Our Founding Fathers

Rav Avigdor Miller on Our Founding Fathers

Q:

Can you give us your opinion about our founding fathers; I mean the founding fathers of America?

A:

Now, it’s not my place here to deprecate or belittle our great national heroes. I believe that we should honor them. I’ll tell you something – I don’t believe in stamps depicting poets or the directors of orchestras or anarchists or anybody else except for the patriots who fought when our nation was established as a republic. I believe that all the stamps should be dedicated to honor those people. And the trend today of catering to feminists and to anarchists and to anybody at all is a disloyalty to the ideals upon which this country was founded. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, all of them. Benjamin Franklin. Certainly! The national heroes! Only to them as stamps should be dedicated.

However, that’s for goyim and when we talk to the gentiles that’s how we talk – in their language. But we know that even the heroes of the nations, the very best ones, are nothing when compared to the greatness of a Jewish home. We wouldn’t admit even the founding fathers of our republic, we wouldn’t admit them into our company, into our homes, because they weren’t equal to the ideals of a Jewish family. The best goyim are not company for the Jewish family. We have different ways of life; not only because of kashrus or because of our dinim and minhagim – because our ideals are entirely different.

Here, let’s say George Washington. Now, I admire George Washington. I want to give him credit. But George Washington attended dances where men and women danced together. And he was embracing a woman, not his wife. A woman is all oisgeputzed; she’s powdered and perfumed and he was holding her with his arms and dancing. Nothing wrong by him. But to us that’s a to’eivah, an abomination! So here was one of the best goyim doing what is to us one of the very worst and lowest things!

What can we say? A man who dances with strange women, other mens’ wives, doesn’t belong in our society. These men, all of them, danced with women at the balls in colonial times. And so although we honor them for what they did for this country – in the role of citizens certainly we honor them, but privately we know that they are nothing compared to us.

TAPE # 599 (June 1986)

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