Rabbi Charles E. Savenor serves as the Executive Director of Civic Spirit that provides training in civic education to faith based day schools.
When America’s founders were imagining the great seal of this new democracy, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson suggested featuring a depiction of the Exodus from Egypt. The Israelites’ overcoming oppression of a powerful king and reaching freedom captured their imagination, as they saw themselves in this triumphant story.
While this biblical narrative inspired many revolutionaries, some of their contemporaries harbored reservations about the powerful appeal of this particular story. Slaveholders in the British West Indies and American South worried about how enslaved people would hear the Exodus story and the conclusions they would draw from it. Their fears only increased in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution in 1804. In an attempt to safeguard against another rebellion of those seeking freedom, slaveholders not only limited literacy, but also censured the Bible. So much so, in 1807 a version of the Bible was produced without mention of the Israelite Exodus.
This so-called “Slave Bible” may have removed the Exodus from its pages, but the human desire for freedom and liberty can never be erased. In fact, we know from the many African American Spirituals - like “Let My People Go” and “Go Down, Moses” - that the Exodus story framed slaves’ aspirations of reaching a “Promised Land” where freedom is a shared norm.
As the Jewish people celebrate Passover this week, the Exodus story is retold and embraced anew. What makes Passover special is not just the telling of the tale, but the internalization of its values and visions through rituals, questions, and conversation.
Our celebrations of Passover, Easter, and Ramadan are also elevated by the storytellers as much as the story. At our holiday tables, we are all educators. Many of us will be in multigenerational settings where we are receivers of our most cherished narratives that one day we will be expected to pass down to our students, children, and grandchildren. Relaying these experiences through our eyes, we become what Abraham Lincoln calls a “living history, ...a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity.”
It is important for us to consider that just as the Exodus has inspired hope on these shores, so too has the American experiment in democracy seeded dreams around the globe. At a time when democracy is challenged near and far, our role as a “living history” about the American story is more important than ever. Despite the United States’ challenges, divides, and conflicts, ours is a story worth sharing.
Tomorrow’s leaders need to hear not just the triumphant memories of yesteryear, but also visions of what our nation can become when a sense of common purpose prevails. When we embrace the opportunity to share how responsibility, integrity, listening, and compromise contribute to the free society in which we live today, we plant the seeds of hope.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.