In February 1861, on the way to his inauguration as America’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln stopped in Trenton, New Jersey, where he described himself as a “humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.” In describing Americans as an “almost chosen people,” Lincoln points to the Hebrew Bible and the miraculous story of the Jewish People as the American model of a particular nation with a distinctive purpose and universal significance. Americans no longer share a common understanding of the meaning of America’s “great struggle.” What is this nation for? What did Abraham Lincoln mean when he called the American people “almost chosen”? Freedom is essential to the American constitutional order, but Lincoln thought the soul of the nation was destined for “something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.” Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik of Congregation Shearith Israel and Yeshiva University will shed light on the debate gripping America about the meaning of nationalism, our civic identity, the role of religion in the public square, and how both biblical and philosophical ideas inspired the American founding and American public life to this day.

Rabbi Dr. Meir Y. Soloveichik

Rabbi Dr. Meir Y. Soloveichik is one of the world’s preeminent Jewish thinkers and educators, and he’s one of America’s most influential religious leaders. He is the senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. He is also director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. Rabbi Soloveichik has lectured internationally to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences on topics relating to faith in America, the Hebraic roots of the American founding, Jewish theology, bioethics, wartime ethics, Jewish-Christian relations, and more. He writes a monthly column in Commentary magazine, and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Mosaic, First Things, Azure, Tradition, Jewish Review of Books, and many other outlets. Rabbi Soloveichik is a descendant of one of the Jewish world’s great rabbinic dynasties. He graduated summa cum laude from Yeshiva University, received his rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and studied at its Beren Kollel Elyon. He has also studied at Yale Divinity School, and in 2010 received his doctorate in religion from Princeton University.