This is the draft of my words for Shabbat morning, July 4, 2026, the day of America’s 250th anniversary! The parasha (reading in the Torah) is Pinchas, and my link to that is chapter 27 of Numbers.
Chapter 27 of Numbers begins: They came up close, the daughters of Tzeloph’chad, son of Chefer, son of Gil’ad, son of Machir, son of Menashe, of the families of Menashe son of Yosef — and these are the names of his daughters: Machlah, Noa, and Choglah and Milkah and Tirtzah.
These five sisters approach Moshe, Elazar the Kohen Gadol, and the whole Israelite leadership and possibly the entire people, and pose this claim. The people have just heard about how land will be divided up among tribes, clans, and households when they all shortly arrive in Eretz Yisrael. But their father has died and left no son. They say: Why shall our father’s name be subtracted from among his family because he had no son — give us a holding among our father’s brothers. (27:4)
If I asked you to sum up the theme of this claim in one word, almost all of you or maybe in fact all of you would say the same word. It’s a word that does not appear anywhere in the Torah text of this happening, but you would say anyway that this is a story and a case about equality.
The reason we would say that is because we are in America, the country that announced 250 years ago today that among its founding, self-evident truths is the truth that “all men are created equal.”
Nowadays every time we quote that, we bump on “all men”, and it’s same thing you might bump on in the Torah with the B’not Tzelophechad. Verse 1 identifies them as daughters, then gives us the names of five men before giving us the names of the five sisters. And even the sisters themselves articulate their claim in terms of their father, his name and his legacy.
I might not have noticed that but for an amazing experience I had eleven years ago the one time Laurie and I got to hear Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speak live. As a lawyer, she successfully argued the first Supreme Court case establishing that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment applied to different treatment of men and women with regard to financial rights and benefits. Her approach was much like that of Machlah, Noa, Choglah, Milkah and Tirzah, in that her client was a man. Stephen Wiesenfeld lost his wife, Paula Polatschek, when she gave birth to their son Jason. But Social Security surviroship benefits were only available to surviving children and widows, not widowers.
Justice Ginsberg said that she knew she could not win a case like this in the mid-1970s unless her client were a man. The case established a principle that henceforth would apply to women, who were most likely to benefit from it. And even in this case, the Supreme Court held that this situation discriminated against the mother, whose earnings while she lived were being treated differently now than those of a man who died and left a wife and children.
My point today, though, is that I would never have noticed the list of men at the start of the case of the daughters of Tzelophechad if I didn’t know about the Supreme Court case of Wiesenfeld v. Weinberger. And more broadly, none of us would think of this case in the Torah as part of a history of equality, were it not for America.
It’s not that equality is not a Jewish idea. Indeed, the Talmudic midrashim, from some 1500 years ago or more, see Moshe’s inability to resolve the case of B’not Tzelophechad as proof that he was no longer receiving God’s revelations in full. They look to the verses that immediately follow, where Moshe calls on God to designate a new leader, and see Moshe himself realizing that he is no longer equipped to lead a people who need the law that the sisters knew before he did.
And yet, even those midrashim we read differently because we are of this time and place. We notice them and give them higher visibility. For at least fifty years, Jews have argued about whether the five sisters were brilliant activists who got the win that was available and planted seeds, or whether they asked for too little and didn’t go far enough to challenge the patriarchy that was being set up at the time it was being founded. Of course when we do that we’re talking about the daughters of Tzelophechad and also about the very men who wrote “all men are created equal” and even about Justice Ginsberg herself. And about ourselves, as we try to understand equality and its imperatives today as Jews.
We are learning and davvening on July 4 in synagogue that is traditional and egalitarian. Two strands woven together, and we can no more unravel them than we could unravel the strands of DNA and expect one to generate life on its own. That’s the exciting part of being an American Jew.
In our Thursday study group this week, I talked about how I first learned about equality, in the years leading up to and through American’s bicentennial. At home, my mom and dad always talked about themselves as both having professions. People would ask me about my parents and I would say, “Dad’s a doctor and Mom’s a social worker”, even though Mom hadn’t worked professionally since I was born and wouldn’t for another few years. They played us the album Free to Be You and Me, which interestingly highlighted the language of “freedom” in order to talk about gender equality and stereotypes. On Saturday mornings my sister Ellen and I watched Schoolhouse Rock and learned about independence and the Constitution and the 19th Amendment. And in those same years, my parents’ small congregation was like many, many Conservative shuls arguing over whether women should count in a minyan.
It was all wound together, the personal and the political and the Jewish. Each feeds the others. That’s what being an American Jew is. Each dimension of our lives, each of our intellectual traditions, nourishes a whole that is more than its two parts. We read the Declaration of Independence and we read the Torah of the five sisters richer than either could ever have been read before, because we are American Jews.
When we as Jews encounter a core American idea like equality, and ask whether it means equal justice under the law, or equal access to power, or equal access to health care and education — we are learning with both FDR and Maimonides. The “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the Torah of shabbaton and jubilee.
When we as Jews think of a core American idea like freedom, we are studying not just the Declaration and unalienable rights, but the liberation from Pharaoh and the crossing of the Sea.
When we as Jews think about individualism, that quintessential American way of being, we are at once walking out of Concord to Walden Pond with Henry David Thoreau, and standing in the beit midrash next to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, who when all the other sages disagreed with him called forth miracles and a voice from God to prove he was right.
No one more than we, the Jews of America, benefit from freedom and lose sleep over its costs. American freedom has allowed us to flourish without renouncing our faith or assimilating. Freedom requires our synagogues to be compelling or wither away. Freedom gives us the agency to choose Judaism out of conviction and love, and not only because of habit or walls that keep us inside.
Freedom is also the fundamental challenge to our humanity, even the basic idol. It was free people who chose the make a golden calf and worship a thing made of gold, and in our day gold itself. It was free people in the Torah who imagined themselves trading the challenge of rising spiritually for the fleshpots back in Egypt and the thought of a life free of difficult decisions and moral agency. Freedom today opens up to mere materialism, to unrestrained competition and social competitiveness. Freedom can make everything a commodity, including ourselves — allowing our interests, our time, even our unique talents to be valued in our own eyes by what they are worth in the short-term to others. What do we say as American Jews, in that back-and-forth about what freedom is?
America has drawn out Torah in a way no other society ever has. It is because we are in America that Jewish thinkers and leaders have had to take a stand on whether Torah itself mandates justice and concern for non-Jews as well as Jews. Whether we have responsibilities for the whole earth and not just the place where we live. It is because of America that Jewish thinkers took on totalitarianism, the nuclear age, and technology; and ask questions about the ethics of power, not just for the sake of our group’s survival, but as an ethical issue about the human potential and limits. Our thinkers are public intellectuals for America.
These are not just within our own shores. All of these themes we have brought even to Zionism, to Israel, and to the globe.
Equality and freedom aren’t static principles; they are arguments in progress about what those ideas mean and what happens when they pull in different ways. Machlokot l’shem shamayim, disagreements for the sake of Heaven. America is a defining place for those arguments, over the meaning of the words published 250 years ago today, and we Jews are uniquely in those arguments.
That is why I have said that the hyphen in “Jewish-American” is not a minus-sign of dilution and dissipation, but the symbol of a chemical bond, an exchange of energy, between two entities joined together doing what neither atom can on its own.
That is why we are celebrating today by being in shul in the morning and at fireworks tonight. America is not merely where we live, yet another Diaspora landing spot for a wandering people. Take time today and this season to be astonished at what America has been in Jewish history, for what America has meant for Torah, what Torah has meant for America. Baruch She-Asanu B’nai u’V’not Chorin — Give thanks to the One who has made us free people.
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