What Happened Today: July 19, 2023
Israeli President Herzog addresses Congress; Cruz allies with rail lobby; existential risk for utility companies
The Big Story
Following the invitation from both Democratic and Republican congressional leaders, Isaac Herzog became the second Israeli president to address Congress on Wednesday, giving a speech in which he emphasized that the U.S.-Israeli bond was “not dependent upon operating in harmony, but on the history we share, on the truths we cherish, on the values we embody.” Herzog’s invited guest, the daughter of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, was in the audience, though several Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, boycotted the speech. “I respect criticism, especially from friends, although one does not always have to accept it,” Herzog said to applause. “But criticism of Israel must not cross the line into negation of the State of Israel’s right to exist. … Questioning the Jewish people’s right to self-determination is not legitimate diplomacy, it is antisemitism.”
Broadcast live in Israel in lieu of the traditional evening news coverage, Herzog’s speech called for the United States to help Israel stop Iran’s nuclear development as it poses “a threat to the stability of the Middle East and beyond,” remarks that drew support from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said the address was “an important speech by the country’s president … who expressed our strong and decisive position against Iran.”
Critical of Netanyahu’s judiciary reforms, Herzog said the ongoing battle in Israel over the fate of Israel’s legal system was “the clearest tribute to the fortitude of Israel’s democracy,” noting that the “momentous debate in Israel is painful, and deeply unnerving, because it highlights the cracks within the entire whole.” Now, 36 years after his father, Chaim, the first Israeli president, gave a congressional address, Herzog cut to the crux of the long-standing U.S.-Israeli tie: “When the United States is strong, Israel is stronger. And when Israel is strong, the United States is more secure.”
In The Back Pages: The A(braham) Bomb
The Rest
→ The number of apprehensions at the U.S. southern border in June fell to the lowest total since February 2021, just as the number of migrants attempting to come in through ports of entry has increased. The new numbers reflect the immigration policies rolled out by the Biden administration in February, which some critics say tracked closely with Trump’s asylum ban, though White House officials have tried to downplay any similarities. A federal court will hear challenges to the new asylum rules on Wednesday. If the asylum rules are blocked by the court, that could undermine the administration’s aim to funnel migrants away from dangerous border attempts and to ports of entry where they can apply for various parole programs while they await a decision on their claims.
→ After dramatic, prime-time promises to hold railroad operators to account for the toxic chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio, in February, GOP lawmakers cozy with railroad lobbyists are stalling the regulation that’s seen the rare endorsement of both President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump.
Spearheaded by Ohio Sens. J.D. Vance (R) and Sherrod Brown (D), the bipartisan rail safety bill seeks to enhance inspection and monitoring procedures seen as essential to preventing another massive toxic chemical disaster.
But the added safety measures are seen as a costly burden by rail operators, particularly the Railroad Commission of Texas—which has lobbied Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the chair of the commerce committee where the bill could soon die—because it would add transportation expenses to oil companies.
“Ted Cruz was happy to posture for the cameras,” said Krystal Ball, host of Breaking Points. “But when it comes down to it, guess what? He’s going to side with the donor class and big business.”
→ Quote of the Day
It’s all happening in back offices behind children’s backs and without the knowledge of adults who care about them. … How does this pass constitutional muster, to charge disabled and orphaned foster kids for their care while paying for everyone else’s?
That’s Amy Harfeld, an attorney and national policy director of the Children’s Advocacy Institute, speaking about the roughly $15 million that Massachusetts welfare-agency officials have been siphoning from federal benefits earmarked for thousands of children who either have disabilities or have endured the death of a parent. According to a new Boston Globe investigation, foster children and others overseen by the Department of Children and Families should have received the funds explicitly set aside for their care, but unbeknownst to the children, the state appears to have used a for-profit firm to exploit an accounting loophole to take “about 90 percent of children’s benefits over the years” and funnel the money into state accounts, the Globe writes. A new state bill meant to address “the skimming” of the children’s benefits was brought before state representatives in a committee hearing in March but has since stalled.
→ A jury’s recent verdict against Warren Buffett’s PacifiCorp said the energy utility owed an average of $5 million to each of the 17 owners who had their property destroyed by a string of fires in Oregon in 2020, opening the door to a potential $11 billion liability to several thousand other owners of property damaged by the fires. While the large penalty against the Portland-based utility raised some eyebrows, the implication of the award is what has investors spooked about the potential scale of exposure for energy companies operating in areas with severe wildfire seasons. “It’s not just PacifiCorp, it’s not just Pacific Gas and Electric, it’s not just Public Service Company of Colorado, it’s every utility in every mountain—that’s the risk,” Andy DeVries, a utility analyst at CreditSights, told Bloomberg.
Pickleball injuries could account for $500 million in medical costs in 2023.
Half of all children in fatal pedestrian accidents were killed by SUVs between 2014 and 2019.
In 2022, the percentage of pedestrian children killed by SUVs rose to 80%.
Nearly 1 in 4 American adults had a visit with a mental-health professional in 2022.
That’s up from around 1 in 10 adults in 2004.
Nine out of 10 users of dating app Hinge prefer to date someone in therapy.
The 2023 U.S. market for cannabis edibles could be worth $3.96 billion.
The entire U.S. market for all cannabis products is worth about $29.6 billion.
Last year, UPS banked $11.3 billion in profits on $100 billion of revenue.
Since 2000, six people have been killed by alligators in South Carolina.
→ It’s a typo, it’s a leak—and it’s led to millions of U.S. military emails chock-full of tax documents, diplomatic materials, travel plans for senior military personnel, and other sensitive information going to email addresses with the .ML domain, which is used as the suffix for the country of Mali, rather than the .MIL used for military email accounts. A Dutch consultant named Johannes Zuurbier who is contracted to handle Mali’s domain and who possesses more than 110,000 misdirected messages has been trying in vain to persuade American military officials to take the issue seriously as the .ML domain has now reverted back to Mali’s government. That’s a problem, Zuurbier says, because of Mali’s close ties with Russia. “It’s not out of the norm that people make mistakes, but the question is the scale, the duration, and the sensitivity of the information,” Mike Rogers, a retired American admiral who used to run the National Security Agency, told the Financial Times. “If you have this kind of sustained access, you can generate intelligence even just from unclassified information.”
→ A Mexican tuna boat rescued an Australian sailor who’d been adrift at sea for three months with his dog. The thin, thickly bearded 54-year-old said he didn’t think he’d ever step on land again after he departed Mexico’s Baja Peninsula in April with a plan to sail across the Pacific Ocean to French Polynesia. A storm soon destroyed his electronics, and his provisions ran out, leaving him and his dog, Bella, to subsist on the raw fish they could catch from the sea. Explaining his motive for the voyage, he said he “very much enjoys sailing” and the “ocean is in us. We are the ocean.”
→ Norway has shut down some of Meta’s targeted advertisements on Facebook and Instagram, a ban that will stay in place unless Meta obtains a user’s consent to be tracked on the platforms. Using emergency powers granted under the European Union’s data privacy protection laws, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority said in a release announcing the ban that “data protection rights of the majority of Norwegians would be violated indefinitely” if they didn’t intervene. Despite a recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union denying Meta’s claim that it has a legitimate use for ads that rely on surveillance of its users’ platform behavior, Meta said there was still a “debate around legal bases” for the regulations used to enact the ban. Should Meta fail to comply with the terms of the ban, it will face a fine of about $100,000 each day.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Why Are So Many Kosher Restaurants So Bad? by Anna Rahmanan
The laws of kashrut indirectly affect non-food-related aspects of the kosher culinary industry
I, Sea Jew by Howard Jacobson
Jews and water don’t mix
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The A(braham) Bomb
Why we’re fighting our political battles like religious wars
Referring to polling data indicating that Sweden was the least religious country in the world and India the most, sociologist Peter Berger used to say that the United States was a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. It remains the case today that many members of the American intellectual, administrative, financial, and even creative elites are unengaged with organized religion on a personal basis and, more consequentially, are only dimly aware of the profound and pervasive impact that religion has on domestic and international politics.
That blind spot is exceptionally dangerous in the 21st century. As American society faced major economic and social changes in the past, religious revivals transformed old religious communities as new religions and denominations sprang up. Today we are facing another such upheaval as the shadow of the singularity and the transformational forces of the Information Revolution shake the foundations of American life.
The decline of old denominations, the rise of new ones, religious polarization, and violence are not new in American history. The early republic saw the rise of Baptist, Wesleyan, African Methodist Episcopal, and Unitarian congregations as Anglicans, Congregationalists, Quakers, and Presbyterians lost ground. Waves of immigrants made the Roman Catholic Church the largest religious body in what, historically, had been the most vehemently anti-papal society on earth. The Pentecostal movement that originated among mixed-race congregations in early-20th-century Los Angeles is today the fastest-growing religious movement in the history of the world. The civil rights movement and the Great Awokening both echoed earlier fights in religious communities over secession and slavery, while the trans movement challenges deeply rooted and widely shared moral beliefs in much the same way Joseph Smith and his estimated 40 wives challenged the consensus of their day, when early Latter-day Saints believers were persecuted, driven from their homes, and sometimes murdered.
But even by these volatile standards, something more consequential seems to be happening in the 21st century. It is not just that mainline Protestantism, Evangelical Protestantism, and American Catholicism are simultaneously undergoing crises. It is not just that feminism and the LGBTQ+ movements in their dizzying proliferation challenge historic Christian beliefs. It is not only that the hedonistic, consumer-oriented focus of blue model society places the satisfaction of individual desire at the moral center of American life. Our singularity-haunted century is a time of exhilarating dreams as well as horrifying nightmares, as possibilities ranging from nuclear annihilation and catastrophic climate change to the abolition of inequality and the indefinite extension of the human life span appear to depend, increasingly, on the outcome of mere political battles.
It is no wonder that Americans from every camp, and some with a foot in more than one, are struggling to come to terms with the kind of eruption of fanaticism and extremism into our political life that we would normally associate with religious upheavals. On one side there are people who insist that to say men can’t give birth is to commit an unspeakable hate crime; on another there are those who are ready to organize for a civil war against the forces of wokeness. Growing numbers of liberal Democrats fear that Republican victory in the next election will bring American democracy to an end even as unchecked climate change threatens to make the planet uninhabitable; many Republicans fear that a prolongation of Democratic rule will mean that trans activists, unchecked illegal immigration, the collapse of law enforcement, and the relentless lust for power by the Deep State will crush what is left of American freedom.
Most of us, thankfully, want nothing to do with the fringe on either side, but it is hard to resist the feeling that Yeats’ poem "The Second Coming" is more relevant than ever: The center doesn’t hold; the best have lost all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. We stand, it increasingly appears, on the edge of history, and the political stakes are approaching the infinite.
This is not a temporary aberration. The specifics may change; radical trans activists and Donald Trump will not occupy center stage from decade to decade. But as America and the world ride the Adams Curve up an evermore dizzying slope, new hopes, new fears, and new conflicts will replace the old ones, and humanity will remain balanced on a knife edge between triumph and despair. Who knows whether our society will become less or more formally religious as time goes by; but I am reasonably certain that the sense that infinite values depend on the outcome of political struggles will continue to whip us into political frenzies as our political disagreements take on, more and more, the intensity that in the past was reserved for wars of religion.
This is a bad time to be Swedish. Under contemporary conditions, the psychological and political significance of religious sentiment and perception is too important to ignore, but many American intellectuals will struggle to wrap their heads around such an unfamiliar and alien subject—even as the American educational system increasingly fails to provide students with a solid introduction to the social power of religious ways of thought.
It may be helpful for more secular readers to think of “religion” not as someone’s adherence to a specific creed or cult, but as a universal characteristic of human consciousness from which our beliefs about good and evil and justice and injustice emerge. We are not often aware of the deep roots of our sense of identity and connectedness to the world, but our intuitions, ideas, and emotions about our relationship to existence are constantly shaping our perceptions of and judgments about our own conduct, that of other people, our political loyalties and opinions, the legitimacy of social and political institutions, and our duties and our rights. As a result, our senses of justice and legitimacy are deeply connected to our religious sense, and religion is both an intimate, highly personal phenomenon and a massively powerful social and political force.
Religion in this broad sense is something that virtually everyone shares, but American culture and politics have been shaped by a more specific form of the religious sense grounded in the traditions that reflect the legacy of Abrahamic religion. No cultural development since the advent of writing rivals the importance or impact of the Abrahamic tradition. The political, scientific, moral, and philosophical consequences of the emergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (and their close cousins, Liberalism and Marxism) are almost incomprehensibly large. By the beginning of the 21st century, more than half of the living human race (2.2 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims, and 14 million Jews) belonged to one of the Abrahamic religions. Despite the defections from Christianity in parts of the West, globally the numbers continue to grow.
It is difficult if not impossible to grasp the direction and the dimensions of world history, to say nothing of American history and contemporary developments, without coming to terms with the peculiar form of monotheistic religion associated with the wandering herdsman widely considered by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers to be the father of their respective faiths. It is out of the Abrahamic world that America’s religious, civic, and political culture have emerged, and if we want to grasp the nature of the forces that both unite and divide us today, we will need to come to grips with the reality that we are, whether we like it or not, the heirs of Abraham.
“Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” is the classic statement of Jewish faith. “I believe in One God,” is the opening of the classic formulation of Christian doctrine known as the Nicene Creed, repeated every Sunday by congregations all over the world. “There is no god but Allah,” is how the Islamic statement of faith opens.
The belief that there is one all-powerful, all-knowing God, the Lord of Time and the Ruler of the Universe—who, acting alone and without aid, made everything that exists—is, whether one personally agrees with it or not, the most consequential idea ever to thrust its way into human consciousness.
I don’t mean by this statement to disparage Hindu, Buddhist, or other non-Abrahamic belief systems. Ancient Greek philosophers found their own way to the concept of a unitary divine being without, so far as is known, direct exposure to Abrahamic religion. Similarly, philosophers and mystics in the great Asian traditions arrived at their own ways of understanding that unity of power, benevolence, and wisdom the family of Abraham worships as God. But Abrahamic religion puts the unity of God at the center of popular piety, greatly intensifying the power of this world-altering concept to reshape the social and intellectual landscape of a given culture.
As a grand hypothesis that claims to provide a single explanation for everything that happens in the heavens and on earth, the monotheistic idea is, for one thing, a daring leap that opens the door to a world of speculation and research—a path from tinkering to science. Postulating a single creator for the entire universe leads to the belief that the universe is predictable and rule driven. Events in the natural world are not just one darn thing after another; they do not reflect the caprices of minor deities. There are laws of nature, and because human beings are created by God—and in the Abrahamic religious accounts we were created in God’s image—most if not all of those rules should be discoverable by the human mind. The mathematical reasoning that we do in our heads corresponds with the mathematical structure that exists in the external world, and the experimental results we obtain in our labs here on earth can help us understand the nature of quasars at the far ends of the universe.
Similarly, in philosophy the idea that there is one all-powerful and self-sufficient God who created humanity in his image serves to stimulate the quest for truth. Our minds may not be able to plumb the full depths of divine transcendence, but the correspondence between creature and creator, a correspondence that includes the faculty of reason, means that as far as our minds can reach, they can discern the truth. Reconciling the scriptures of the great Abrahamic religions with the conclusions of Greek philosophers was the business of Jewish, Islamic, and Christian thinkers well past the classical period. The works of Maimonides, Averroës, and Aquinas, each representing the culmination of centuries of reflection, still stand as massive monuments in the history of human thought and continue to shape and inspire philosophers and political thinkers to this day.
Abrahamic thought and religion are as foundational and constitutive in the worlds of politics and history as they are for science and philosophy. Abrahamic religion holds that every human being matters, is a direct object of concern and care by the Creator of the universe, and is an immortal soul whose fate has eternal significance—and that the history of the human race is a moral and ethical story with a purpose and a meaning. Those are genuinely world-shaking convictions, and people who have never read a word of the Abrahamic scriptures or darkened the doorways of an Abrahamic house of worship live in a world shaped by Abrahamic values and ideas.
Women matter. Peasants matter. Slaves matter. Social divisions like race, caste, and wealth are evanescent. God judges impartially between rich and poor, and every human being lives under the same moral law. Every human being has rights by divine decree that do not depend on or proceed from the will of the state. Rulers are accountable before God not only for their personal conduct but also for the consequences of their policies on the poor and the weak. These are radical ideas, and they have touched off more than one revolution in the long course of history. They continue to subvert tyrannies and challenge hierarchies of privilege in our time. In my opinion, the Abrahamic political revolution will continue as long as imperfect human social orders fail to live up to the requirements of Abrahamic justice.
But Abrahamic politics is not just about the rights of individuals and the poor. Abrahamic thought gives meaning to the entire span of human existence: Created without sin in perfect harmony with nature and God, humanity tragically lost that original connection early on and was plunged into the world of greed, confusion, evil, and chaos that we know. God, however, has determined not to leave us in this wretched state and has reached out to the world through prophets and lawgivers to set us on the right track. At some point, God will intervene decisively to restore order and justice to the world.
Humanity’s life on earth is therefore divided into three eras. There is the prehistorical era in which our earliest ancestors lived in harmony with God and inhabited Paradise. The Fall precipitated the era of history in which we now live. In this time, humanity, thanks to God’s mercy and grace, struggles toward a purpose. During this time, the actions of citizens and governments can either advance or retard that purpose. We all have a moral duty to cooperate with the divine plan and, so far as we are able, advance the work of recovery and repair. The end of history will come when God intervenes to bring history to its glorious conclusion.
Jews, Muslims, and Christians of course disagree vehemently over the specifics of the divine plan, but the Abrahamic approach to history is something they basically share. The human story is not just a set of random events, nor is it a cyclical process. A moral imperative is encoded into history; individuals and states are either acting in accordance with divine mandates or in violation of them.
These beliefs lead the followers of these traditions to bring ethical ideals into public policy and diplomacy. They also lead to wars of religion as Abrahamic believers seek to impose their moral and religious visions around the world. The Abrahamic vision of history is so powerful and corresponds so deeply to the intuitions that many people have about the world, moreover, that even those who reject these religious doctrines embrace the historical and political visions that Abrahmists propose.
When Francis Fukuyama greeted the end of the Cold War by suggesting that the end of history was upon us, he was consciously referring to the Abrahamic schema of history. German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel built his philosophical system on the foundation of the Abrahamic historical vision. His idea of the end of history—the point where human society had developed to its intended perfection under the guidance of the Spirit that expressed itself through the historical process—is nothing more than the old Abrahamic idea of the arrival of a divinely perfected earthly order in philosophical robes.
Hegel was neither the first nor the last European thinker to recast Abrahamic history into political terms in the wake of the Enlightenment. Liberals in the United States and beyond saw in the integrated scientific, technological, and social progress of their times the signs of a progressive and permanent change in the human condition. Scientific knowledge would create a more prosperous world. That prosperity would enable the spread of education and enlightenment to the masses. With time, the combination of free markets and free institutions would bring an end to poverty, tyranny, and war even as scientists learned to cure sickness and extend the human life span.
Liberals were not the only children of the Enlightenment to build an essentially secular worldview on Abrahamic foundations. Karl Marx, who saw his life’s work as integrating the German philosophical tradition with the British political economy, was if anything more explicit than Hegel in recapitulating the Abrahamic outline of history. Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels pictured humanity as moving from stage to stage toward the final classless utopia of universal peace and abundance. Early humans were hunters and gatherers, living in a classless and Edenic “primitive communism” of relative equality and peace. The Neolithic Revolution and the rise of the ancient empires forced humanity out of the Garden of Eden and into the misery of class oppression and war. But that was not the end of the story. While neither an Abrahamic God nor a Hegelian Spirit was guiding us, the material progress of the human race was gradually but inexorably laying the foundation for the return by a fully developed, scientifically managed future human society to a sophisticated version of primitive communism.
St. Augustine saw human history as a long march from the Garden of Eden at the beginning of time to the City of God at the culmination of history. Marx saw a similar progression from the rural but primitive paradise of the hunter-gatherers to the glittering communist metropolis of the future.
Liberals and Marxists also carry the ethical imperatives of the Abrahamic worldview into their political visions. From their viewpoint, human beings have a duty to assist the arrival of utopia. Rulers who fight to save their backward autocracies are not just wasting their time fighting the inevitable tide. They are doing something evil, and it is the duty of good and honorable people to resist them.
This is why in my view Liberalism and Marxism deserve a place in the quarrelsome, divided family of Abraham. They resemble the religions descended from Abraham in their claims of universal and exclusive truth, in their unshakeable belief in their right to dictate morals and politics to the world, and in their confidence that at the end of the day their visions will triumph over their rivals’.
As the five Abrahamic faiths have spread around the world, the influence of these ideas has grown. If we add Communist China and proponents of liberal democracy to the Abrahamic West, Middle East, and Africa, where Christianity and Islam have largely replaced indigenous religions, it should be clear just how pervasive the legacy of Abraham has become.
If we add Communist China and proponents of liberal democracy to the Abrahamic West, Middle East, and Africa, it should be clear just how pervasive the legacy of Abraham has become.
“Look up to the heavens,” the Voice had said to Abraham (as translated by Robert Alter), “and count the stars, if you can count them.” That, the Voice said, will be the number of your descendants. And on another occasion: “I will make you most abundantly fruitful and turn you into nations, and kings shall come forth from you.” Scholars differ on whether and how much the story reflects an actual series of historical events, but whether the Voice was a divine call, a herdsman’s imagination, or an episode in a legendary cycle with no discernible historical foundation, the past 4,000 years have seen this prediction fulfilled.
Not every consequence of this astonishing development has been benign. The family of Abraham is uniquely large and uniquely influential. It is also uniquely truculent. Abraham’s putative descendants warred across the deserts of the Middle East for thousands of years, and Christians and Muslims have been calling holy wars against one another since the first Islamic armies swept out of the Arabian Peninsula nearly 1,400 years ago.
Human beings fought wars long before Abraham followed his flocks into Canaan, but the belief in a single Creator introduced a new source of conflict into the world. If there is one God who is entirely good and who is actively intervening in human history, then we really ought to follow his commandments. There is one truth that ought to be known and believed by all people, and there is a right way to live to which all people ought to conform.
The pagan priests of Jupiter did not believe that all people should worship the same god. Nor did they care if the rites by which Jupiter was worshipped in Rome differed from those used in his temples in Naples. The Romans and their neighbors fought over honor, territory, security, and wealth; they did not fight over religion. Shinto priests today have no desire to convert the world to their belief system. It is the heirs of Abraham—including Liberals and Marxists—who believe that the world’s welfare requires the global dissemination of their faith and who have often felt compelled to spread that faith by fire and the sword.
While Abrahamic thought and religion remain central to American identity, we must remember that the United States is only one of many countries around the world whose political ideologies and self-image are grounded in Abrahamic imagery and thought. The ancient Hebrews, the Islamic caliphates down to the Ottoman era, the Byzantine and Russian emperors, and the Habsburgs all believed that their states represented the culmination of a divine purpose. In the American case, the primary sources of American social and political thought—the Protestant version of Western Christianity, Enlightenment Liberalism, and various forms of progressive ideology ranging from middle-class reformers like John Dewey to the Marxist and quasi-Marxist hard left—all saw the nation’s history as part of a cosmic story taking place within the Abrahamic framework.
For our predecessors, the arc of history seemed clear. The great civilizations of the Greco-Roman world had reached an apex of cultural and political accomplishment, just as the pure religion of the early Christian church marked a spiritual high point in humanity’s long, divinely assisted recovery from the Fall. But the promise of the classical era had been cut short. Corruption and decadence brought an end to the liberties of the ancient peoples, while the gradual corruption of the early church under the influence of tyrannical emperors and scheming clerics led to what American Protestants saw as the evils and errors of the medieval church.
The barbarian invasions marked the fall of the ancient Greco-Roman civilization even as the consolidation of papal power marked the degradation of Christianity and left Western civilization in the shadow of the Dark Ages. But the early Americans believed that this was not the end of the story. The scholars and humanists of the Renaissance began to recover the ideas of the ancients from obscurity. The Protestant Reformation inaugurated the process of recovering the early purity and power of the Christian faith.
The intellectual and spiritual recovery led to the rebirth of the ancient spirit of republican liberty and, Americans believed, the virtue that made liberty possible. American and British observers both saw the Glorious Revolution of 1688—when James II was overthrown after the defeat of his plans to establish absolute monarchy and break the power of Protestantism, and Parliament emerged as the most important center of power in British politics—as a decisive victory over the forces of superstition and tyranny, opening the way to accomplishments even greater than the greatest achievements of the ancient world.
Between the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution almost 90 years later, the fruits of the new order seemed to explode across the historical stage as the scientific and intellectual accomplishments of the Enlightenment astounded contemporaries. From Sir Isaac Newton’s discoveries in mathematics and physics to Adam Smith’s groundbreaking work in political economy, from James Watt’s development of a more efficient steam engine to John Harrison’s creation of chronometers accurate enough to permit ship captains to determine their longitude on extended voyages, one astonishing innovation after another electrified the European world and pointed toward even greater accomplishments still to come.
Read the rest: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/abraham-bomb-via-meadia-walter-russell-mead
The fact that Sanders and Jayapal boycotted Weizmann's speech tells you all you need to know about them. While their supporters and the media often pretend otherwise, it's not about Netanyahu or the defunct "peace process."