https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/how-thomas-jefferson-and-a-conservative?tok
Why is God not mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence? Does it have to do with the passionate ideological secularism of most of Israel’s founders? For those familiar with America’s Declaration, God’s absence from Israel’s feels all the more peculiar, given how often “Nature’s God,” the “Creator” and “Supreme Judge” are found in the Declaration of Independence of the United States.
There’s an urban legend of sorts which claims that God isn’t entirely absent from Israel’s Declaration, and that the final paragraph is, in fact, a nod in God’s direction. According to this tale, the secularists, the Bible-loving-but-God-rejecting David Ben-Gurion chief among them, were adamantly opposed to including in the Declaration a God they were certain did not exist (but Who, they nonetheless believed, had given the Land of Israel to the People of Israel). But religious Zionists, it is said, wouldn’t cave on that point, so a compromise was reached. The Declaration would include the phrase “Rock of Israel”, taken from the morning [shacharit] liturgy. The secularists could interpret “Rock of Israel” as the strong arm of the Haganah, the vital spirit of the state-builders or however they wished, while the religious signers could be comforted by the fact that just as “Rock of Israel” means “God” in the liturgy, so too, it (for them) meant God here, too.
It’s a great story, ubiquitously repeated almost anytime one discusses the Declaration of Independence. The only problem with it is that it’s totally false.
So, in honor of America’s celebration of its independence this weekend, here’s a brief and more accurate version of what happened, including the fascinating way in which Thomas Jefferson and a Conservative rabbi were actually responsible for the inclusion of “Rock of Israel” in Israel’s Declaration.¹
It turns out that the American declaration of independence was the subject of its own push-me-pull-you of secularism versus theology tension. Thomas Jefferson, who was the author of the DoI, apparently wanted the declaration to read near its end, “And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Some of those early American theists, though, religious in some vague sense but not passionately theological, felt that God ought to make an appearance at the end, just as God, Creator and Judge appear earlier. So Jefferson added the phrase “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” into the phrase above, so that the version we have all inherited reads “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
One hundred and seventy-two years later, David Ben-Gurion was getting ready to do more or less what Thomas Jefferson and his compatriots had done. He was going to declare independence from the British and would found a country. The British were going to be leaving on May 14 and among many other decisions (including whether to declare a state, as we discussed in an earlier posting, “The National Liberation Movement of the Jewish People”) and preparations, a Declaration had to be written. The task was eventually passed down to one Mordechai Behm, who had formerly worked as a lawyer for the British Mandatory authorities, but had then left to join his father’s thriving law practice.
