture questions as July 4th approaches. The case for “no” as the answer to any and all of them is not hard to make, especially for Jews with all of our history. It is hard to celebrate without hopeful answers. Where might we find hopeful answers, or the motivation to find them?
In the Torah reading today, our people are toward the end of their wandering, and they face a crisis of thirst. The story may be familiar, but what might not be familiar is that this particular crisis is actually supposed to remind the people of a past crisis. Here they are in a place called Midbar Tzin thirsting for water, and not long after crossing the sea their parents’ generation has been to a place called Midbar Sin where there also wasn’t water. Back then, God had told Moshe to assemble the people and strike a rock — to perform a miracle and make water gush forth. Now that generation is almost entirely gone, including his sister Miryam who has just died. Once again Moshe is told to gather the people by a rock, and water will gush forth.
Moshe runs the old playbook – he strikes the rock, as he had done before. But the old solution is not what is called for. God instructs him to speak to the rock, but instead Moshe scolds the people for their lack of faith before hitting the rock. This is the moment God informs him and his brother that they will not live to lead the people into the future they have dreamed of in their promised land.
The Netziv of Volozhin has the most subtle reading of this episode. He sees Moshe as too tied to a single view of what is going on – he recognizes only one historical analogy and is determined to ride it to the end even when it doesn’t help. But in fact, says the Netziv, almost everything is a bit different in Tzin than it had been in Sin. The people are in a different place than they were, literally and metaphorically, and Moshe’s task was to help them see that.
The Netziv says there is more water around than they realized. Not all they would need for years, but they aren’t going to be there for years. Enough to get them by so they could refresh themselves and strategize. Many of the people have gained perspective, believe in their freedom and their covenant – not all of them, but enough that Moshe could have harnessed the ones who were confident, ready to do harder things themselves and not keep depending on a leader to perform quick-fix miracles for them.
Instead, all Moshe could see was one kind of crisis and one way to handle it, and that is why he needed to be moved from the scene.
And it’s clear to me that Moshe and the people are missing at this moment the balance to his approach that came from his sister Miryam. Miryam is associated in midrash with a well that would travel with the people all through the midbar; a well not just of water but of hope. People would come to her again and again, all through the forty years, from the older generation and the new one, to satisfy their thirst for hope.
I’ve taught many times that hope is different from optimism. Hope isn’t a prediction; hope is the ability to see a new future clearly, its values and its texture, and it’s the belief that such a future is worth working toward, worth betting your life on, whether it comes into reality or not.
In Egypt Miryam was the one announced her certainty in redemption when Pharaoh’s persecution was at its worst. She had zero data points to draw on. Yet she wasn’t some naïve dreamer — she was a midwife who lived in the world of the decree to murder babies, watched people comply and figured out how to resist and then turn the tide. She taught first the women and eventually the men that the promised land was worth preparing for every frustrating day in the wilderness. She had the model Moshe was missing the day he struck the rock.
Miryam’s is the kind of hope we need today, so we can truly celebrate a week from today, and not just see the founding of the United States as long-ago history, the start of a now-fading experiment, or worse yet a fraud from the start.
In the summer of 1798, while Federalist and Republican street gangs roamed the streets of Philadelphia, people who knew history well like our Founders had every reason to doubt that our system could survive what was happening by then. They had studied the Roman and Renaissance republics and the demise of every single one of them, and of course across the ocean in France that’s exactly how history had progressed, with the entirely predictable subversion of the Republic by Napoleon.
But there were people who were like Miryam. James Madison, for instance. Madison believed in seeing his vision through, getting enough water to drink to steady himself, tweak his formidable political theories, and strategize. I don’t know what he did specifically on the Independence Day in 1798, as the Alien and Sedition Acts were falling into place. I do know that like Miryam in Egypt, Madison went around that time to where he had power, both to dream and to make a world different from the streets of Philadelphia — back to the legislature in Virginia and then to as many legislatures as he could influence. He wrote, he lobbied, he networked. And it made a difference. It might not have. But it did. That’s how hope works.
So that is what I ask of us, what I call on you for and invite you to now with me: I ask for hope in our country and in our people Am Yisrael and in ourselves, hope as vision in action. I ask us to hope both as Americans, and as Jews in this time and place, who have blended the legacy we left Egypt with and the one we found in this country as each of our families arrived. Aleinu, it is on us, to hope and to spark that hope in others.
We have come a long way from the Wilderness of Sin to the Wilderness of Tzin, from the streets of Philadelphia in the summer of that ’98 to the parks of New England in this ‘26. We don’t know which data point we will be adding, how things will go next. Hope is what we thirst for, and in this wilderness there is more water than we realize. A deep well for this moment in history that seems momentous and is, in the U.S. and in Israel, and not just because of a round number anniversary. So let’s pack up our picnics and delight in our fireworks, and bring along gallons and gallons of hope.
Shabbat Shalom and an Early Happy 4th!
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