“America is over.”

That, with some variation, is the message I’ve been getting from friends and colleagues ever since last week’s Democratic primaries elevated a host of radicals to prominence. In WhatsApp groups and text messages and long, doleful emails, intelligent, soulful people wrote to declare that the experiment that had begun on these shores 250 years ago was now at an end. America, they lament, is obviously on its way to becoming another Spain, Poland, Ukraine—just “another shithole country where Jews used to live.”

If this were 1857, these people would have sounded almost the same: America, they would have reasonably argued, is finished—torn between those who defend the institution of slavery and those who wish to abolish it with an increasing sense of urgency. Every month new states contemplated joining the Union, and deciding on where they might fall on this seminal question seemed obviously destined to spoil the nation’s future. Attempts at compromise proved futile. Over in Congress, members were fighting with actual fists and canes. No leading figure was visible anywhere on the horizon to step up and rescue the country from this nightmare. There were only awkward gents like that lanky, depressive, and verbose fellow from Illinois, who seemed better suited for endless debates with Stephen Douglas than for the highest office in the land.

Now imagine that, in the face of these incontrovertible facts, I told you that in 15 years’ time, America would not only resolve its seemingly intractable conflict—true, at a very solemn cost—but also begin its ascendance and become the greatest global force for good mankind had ever seen. What would you do? You’d ask me to provide my reasoning, some proof. I wouldn’t be able to. In 1857, there was no evidence to support any argument that the future was anything but bleak.

This would have been wrong then, it’s wrong now, and it’s important to understand why.

If you speak a little bit of Hebrew, you know that the Hebrew name for the United States of America is strange: It’s Artzot Ha’Brit, or “the lands of the covenant.” The language of the Bible understands spiritual nuances very well, and it knows to call America by its defining feature: Ours is a covenantal nation.

We could spend long hours diving into the precise implications of this designation, but if you’d like to understand covenantal thinking, you need look no further than the original recipient of the covenant: Abraham.

Our great forefather was a profoundly ordinary man. Unlike Noah, whom the Torah celebrates as exceedingly righteous, Abraham enters the story without fanfare or introduction. He is chosen, in other words, not because of what he had already accomplished, but because of what God knows he could yet achieve. Indeed, he aces every test the Lord sets before him and, with each fresh challenge, grows into the moral giant he was always meant to be, because covenants are always about change.

America is a strong case in point.

This covenantal nation, put here by God to spread the light of freedom to a benighted world, is a nation always busy being born. When it first emerged, 250 years ago this summer, it did so when a band of brave men decided to rise to the occasion and make new proclamations that put them in conflict with the mightiest military force on earth. They prevailed, and by doing so, forever changed the course of history. And yet, not even a century later, it was time to renew the covenant and fight a bloody Civil War to protect the foundational virtues upon which this nation was built. Fast-forward another 100 years, to 1964, and we once again found ourselves in a moment of covenantal renewal, once again called to protect America’s core belief and ensure that the bell of liberty rings for all.

You can learn two key lessons from this very brief spiritual history of America. The first is that, every few decades, we’re called to have a very public, deeply unsettling, and absolutely essential conversation about first principles—conversations that, if history is any indication, always have happy endings: The King was defeated. Slavery was abolished. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law. Which leads us to the second key lesson: No covenantal renewal ever looks like its predecessor. America of 1865 was a radically different place from the nation that had just won its war of independence, and the country cheering on the Freedom Riders in the 1960s had almost nothing in common with that slouching into Reconstruction. We, nostalgic and anxious creatures, are so often eager to seek stability in the known realms of the past; but covenantal nations are always changing because history itself changes, too—their task, and their genius, is to find new ways to preserve old ideas even as the world around them turns fast and furious.

You may dismiss this spiritual argument for America because you do not believe in its author, the Almighty. Or you may have faith and yet say that it is the height of folly for men to try and guess God’s intentions: After all, didn’t the divine light shine once upon a time on Rome as well? Or the great Spanish empire? And might it not, one day and for reasons we can’t begin to fathom, abandon America?

These are fair questions, and they bring us to the second, historiographic, argument.

Look at virtually any other country on earth, and you’ll have little trouble understanding its essence. Norway, for example, exists as we know it because, somewhere around 3,000 BCE, Indo-European farmers settled in the country’s east and, for thousands of years, developed a cohesive culture predicated on ethnic similarities and a history of sharing a contiguous strip of land. The same, with some variations, is the case everywhere you turn. Except, of course, here in America: An immigrant to Norway stands out because he or she visibly does not resemble the overwhelming majority of the population, which shares very specific traits. This logic does not apply in America, a nation made up of immigrants, attracted by the promise of that great mantra: E Pluribus Unum, out of many comes one.

The same forces coded into the DNA of other nations or empires—inflamed religious dogmas, fantasies of ethnic superiority, fear of some external enemy always aggressing—simply don’t exist here. True, we’ve no shortage of political fringe groups trying to import these noxious ideas from corners, like Russia, to which they’re native, but it’s always a good idea to assume that no ideology entirely and completely antithetical to a certain culture’s core values is likely to ever overtake and subdue its host body. Or, put bluntly, if you study American history, you understand right away that it’s different. And when you say it’s just another Poland awaiting collapse, you’re not being rational or prudent but merely projecting your own histrionics onto it, trying to recast America in the image of your anxieties rather than observe its reality.

Suppose you were unmoved by the first two cases presented above. Suppose you have no feeling for all things spiritual and believe that though America might have, at some point, been a welcoming society made up of people from different cultures, it has now hardened somehow into something darker and decaying. Well, let’s proceed to argument number three: geopolitics.

Imagine, for a moment, that we all make aliyah en masse. What would the world look like then? Assume an America in decline. Assume a Europe already clutched by waves of Jew-hating Muslim migrants. Assume a triumphant Axis of Resistance, with China, Russia, and Iran feeling emboldened by America’s looming death. Do you believe this would be a world in which Jews anywhere, even in Israel, could live in peace? Ours is a small planet, now made more so through being bound together by technologies and economic interests that make it impossible for what happens in the biggest places not to affect everywhere else. Running to Israel while the rest of the world sinks into darkness isn’t a carefully considered plan of action; it’s hiding in the closet while the Nazis run roughshod outside. It’s only a matter of time before they get to you.

You think Singapore will stay as peaceful if America falls? That Argentine President Javier Milei will have the wind at his back that he now does? That Poland’s trajectory will be the same? If so, you don’t understand something fundamental about politics, or the globe right now. Which may be fine for some people but is inexcusable for Jews. We cannot afford to be so traumatized by the last chapter in history that it makes us stupid about the one we are living in now. Is it dangerous? Yep! Unstable? Insanely. That’s why you need to resist the temptation to grab the last lesson and rinse and repeat. Our role here isn’t to retreat; it’s to be God’s partners in defending and repairing the world, all of it, everywhere and to the best of our abilities.

Earlier this year, Tablet founder and editor in chief Alana Newhouse kicked off a masterful essay about the looming state of the West with a telling anecdote:

If you wish to move to Israel because you feel spiritually called to take part in the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland, more power to you. But if you’re looking at real estate in Modi’in because you were too lazy or hysterical to properly fight for your own city and country, I can promise you that you’re the last thing that small country needs right now. In fact, given the state of the world, you’re letting your anxiety turn you into the last thing anyone needs.

I, for one, am endlessly grateful for, deeply loyal to, and wildly hopeful about America—not as an idea or abstraction or set of beliefs, but as a very real country with very real people. These people, my neighbors, my friends, may sometimes get it wrong, even catastrophically so, but they’re still my friends and neighbors. And they deserve that I stay and fight alongside them, fight for this country we love with all our hearts, fight for our home.

I also believe they—we—will win and that victory will redound to everyone’s benefit.

True, the challenges are real and they’re immense. The advocates of infinite migration are arguing for open borders, which means the end of America, because it was precisely the very finite nature of immigration to this country, and the demands that came with it, that made previous generations of newcomers fit so seamlessly into the national mosaic. Large corporations are melting into the government’s infrastructure, using advanced surveillance and information technologies to run endless ops on American civilians. And we have something like three jumbo jets’ worth of people succumbing every day to deaths of despair, killing themselves overtly or otherwise because they can no longer imagine a future that’s anything but grim.

So, yes, rediscovering our shared story will be difficult, and making it resonate over the shouting choruses amplified by social media more difficult still. But looking at these difficulties and these challenges, we must say Baruch HaShem, “God bless.” How fortunate are we to have been placed here, in this nation and at this moment, to play a part in the next great American Revolution, to fight once again for our sacred principles, to partake once again in the refoundation of this amazing nation. Just as our ancestors fought alongside Washington, stood by Lincoln, and marched with King, now we, too, get to write the next chapter of American splendor. So enough, please, with the whining: America isn’t over. It’s barely beginning. And as 250 years of American history show, those who truly believe this sentiment and are ready to fight for it always, always, always win big.