Of all the documents and all the artifacts that will kick off the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, the most remarkable will not be Jefferson’s quill or Franklin’s spectacles, but a letter penned in broken Yiddish by Jonas Phillips. The story of the letter – and really, the story of Jonas Phillips himself – is extraordinary, as extraordinary as it is overlooked.
Born in the German Rhineland in 1736, Phillips arrived in Charleston, South Carolina at the age of twenty, not just penniless, but actually an indentured servant. Three years later, having bought himself out of poverty, he moved to Albany and eventually to New York City. An ambitious merchant, Phillips climbed the ladder to prosperity the old-fashioned way: he married up. His wife, Rebecca Mendez Machado, was the daughter of the most prominent Sephardic family of New York City, a blended union that gave life to – wait for it – 21 children. As historian Jonathan Sarna, this year’s Shabbaton scholar-in-residence, remarked to me, almost every Jew in early America could be traced to this founding family, a subject to which we will return to soon enough.
Attracted to the ideals of the revolution, Phillips was bullish on the patriotic cause, serving in the Pennsylvania militia and helping organize a series of blockade runners to get supplies into the colonies. Like many patriots, he fled New York to Philadelphia, which, in retrospect, must have been a delicate moment in synagogue politics as Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel community absorbed the refugee members from New York’s Shearith Israel.
July 1776 needs no introduction, with Jefferson, Franklin, and their Committee of Five putting the final touches on the Declaration. Once approved, the Continental Congress ordered Philadelphia printer John Dunlap to set the text to type. Dunlap struck off about 200 copies of what became known as Dunlap Broadsides, of which 26 are known to have survived, to be dispatched by horse and post to be read aloud in public squares across the colonies. On July 28, 1776, in violation of British law, Jonas Phillips sent a folded broadside – the wax residue on the back suggests it had been pulled off a posting board – to his kinsman Gumpel Samson in Amsterdam. Seeking to conceal its contents, he wrote his accompanying letter in Hebrew script in an anglicized Yiddish. Neither his letter nor the copy of the Declaration ever arrived. The ship carrying it was captured by a British warship. Housed in the British National Archives ever since, the Phillips letter and the Dunlap Broadside will return next month to Philadelphia, the very city where their journey began.
Charming as it is to imagine the scene of British soldiers trying to decode Phillip’s Yiddish, far more gripping is the image of Phillips scribbling that secret letter to his cousin. Here is part of what he wrote:
“Di milkhume vert gantz englant mekhule makhn. (The war will make all England bankrupt.) The Americans have an army of 100,000 rikim (recruits) and the English only 25,000 and some ships. The Americans have already made themselves like the States of Holland. Di ayn geshlaginin iz ayn diklereishen fun di gantze medine. (The enclosed is a declaration of the whole country.) Vee es vert oyzgayn? Der Oyberster vays es. (How will it end? God only knows.)”
Jonas Phillips had arrived dirt poor from the old country, a world in which his movements, opportunities, and very identity were constrained by his faith, the shadow of the Inquisition, civic exclusion, and hidden Jewish practice still etched into memory. Now he stood at the hinge of history, swept into the course of world events, present at the birth of a nation that dared hold it to be a self-evident truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
As many scholars have noted, the Declaration’s assertion about the inherent rights of all human beings is less about protest against the British than it is about principle: an Enlightenment affirmation of the human condition – explicit and implicit freedoms – conscience, expression, and religion. France would not declare Jews full citizens until 1791; decades would pass before emancipation reached Holland, Austria-Hungary, Italy, England, or elsewhere. True, there were pockets of time and place where Jews could practice their Judaism quietly, privately, and without interference. But to do so publicly, not as the indulgence of one’s host country but as the inalienable right of a citizen, for Jonas Phillips that was nothing short of revolutionary. Vee es vert oyzgayn? Der Oyberster vays es. How will it end? God only knows.” How exciting. How aspirational, at least for white, Christian, straight, men. Not for women, not for African Americans, not for Jews were those founding ideals made real then and there.
As for Phillips, he was not the sort to leave these matters in God’s hands. A few years later, on September 7, 1787, just days before the signing of the Constitution, Phillips wrote to George Washington (in English, not Yiddish) protesting the proposed “test oaths” that required holders of public office to swear upon the New Testament. In Phillips’s words: “All men have a natural and inalienable right to worship almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience and understanding.” Article VI of the Constitution would go on to declare that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” By a certain telling: no Jonas Phillips – no Louis Brandeis, no Joe Lieberman, no Ruth Bader Ginsburg – and a whole lot of others.
And Phillip’s fight would not end there. A few years later, Phillips himself would be put to the test. On April 5, 1793, he was summoned to provide testimony in a Philadelphia court case. Phillips refused. Why? Because April 5 was a Saturday, his Shabbat. We do not know exactly what he said, but we do know the court fined him ten dollars, a penalty that would eventually be waived. Scholars point to the case, Stansbury v. Marks, as the first instance in American legal history where religious observance was asserted, tested, and ultimately accommodated. Phillips lived proudly and publicly as a Jew. We even have archival testimony from Benjamin Rush, our Presbyterian founding father, who attended Phillips’s daughter’s wedding, a vivid account of Jewish pride.
The significance of Phillips’s story is not that he was the first American Jew; he wasn’t. Nor is it the chutzpadik suggestion that he was “in the room where it happened” with our Founding Fathers. Rather it was that Phillips lived through, grasped, and fought for the promise of what it means to be American and what it means to be an American Jew. Present at the creation of our country, he seized upon the unprecedented liberties our country offered. Once enshrined in the Declaration, he knew that our country’s ideals needed to be made real. He understood that self-evident truths are not self-evident to all and must be fought for and defended. As an American Jew, he recognized that the freedoms conferred carried both the opportunity and the obligation to live proudly and publicly as a Jew. Before America, one could be, at best, a Jew in the home and a citizen in the street. Not so, said Phillips. Not so, promised America. Here, we are Jews in the home and Jews in the street, Jews in the private sphere and Jews in the public square. This is the legacy of Jonas Phillips, not a historical footnote but a patriot whose cause still calls to us every year and especially this semiquincentennial year. To secure the promises of the Declaration, to insist that our Judaism be heralded, not hidden; this is a message which must be proclaimed throughout the land.
Today is Rosh Hashanah. Our new year, the day upon which our people gather in synagogues across the globe to celebrate the gift of life, to reflect on the year gone by and the year ahead, and to ask the big questions of our faith, families, and people. For each of you, and your loved ones, and for all the people of Israel, I pray that this year will be a year of health, blessing and peace.
The rabbis teach that Rosh Hashanah is actually not the day the world itself was created. That, they say, took place a few days ago, on the twenty-fifth day of Elul. Today, Rosh Hashanah, marks the sixth day of creation, the day humanity was created. Today is the day we reflect upon and affirm what it means to be human. The biblical text could not be clearer: “God created the human being in the divine image; in the image of God they were created” (Genesis 1:26–27). Whatever beliefs our Founding Fathers may or may not have held, there is a direct line from Genesis to the Enlightenment to the Declaration. Aristotle taught that some men are “slaves by nature” while others are born to rule (Politics I:5). The Code of Hammurabi, like much of the ancient Near East, assigned different worth to lives depending on class and status. By contrast, the Torah proclaimed a radical truth: Every human being bears God’s image – equal, dignified, free. From the Magna Carta’s safeguarding of liberty to Maimonides’s insistence that humanity’s essence lies in our conscience, from Aquinas’s teaching that the divine image is revealed in our capacity to reason to Locke’s “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” the pedigree is clear. A direct connection between the biblical order and the Western order, between our biblical roots and the fruits of liberal democracy, between the themes of Rosh Hashanah and the ideals underpinning our nation’s founding.
And for us as both Americans and Jews, it is because these ideals are so intertwined that when we arrive here on Rosh Hashanah every year, but especially this year, the extended echo of Phillips’s legacy speaks with such compelling force. The Phillips story doesn’t end with Phillips. One of his grandchildren, Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785–1851), the most famous American Jew of his day (about whom I wrote recently), sought to establish a self-governing Jewish colony in upstate New York in 1825. America, Noah argued, was nothing less than a divinely ordained opportunity for the Jews of the world to seize control of their own destiny. Another grandson, Uriah Phillips Levy (1792–1862), a maverick sailor and the first Jewish commodore in the United States Navy, was so taken by Jefferson’s defense of religious liberty, that he rescued Jefferson’s home, Monticello, from ruin, determined that Jefferson’s physical and spiritual estate should not be lost to history. In their own ways, both Noah and Levy carried forward the conviction of their grandfather that to be a Jew in America was not to shrink back in silence, but to step forward with courage, conscience, and pride, defending American ideals as Jews, and Jewish ideals as Americans.
At risk of a spoiler alert, let me say right now: There will be no dramatic reveal in today’s sermon. Unlike in years past, I know of no long-lost descendant of Jonas Phillips who is about to rise from these pews, although if there is, now would be a really good time to let yourself be known. The theme of our synagogue year is America at 250. There will be lectures on our country’s history, programs on civic engagement for adults and teens, get-out-the-vote efforts in a consequential mayoral election, concerts celebrating American Jewish music, trips to civil rights sites, and of course, a trip to Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution to see the Philips letter itself. It is a great lineup, and it is still taking shape. Like many schools, churches, and civic organizations, we are going all in on our nation’s past, present, and future.
The reveal of today, if you will, is you: each of you and all of us are the heirs to Phillips and the American Jewish ideal he represents. The question is how you will measure up to Phillips and his descendants, whether you will rise to claim the freedoms granted by our country and proudly and publicly embrace the fullness of what it means to be an American Jew. We love it when Jews like Phillips publicly assert a positive Jewish identity: sixty years ago these High Holidays when Koufax refused to pitch in the World Series and when, in response to Charlottesville, Billy Joel walked onstage with a yellow star sewn to his jacket. There is a vicarious thrill when a kinsman wears their Judaism with pride, but the danger is that as spectators to their courage, we mistake borrowed pride for the sacred obligations that are ours to bear.
Prior to October 7th, my concern was that the freedoms of America had made us comfortably numb to the particularities of Jewish identity, a postwar story of assimilation and ease best captured by an old tale of Sadie Goldstein.
Sadie finds herself across from a well-dressed man on a train. “Excuse me,” she asks, “are you Jewish?”
“No,” he replies, and returns to his paper.
A few minutes later, she leans forward again: “Are you sure you’re not Jewish?”
“I’m sure,” he insists.
But Sadie, being Sadie, can’t help herself, and after a pause she asks a third time: “I’m so sorry, but are you absolutely sure you’re not Jewish?”
Exasperated, the man throws down his paper: “All right, all right, you win. I’m Jewish.”
To which Sadie smiles and replies: “That’s funny, because you don’t look Jewish.”
We were Jewish, yes, but quietly, privately. Jewishness was something we carried, but not necessarily something everyone , or even we ourselves, needed to know.
Since October 7th, everything has changed. The assault on Israel, the continued plight of the hostages, and the war Israel wages against its enemies have fundamentally altered the landscape in which we live. Bald antisemitism from the right and the left is difficult enough, and now the pernicious blurring of lines between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has broken open, shaking our security to its very core. Given Israel’s central place in Jewish identity, Jewish history, and as the homeland of eight million of our people, attacks on its legitimacy are attacks on Jewish identity itself.
The hatred comes in different forms and from different directions. Denial or moral equivocations surrounding the atrocities of October 7th; the invalidation of Jewish pain; the insidious exclusion of Zionist – and therefore Jewish – presence from academia, publishing, film festivals, and supposedly open spaces of every kind. We are witnessing the normalization of hostility against Israel, the sanitization of slogans like “globalize the intifada,” and demands by mayoral candidates calling for the arrest of Israel’s Prime Minister, obscene in any world and acutely so in our era of unchecked political violence. We are seeing the conflation of all Jews with the policies of an Israeli government that does not represent the body politic of global Jewry. All this and more has produced a chilling effect on the open expression of Jewish identity.
Yes, some of us wear our hostage pins or proudly hang a Magen David around our necks. A relative of mine indelicately identifies her pronoun to be “Jew.” Some punch back, but many do not. The magnetometers and security guards here to keep us safe for some trigger fear of walking into a Jewish space, which has a chilling effect on Jewish community. It is safer and sometimes easier to keep one’s head down. Next year will mark sixty years since Elie Wiesel’s landmark book on Soviet Jewry describing their enforced suppression and the shameful indifference of a world that looked away. It was called The Jews of Silence. Will the same title, I wonder, be used for us one day?
But the muzzling of Jewish identity comes not just from our detractors and enemies; sometimes it comes from within our own camp. It is tough enough to live in this time when ideas are weaponized, when fear of retribution looms, whether it is fear of being cancelled by the left or crushed by the right. As a rabbi, my first concern is when such behavior takes root inside our community, either our synagogue and the wider Jewish world of which we are part, when Jews are more eager to take down people than to debate ideas, more inclined to question a person’s motives than to engage a person’s argument, creating a new kind of test oath, if you will, whereby one must conform to some received orthodoxy as to what is and isn’t in the best interest of American Jews, and what is and isn’t in the best interest of the State of Israel. Such loyalty oaths are not only counter to the American promise of free expression and the Jewish commitment to vigorous debate, but they are counter to the future of Judaism itself. When a campus Hillel disavows a left-leaning pro-Israel group, it alienates young Jews not only from Israel, half of whose citizens believe what those college students believe, but from their Judaism itself. All ideas are not equal. I know what I believe in. I also know, whether with my biological children or the children and grandchildren of this congregation, that closing off debate on the issues of the day is the surest way to foreclose the Jewish future. The stifling of free expression is a self-inflicted suppression of Jewish identity.
Nobody has a monopoly on truth. Peaceful, vigorous debate is not a bug of democracy; it is its essential feature. To paraphrase Jefferson: the turbulences of democracy, when weighed against the oppressions of monarchy, become nothing. It is why Uriah Phillips Levy built a monument to Jefferson’s name. He understood that Jefferson’s defense of liberty was good not just for America but for Jews. Free speech, learning to disagree better, is the foundation of our democracy and our Jewish tradition, and it is the very means by which the Jewish future will be secured.
Every action that Jonas Phillips took and that his grandchildren took leads me to believe that he believed that the freedoms of America were important only if they prompted Jews to live openly as such. That when he read the words of the Declaration, he took them as a challenge and charge, like the Israelites of old, that our freedom is made sacred only insofar as it is leveraged toward living proud Jewish lives. I imagine Phillips wondering how it came to be that an American Jewry that can worship how they want, observe as they wish, and do so as an expression of, not in contradiction to, their citizenship, would choose to do otherwise. I imagine Phillips wondering how an American Jewry afforded the opportunity to live vibrant Jewish lives would choose to expend its energy on internal bickering rather than building up a Jewish future.
These past two years have not been easy, not only owing to the personal anxieties I carry for my family, biological and extended, in Israel, but owing to the weight of being a rabbi called to lead. For me, for every American rabbi, the demands have been relentless. To champion an Israel under attack, to fight for the defense of American Jewry, and to advocate for an Israeli government whose decisions represent neither my input, nor my politics nor are made, understandably so, with my well-being in mind. It is exhausting to publicly walk the tightrope of my identity and ideals as an American, as a Jew, and as a Zionist and then be critiqued from all sides for having said too much or too little. Outsized as my love for the Jewish people may be, it is simply beyond my vocational calling and competency to reconcile the irreconcilable political divides of our time. I went into this work to bring you, your children, and your grandchildren closer to Torah and tradition, not to tiptoe around the fault lines of our age. I have tried my best to keep our diverse community together both by my own example and by modeling a community conversation that includes the diversity of ways one can express love for America, love for Israel, and love for the Jewish people.
I will be fine, I get it. I’ve got this. In the immortal words of Hyman Roth of “Godfather” fame: “This is the business we’ve chosen.” But what pains me most is the thought that this thing I love most, Judaism – Jewish life and living – is taking a hit from which it may not recover. It pains me that a Jew would rather expend energy attacking another Jew than building up his or her own Jewish identity; that a Jew would rather attack another Jew than push back against the very people who would see us silenced; that a Jew would sooner walk away from the momentous opportunities of being a proud American Jew than put in the work to establish a vital future for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.
Today the voice of Phillips calls to us. A voice that demands that we push back against any effort to delimit our Jewish presence, muffle our voice, or threaten our safety. A voice that reminds us that the free exchange of ideas is fundamental to who we are – as Americans and as Jews. A voice that insists that the defense of freedom of conscience and expression is an American duty and a Jewish commandment. A voice that inspires us to prioritize Shabbat and observance of mitzvot over the array of choices afforded to us in a free society. That we lean into Jewish education, ritual, spiritual growth and tzedakah. That we build up our Jewish identities, our Jewish families, and our Jewish community. That we find a way to live peaceably with the members of our extended Jewish and American family – the ones we like and the ones we don’t. That we focus more on the example of our own actions and less on where we think others fall short. That we model a culture of debate that reflects the best of our tradition. That everything we do, we do with an eye to building a vibrant Jewish future. A voice that demands from us that we live our lives proudly as Jews, proudly as Americans, and proudly as American Jews.
“Vee es vert oyzgayn? Der Oyberster vays es. How will it end? God only knows.” American Jewry is living through a moment that Jonas Phillips could not have imagined, the American Jewish experiment entering its next chapter. God may know how it will end. I do not. But like Jonas Phillips, I am leaving nothing to chance. I will do my part, and I ask you to do yours. The content of this chapter is ours to write. A document that will determine whether this nation, and our people, conceived in liberty and dedicated to God, can long endure.