The day after America’s 250th birthday, Christians United For Israel — CUFI — kicked off its annual summit in the D.C. area. Founded by Pastor John Hagee in 2006 and now reporting over 10 million members, CUFI builds its advocacy for Israel and its stance in opposition to the onslaught of antisemitism on Biblical foundations. It is an effective political force, as witnessed by Pastor Hagee’s televised benediction at the dedication the American embassy when it was moved at last to Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem.
This year was the second time I had accepted an invitation to attend their summit. Around 2017, Dayton’s CUFI head at that time, Pastor Gary Trenum, had won me over with his sincerity, courage, and friendliness. We spent hours together, sometimes at my home or at our synagogue over dinner on Friday night, sometimes over coffee or tea at a local coffee house. He made clear though his own example that his belief and that of the organization was neither supersessionist nor conversionary. Rather, by recognizing God’s covenant with the people of Israel and seeking their safety, well-being, and freedom, they are affirming their own covenantal relationship with God and assuming a major role in His redemptive plan.
Two hundred and fifty years after its founding … the founding spirit of America was vibrantly alive and well in our nation’s capital.
I was wowed by the 2019 summit, not least at the surprising sight every day of a minyan — organized daily prayer services — for the significant-sized group of Orthodox Jews who were attending. This year, that group had grown, including Orthodox rabbis and educators, businesspeople, and even a bearded and yarmulka-wearing long-haul semi-truck driver. The convention had thoughtfully provided kosher meals, making the participants feel at home.
At our meals and prayers, we gave voice to our amazement. CUFI’s steady message of unconditional love for the people whom they thank for bringing them the keys to their own life with God affected us all very deeply. It was the subject of constant remark and conversation. Time and again, people at services and meals remarked that we must all learn from our CUFI comrades’ conviction, energy and positivity, their laser focus, and their stalwart, powerful, and unafraid defense of Israel against today’s bombardment of falsehood, ignorance, and malice.
Present each day at the summit were hundreds of high school and college students whose enthusiasm was infectious and uplifting. Too many have conceded today’s youth to the anti-America and anti-Israel propagandists. Identifying the infiltration of American education from pre-K to post doc by trillions of dollars from Chinese and militant Islamist sources is a necessary first step but it can’t be the last. CUFI is at work on the great work that still must be done.
This time in the Jewish calendar marks the three-week period from when the Babylonians pierced Jerusalem’s defenses until the Temple was destroyed about 2,500 years ago. The events are recorded in several Biblical books, and the destruction is mourned in the whole book of Lamentations. Centuries later, this same period of time witnessed the Roman destruction of the Second Temple on the same date as the first.
The rabbis of the Talmud identified the causes for the first destruction as the three cardinal sins of murder, idolatry, and sexual violations. It took seventy years of exile to turn the situation around and return and rebuild in the Land.
The second destruction, at the hands of the Romans, had a different cause, they taught. The three cardinal sins were no longer so widespread. The cause this time, the rabbis taught, was groundless hatred.
It is almost 2,000 years since that destruction, and the exile is not entirely over.
The cure for groundless hatred is love which is as purely for its own sake as the hatred.
The discussion among ourselves was that Providence was giving us an extraordinary object lesson in that love, covenantal love. In a world where algorithms help us calculate everything to a T, this love is not calculated but is the result of profound gratitude and of a full-hearted commitment to the God who asks for us to love each other as He loves us.
As one Jewish participant said there, would that we cared for each other with such clarity and intensity! Would that we can take that home with us to our communities!
In his 1789 letter to Savannah’s Jewish community, George Washington concluded with a blessing:
“May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivered the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors, planted them in a promised land — whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation — still continue to water them with the dews of heaven and make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is [the Lord].”
Having been elected president unanimously, Washington was not seeking invidious political advantage. He was expressing his own deep-felt belief that the hand of Divine Providence was constantly and conspicuously at work in the new-born United States.
The President’s sentiments were widely shared. In the crucial year of 1776, John Adams wrote approvingly to his wife Abigail about a sermon he had just heard:
“I have this morning heard Mr. Duffield, upon the signs of the time. He ran a parallel between the case of Israel and that of America; and between the conduct of Pharaoh and that of [King] George.”
Is it not a statement of Moses, “Who am I that I should go in and out before this great people”? When I consider the great events which have passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing, and that I may have been instrumental in touching some strings and turning some small wheels, which have had and will have such effects, I feel an awe upon my mind which is not easily described.
Here is the vision: the Founders saw as Moses taught that our lives are instruments of the Providential purpose.
This sentiment of identification with Israel may seem commonplace, but it was not so throughout history. Jews were at best tolerated in nations where they lived throughout the many years of exile. Those host nations did not identify their own genesis as nations with the beginning of the people of Israel.
But America came together as a covenantal nation, dedicating themselves to the proposition that all men are created equal, and that the Creator has endowed them with fundamental rights, the preservation of which is the chief legitimate role of government. And America accordingly identified itself with the covenantal nation of Israel.
Two hundred and fifty years after its founding, despite all the roiling storms that have beset our great republic, the founding spirit of America was vibrantly alive and well in our nation’s capital. Ordered American freedom has resulted in the freeing of religion from slavery to hatred and jealousy and brought Jew and Christian together in the victorious realization of the Providential plans of our common Maker.
There lies our future, as long foretold.
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