The two Promised Lands

By Jack Miller
and Dovid Vigler 
Real Clear Wire

At first glance, you wouldn't think that the biblical tale of Jews entering the Promised Land after 40 years in the desert has much to do with our Declaration of Independence. Yet, they both tell the same story—and teach us the moral basis for a free society.

After escaping from Egypt, where they had been dependent upon the Pharaoh, the Jews wandered the desert for 40 years dependent upon God to provide water and substance for them. It wasn't until all those who knew slavery died out that the Jews were allowed to enter the promised land. At that point, responsibility for their own lives passed from God to themselves as individuals.

In the Declaration, our most important foundational document, the vision that guides America as the land of the free, we find that most famous phrase, that we are guaranteed our lives, our liberty, and our “pursuit” of happiness.

It is that concept of “pursuit” that makes the American Founding similar to the entry of the Jews into the Promised Land. It asserts the freedom for each individual to be able to pursue their own vision of their own happiness, each guaranteed  their right to “life, to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness .” This is the “promissory note” that Martin Luther King in his “I have a dream” speech was asking America to fulfill. He wasn’t asking America to guarantee anyone their happiness, just the opportunity to pursue it.

Each promised land was only for people who were prepared to govern themselves. Their freedom came with personal responsibility. In the ancient Jewish situation, it was from God to the people and in America it was from the English king to the people.

Today, though, we face a crisis of freedom and responsibility.  Will today’s people in America be like those Jews in the desert who never knew slavery and entered the promised land ready to assume responsibility for their own lives, or are they more like those who knew slavery and who were afraid to do that and who preferred dependency?

In Egypt, the Pharaoh governed directly, and in early America, the English king wanted to rule directly. Both were top-down systems with limited to no freedom for the people, with the leader taking all responsibility. In the Jewish promised land and in post revolution America, it is for the citizens, the people, each individual, to take the responsibility for their own lives.

The answer to the discontents of a deeply divided America today is to restore the possibility of self-government. We must reclaim that vision for America stated in our Declaration of Independence and in that biblical story where the Jews entered the promised land. Do we, today, really prefer a top-down form of government? Or are we willing to take responsibility for our own lives and for our own individual pursuit of happiness?

These are questions that go far beyond the “left-right” divide. Self-government is not about the fortunes of one party or another, liberals or conservatives. It is about assuming responsibility for our government, for our own lives, and for our own happiness.

And that is why, ultimately, we must focus on reforming our educational system. Is it preparing our young people to be responsible citizens in a free society or are they failing in doing that? A professor once told me that it used to be that it wasn't until the students came to college that they began to think that socialism was good. Today, he said, they come already feeling that socialism is better than capitalism.

This erosion of the belief in our American vision and in our free market economy, which is so much a part of it, is the result of the fact that the teaching of civics and American history have in so many of our schools been degraded, corrupted and often abandoned. That is beginning to change as organizations, like the Jack Miller Center and others, are educating our teachers and professors to, once again,  get this teaching, based on original documents, back into our system.

America was founded on the principles of the freedom of the individual with each individual responsible for his or her own happiness and for being self-ruling as a nation.

And that takes us back to the story in the Bible when God let those who only knew freedom enter the promised land. And, at that point, he handed the responsibility for their own lives to them as individuals.

The question for us today is whether we, as citizens of this great country, are going to continue to enjoy the freedom it has given us by assuming the personal responsibility for our own happiness and for sustaining the values that have made this also the promised land.

Jack Miller is founder and chairman emeritus of the Jack Miller Center. Rabbi Dovid Vigler is the founder and spiritual leader of Chabad of Palm Beach Gardens in Florida.