Brooks: America’s 250th Falls on Shabbat. That’s Fitting

By Matt Brooks, National Review
Thursday, July 2, 2026

This week America turns 250, and the day falls on Shabbat. The greatest experiment in human liberty marks its founding anniversary this year on the day the Jewish people have kept holy for millennia. The connection goes far deeper than a coincidence of the calendar.

Two and a half centuries ago, a group of British colonists in North America did something no people had dared before. They declared that legitimate government flows not from a throne but from the consent of the governed, that all are created equal and endowed by their Creator with rights that no king may revoke. They staked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the outcome of their rebellion. And from 13 colonies rose a Republic that would become the best hope of free people everywhere.

The source of that freedom is carved into the nation itself. When the Liberty Bell was cast, the words chosen for it came from the book of Leviticus: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” When Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson proposed a seal for the new nation in 1776, both turned to the story of Exodus: a people delivered from bondage into freedom toward the promised land. The men who built this country drew, again and again, on the same ancient source, the Hebrew Bible.

None acknowledged that connection more beautifully than George Washington. In 1790, writing to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, our first president promised that the United States would be a nation where “it is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” At root, Jewish rights in America required no permission or indulgence, because they were endowed by our Creator. Washington blessed the Jews of this new country in words drawn straight from the prophet Micah: that everyone shall sit in safety “under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” John Adams went further, writing that the Hebrew nation had done more than any other to civilize mankind. The Founders saw in the Jewish story the story of liberty itself.

This is the inheritance that Americans of every faith share, and one that the American Jewish community holds with particular pride: the principle that a people may govern themselves; the truth that liberty is not a gift of kings but a birthright of all mankind. America took these convictions and made them the foundation of a nation.

And what this nation gave the world, in only two and a half centuries, defies the measure of any people before it. America defeated fascism and stood as the arsenal of freedom while tyrants fell. When Allied soldiers threw open the gates of the concentration camps, American GIs were among them, bearing witness to the worst of human evil and bringing salvation to those who survived it. America cured diseases that had stalked mankind since antiquity, harnessed the atom, and put human beings on the surface of the moon. No nation has ever fed more of the hungry, freed more of the captive, or lifted more of the poor. America has spent its blood and its treasure not to conquer but to liberate.

From that foundation rose the most powerful, prosperous, and free nation in the history of the world. It is a country that took in the immigrants the old empires discarded, my own grandparents among them, and asked only for their fidelity and loyalty in advancing that shining city upon a hill. In return, as George Washington promised in his letter to the Jewish community in Newport, the freedom and opportunity of all citizens would be theirs by right, not by tolerance. In 4,000 years of Jewish history, only one country ever made that promise and kept it: the United States of America.

So on this historic upcoming Saturday, the American Jewish community gives thanks for a nation that built its liberty on foundations we recognize as our own, and for the remarkable privilege of standing as proud Americans on its 250th birthday.

May God bless this Republic for the next 250 years as He has blessed it to this day. Shabbat Shalom and a happy Fourth of July to all.

This article appeared on the National Review web site on July 2, 2026.

This article was published on the National Review website on July 3, 2026.