President and Rosh Yeshiva

On Monday, I will stand before our nation to offer words of blessing at Donald J. Trump's second inauguration. It's a profound moment for me—not just for the gravity of the occasion, but for how it binds together the threads of American history, religious tradition, and our collective hopes for tomorrow.

They don't teach this in rabbinical school. There's no chapter in the ancient texts titled, “How to Bless a President.” But as I prepare to head to Washington, D.C., my mind has wandered to another capital city, one that has whispered its wisdom through the centuries: Jerusalem.

It turns out I'm not the first to make this connection. George Washington found himself drawn repeatedly to the words of an ancient Hebrew prophet named Micah and his vision of Jerusalem. More than fifty times in his letters and speeches, Washington returned to Micah's dream—not of conquest or power, but of a place where “everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.”

This wasn’t mere rhetoric for Washington. In 1783, fresh from leading the revolutionary army, he wrote to a friend with an oddly specific request: Would they send him some grape vines and a couple of fig trees? Here was the father of our country, literally trying to plant Micah’s vision in America’s newly free soil.

The image is almost too perfect—the general who had wielded the sword now seeking to cultivate vines. It echoed Micah’s prophecy of a time when nations would “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” Washington wasn’t just building a garden; he was planting hope.

A few years later, writing to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island, he wove that same biblical imagery into a profound promise of religious freedom. He wished for them that they would “merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants” while everyone sat “in safety under his own vine and fig tree.” The metaphor had evolved from personal yearning to national vision.

But visions take root slowly. The peaceful era Micah foresaw hasn’t arrived, not in Jerusalem and not in our own divided nation. The ground beneath our feet often feels unsteady, the winds of discord blow fierce and cold.

This is why, in preparing my benediction, I found myself drawn to another prophet, Jeremiah, who spoke to people living in uncertain times. He offered them an image of a tree planted by water, its roots reaching deep to the stream, remaining green even in drought, bearing fruit even in hardship.

That’s America at its best: a nation that draws strength from deep roots—roots that reach back to Jerusalem and Athens, to London and Philadelphia, to every shore from which our people have come. These roots tap into wellsprings of faith and reason, of liberty and law, of the sacred and the civic.

Washington understood this. He called faith and morality the "indispensable supports" of American prosperity. Not because they were imposed from above, but because they rose from below, from the soil of human hearts cultivated in freedom.

As our nation approaches its 250th year, these roots are tested anew. The heat comes, the winds blow. But like Jeremiah’s tree, we endure when we remember what sustains us—those core values that America shares with the faith traditions that have found shelter here: the sanctity of life, the pursuit of liberty, the call to service, the morality that underlies all law.

On Monday, standing on the Capitol steps, I will offer words of blessing to our nation and its forty-seventh president. But the real blessing is already here, planted deep in American soil—this extraordinary experiment in freedom and fellowship, this ongoing effort to cultivate a garden where all may sit without fear.

May its leaves remain green, and may it never cease to bear fruit.

Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman
President
Yeshiva University