NEW YORK CITY – U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) delivered the keynote address at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s convening on Upholding Human Dignity in Turbulent Times yesterday, examining the moral foundations that support both faith and democracy.
Drawing on Jewish and Christian scripture, Senator Coons urged the audience to uphold faith principles of listening, trust, and dialogue as a way to avert political violence and strengthen our democracy in the wake of the second Trump presidency.
Looking ahead, Senator Coons said the nation should seek a “Third Founding” rooted in opportunity, security, and justice for all Americans, similar to the “Second Founding” that followed the Civil War. He closed by promising to continue listening to Delawareans of every political view and working across the aisle to strengthen American democracy in the face of unprecedented times.
A video and transcript of Senator Coons’ remarks are available below.
Thank you, Jack. Thank you for that powerful introduction, and for the grace of your friendship over so many years. The weekly reflection group that he just gave short shrift to, which is faith and politics, is a mixture of encounter session, prayer group, and therapy that helps a group of, today, only Democrats in the Senate confront the challenges of our modern moment – and he has been an incredible source of encouragement, of inspiration, and friendship. I am grateful for you, Rabbi Moline – please give him a round of applause, if you would.
And to Chancellor Shuly Schwartz, to Vice Chancellor Gordon Tucker, to Tamara Neuman and her team for all the logistical help in getting me here, notionally, on time, sort of, close to. And I wanted to take a moment and just thank four friends who gave input on my remarks – Delaware's Rabbis Yair Robinson and Michael Beals, who've both been friends for a long time, and Rabbis Hara Person and Barry Block, who will feature later in my remarks this morning. I'm honored to be a part of a weekend that this evening will culminate with the Bernard Segal Lecture, because law and ethics, as you heard, back to my time in graduate school and looking forward is, I think, a critical area of reflection and concern for all of us. And I can't think of a greater name to be on this evening's lecture than one of America's greatest lawyers and a tireless advocate for legal services to the poor and for civil rights. And it is a huge blessing to see Ruth Messinger, who I first met when I was working for Bob Hayes at the Coalition for the Homeless in the 1980s in New York City, a time when I was frequently visiting a very large homeless shelter just a few blocks north of here, and when the circumstances of income inequality, housing and desperation on the streets of our cities first really awakened my soul to the urgency of showing God's love and fighting for human dignity here, at home, in the United States.
I'm here to talk today about the critical role of dialogue, about the importance of listening – listening to each other, listening in a way that risks and challenges and hopefully reinforces our beliefs, and I can think of no more relevant and important place to talk about intrafaith dialogue, interfaith dialogue, dialogue, than the Jewish Theological Seminary, given its roots, given its role, and given, I believe, its critical future. The theme is upholding human dignity in turbulent times, and to understand what human dignity is we should start by asking the question: What does our God require of us? And to find that we, of course, begin with scripture.
Our shared faiths have a clear answer to the question: What is the greatest commandment? “To love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and with all your spirit, and a second is like unto it – to love your neighbor as yourself.” These two commandments appear both in Deuteronomy and Leviticus in Torah, but are an anchoring passage in the Gospel according to Mark in the Christian faith. And these words echo with me as I pray in the mornings, and as I try to go and engage on behalf of a million Americans in our nation as a senator in a particularly difficult time.
The parable that Jesus teaches then goes on just a little bit because a lawyer – and it's always the lawyers – trying to justify himself says, “Oh, but who is my neighbor?” And the answer that Jesus gives is truly radical. It shattered a lot of the expectations of the time, and it focused not on the obvious, not on the related, not on the nearby – but on the distant, on the marginalized, on the excluded, on the widow, the poor, the orphan, the immigrant. He reinforced what Tanakh says all the way back to Genesis, which is that neighbor should be defined as broadly as possible, because the spark of the divine, the fact that we are all created in God's image, is what is the foundation of human dignity. And so that understanding undergirds the definition of righteousness that Isaiah gives in Chapter 58, “If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall surely rise in the darkness.”
So I stand before you, having just come from a month of bitter fighting in Washington, DC. Where literally, our president sued all the way to the Supreme Court for the power to deny food to America's hungry children and families in pursuit of being able to deny health care to their families and their parents. This has been a truly ugly time of using suffering and denial of food, denial of health care, denial of status to the immigrant, that I think goes directly against our fundamental and shared understanding of righteousness. Sometimes in the current political context, it seems to me that the cruelty is so intentional that it is the point. And this year began with DOGE and Elon Musk tearing up all of the infrastructure that we built over decades to deliver food to the hungry of the world, to deliver health care, to those facing HIV-AIDS or Malaria or TB. And for me, this was a little personal, because I've dedicated much of the last 15 years of my life to that in the Senate. I actually wrote the bill in the Senate that funded USAID in the last two Congresses.
So when it was shredded in front of me, set on fire and shoved off a balcony by literally the richest man on Earth, seeing the wreckage that that has caused – not just the suffering and the needless deaths, but also the strategic harm to the United States, to our reputation, to our sense of who we are and whose we are in the world – has made this a particularly challenging moral year. To then also go back to that weekly prayer breakfast and hold hands with those who had just voted for things that violated my core sense of what is human dignity, and what is our calling, both as a nation and as a democracy.
So, look, I've always thought of SNAP as food assistance and as USAID as health care at home and abroad, as how we show care for our neighbors. How we, as a nation, reinforce that we're founded on the idea that there is that spark of the divine in everyone. And I fear today we're becoming a nation that doesn't recognize the dignity in all; that is willing to marginalize and to deport the stranger in our midst, that is willing to cut off from food and health care those who don't count, that is willing to look at who is who in our society and demonize the marginalized. So, I am very worried about finding a path forward that is positive, and hope to spend some time on that topic with you today.
I think that Scripture teaches us that one of the most foundational ways to move back towards reclaiming human dignity is the simple act of listening. First, listening to God, and then, listening to each other. God, as we know, reveals Himself to us, not necessarily in the rush and roar of daily life or even cataclysmic events, but as Elijah found in that still, small voice, or as Samuel found in the temple. That voice that seems so quiet as to be haunting, then engaging, then goading. And in the Christian gospels, it is by listening and engaging in dialogue that Jesus teaches. All of his most important lessons come in parables; not in declamations, not in pronouncements, but in engagement – asking and answering questions with people of all backgrounds. One of his most radical acts was respecting and engaging with the people at the very margins of society, whether tax collectors or lepers, women or Samaritans – he engaged in dialogue very, very broadly. Israeli author Micah Goodman says, “listening means risking one's own beliefs.” And I think risking a renewed dialogue around that question, “Who is my neighbor?,” and listening to those who are voting in a governing power because of how they feel they have not been heard is part of the menu of how we can move forward.
Micah Goodman tells the story of Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai in the first century, both of whom claim to know and interpret Jewish law. God said, ultimately, that both spoke the words of the living God, but that Jewish law would be thereafter interpreted in accordance with Rabbi Hillel. Why? And forgive me, this was suggested to me by others more learned than I – because Hillel's followers chose to listen, chose to actually teach their version and Shammai’s. To risk their own beliefs and on several critical occasions, reconsider or even change their teachings in dialogue.
I came to believe personally in the power of dialogue because of my own life experience. When I went off to Amherst College, I was leaving a relatively privileged suburban, white, small, mushroom-farming town – more on that later – in the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware. I grew up in a Presbyterian Church. I was comfortable, in no way afflicted, and I went off to Amherst College, thinking that I, you know, sort of hit a triple, not realizing I'd been born on third base. I was a member of the College Republicans. I volunteered on the Reagan campaign. I was an enthusiast for American exceptionalism, and had a sense of accomplishment, not founded in actual lived experience.
But I had an unexpected blessing, two people in my freshman hall, Hara Person and Barry Block who, instead of canceling me, instead of shouting me down, instead of saying that the things I was saying were ignorant and ill-informed and offensive, asked me questions and listened to me. Is it any surprise they've become great rabbis? “Why do you feel that way when you say that? When you say that, what's behind that? How does it make you feel when you speak up in class in a way that hurts others? Did you really mean that offense, or did you just not know better?” Barry and Hara were one of a small group of people who didn't just count me out and didn't just reject me out of hand, but instead tested me, challenged me, pulled me towards a broader understanding, and helped me deepen my own understanding of the faith in which I've been raised and the shared roots of righteousness that inform both of our faith traditions.
They troubled me so much, and I realized then this sort of iron bubble I was in, that I actually went to Kenya for a semester. I took a semester at the University of Nairobi, wanting to see what I knew I didn't know. And there I had an experience, both of students, fellow students at the University of Nairobi, challenging my world view and values. This was during the anti-apartheid movement, and I was proudly defending the Reagan government; and that terrible Marxist, later recognized by all as a freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela. And I found my arguments unpersuasive, and my classmates persistent and challenging. In some ways more importantly, I lived with families, Kenyan families, whose faith was incredibly important to them, and who lived their faith in joyful worship, a sort of energetic and joyful worship I had not experienced as a child, and I came back newly alert to the challenges of wealth and poverty, of opportunity, of race and colonialism.
When greeted at the airport, my college debate partner and friend, now a theologian at Fordham – you see the unexpected blessings sprinkled throughout my life – picked me up and drove me to the South Bronx and said, explain this – in your view, that the free market solves everything, that opportunity comes to those who work hard – explain the poverty and the dysfunction in some parts of our country. Given what you’ve seen there, now try to apply it here. As you can imagine, these dialogues ultimately led me to reconsider some of my core ideas and reaffirm others, and recognize the tension between the biblically-based sense of justice that had informed my childhood, the actions of my parents in my congregation to do justice to others, and how they were in tension with the political ideology I'd adopted.
So, after time working with the homeless here in New York, I went to both law school and divinity school, just simply accelerating the tension in my life, and ultimately found that I was more certain in my faith, but less certain of doctrine or dogma. After three years spent studying and listening.
I've seen the power of listening work in politics too, as Rabbi Moline referenced; one of the things I try to do is to go both to the Faith and Politics reflection group that reinforces my core commitments, and on alternate Wednesdays to go to a genuinely bipartisan prayer breakfast that's run by our chaplain of the Senate – no staff, no lobbyists, no media, just a group of Republicans and Democrats holding hand in prayer, singing hymns, and then one of us stands up every week and talks about our life and the role of our faith in our life, and how it's challenged and informed us.
The first decade that I was serving in the Senate, I was commuting from Delaware, so to go to this at 8 a.m. I had to get up at 5 a.m. and take a train. I have a confession – on several occasions, I'd look at who was speaking and go, “Oh Mike Lee, John Barrasso.” And I’d want to turn over and take a little longer nap. I learned over time to make myself make that train, because those were the moments that challenged my expectations the most. It was in actually listening to the life story of people whose political views I most disagreed with that I built friendships based on mutual respect, based on an understanding of their life.
Ultimately, a senator named Johnny Isakson, a conservative Republican from Georgia, became my best friend in the Senate. And today, James Lankford, who for a long time was the only other divinity school-trained senator, has become a close friend, my partner in co-chairing that prayer breakfast. We have dramatic disagreements. It has almost never happened that we walk into that first vote Monday and go the same way. We sort of laugh at each other because we are always doing this and then talking about our families and about the concerns that move us.
I think that is the only path forward, as it has been here for our nation, being willing to risk listening to each other, being willing to risk the opprobrium that comes from being seen in the company of someone who is radically to my right or who views me as radically to their left is in some ways, the only path forward for all of us.
Democracy – our democracy, but democracy more broadly understood – is at its core an exercise in upholding human dignity, in seeing everyone as equal, and seeing everyone as our neighbor. The idea that each of us has a right to make critical decisions in our lives would have been radical in biblical times, radical today in significant parts of the world, but it is central to democracy – the idea that we all have the right to choose our path and our course and who governs us, because we are all children of God and have that spark of the divine within us. It relies on our most foundational freedoms: to speak, to assemble, to petition, to report, and to worship. Had our nation not been founded on religious liberty, had our nation not been founded on this most essential right, many of us would not be here today because so many people came to America seeking religious liberty, and I would argue, insisting on that – on a separation of church and state, and on a nation that sees and reflects the imprint of God on all of us, holding that dichotomy together – is absolutely essential. Because in the end, democracy relies on trust, trust in each other that all of our fellow citizens want what's best for our country. They may have differences of policy, but at the end of the day, we respect each other and we work together to solve problems.
That very idea seems to be at risk right now. I've lived in and traveled to countries where democracy is not yet born and is struggling, or where democracy has been crushed beneath the heel of an authoritarian. And I think many of us can see parallels today in what's happening in Washington.
I am alarmed by – I am not naive to – the profound risks of Republicans in Congress giving our Article I powers away to the executive; of an executive that is acting in ways that fundamentally violate the norms and traditions of our modern democracy; and courts that, at least at the highest level, have given the president too much power. All of these, in combination, are rooted in a simple problem: we don't trust each other anymore.
Only a third of Americans today say that a majority of Americans can be trusted. Think about that. Two-thirds of the American people say most people can't be trusted. A majority of Americans don't trust their neighbors, and underlying that distrust is a lack of knowledge of who they are and a respect for the commonality that should be at the foundation of a successful democracy.
The most seasoned Democratic senator when I got there was Pat Leahy of Vermont. And in my first time going through President Trump being our president – that particular election – I remember going to Pat and saying, “Wow, this, I mean, this is awful. I've never seen such division, such chaos, such anger. Has this place ever been this divided before?” And Pat, being from Vermont, said, “Ayuh.” And I said, “Pat, when was that?” He goes, “Civil War.” Right.
He goes, that desk right over there is where the caning of Senator Sumner happened, and that desk right over there is where soldiers smashed a desk as they began to take control of the chamber. I could not have imagined back then, that just a few short years later, I would be hurried out of the chamber by men in SWAT gear, moments before an angry mob descended in the exact place we had been just moments before. I'm clear that we are in a moment of profound danger. So please don't think me naive in saying all we need to do is listen to each other – be a little nicer, have a little more dialogue, how about a tea after our sessions? But the alternative is violence.
The foundational point of a democracy is that we are going to resolve problems through dialogue and compromise rather than violence. And when we give up on – when we distrust the possibility of compromise with each other, there is only one other path. So, I remain hopeful that it is possible for us to find that path. And I want to leave you with sort of two broader insights and ideas, and then take your questions.
First is that after the chaos and the violence of the Civil War, which was our nation's most difficult moment, we had a Second Founding. Historian Eric Foner says that the Second Founding was the new Constitution – the new relationship between citizens and the federal government, between states and the federal government – embodied in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
Now, it took a whole century for that Second Founding to be made real – the service and sacrifice of people like Congressman John Lewis and so many others who marched in the Civil Rights movement before those promises embedded into our Constitution were really made fully real. But it's worth thinking for a moment about what it required after the profound divisions of the Civil War to get a new constitutional dispensation – to re-engage a majority of Americans in the project of our nation.
And I think we need to begin conceiving of a Third Founding – of recognizing the fact that we are headed in a very dire direction, because the majority of Americans don't trust each other and don't believe in our institutions. So if Trump wants to be king of the ashes – he wants to violate our Constitution, spread disinformation, destroy our trust in each other further – then we will need to be intent on building, rebuilding, from those ashes.
Like Nehemiah, who led the Jewish people to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem after the tragedy of the Babylonian captivity, there are examples in Scripture that can teach us the power and the possibility. It was unforeseeable in the depths of the Babylonian captivity that the walls of Jerusalem would be rebuilt in record time. But like Nehemiah, we simply need to have the confidence, first, that it's possible. Second, to be mobilized to a common direction and purpose. Third, to simply begin lifting the stones, stone by stone, to repair the breaches and rebuild the walls.
That first step seems ridiculous – the project is too long, the prospect too dim. But if you think about democracy and how foundational it is to protecting all the rights and liberties that have made us possible, it's worth it. And I think the first step on that journey is the risk of listening, listening to the Americans who've lost faith in our democratic process to meet their needs, and listening to each other across our political divide.
We've done this before. After the excesses of the Gilded Age and the terrors of the Industrial Revolution and the profound physical losses of those who were crushed beneath the wheels of the locomotives of the new industrial age, came the progressive reform period, where there were dramatic changes in law and practice. After the excesses of the Nixon era and Watergate came a decade of good government reforms. In the depths of either, you could not have foreseen the next. And so for those who have some understandable anxiety about the moment we're in now, I urge you to remain hopeful. They found a way forward out of those periods of loss and of seeming hopelessness, but step by impossible step, and then stone by stone, they rebuilt and they renewed the guardrails, the systems, the very boundaries that made freedom possible.
It's my sense that this community almost uniquely understands that, too. My understanding is JTS was founded as a midpoint between the poles of orthodoxy and reform traditions. A place of risk – of listening to traditions – of holding on to the traditions of Europe, and of being flexible in the context of the new world, trying to be wholly traditional yet wholly modern. And that out of that came the birth of Conservative Judaism.
That is what I think needs to happen for us to have a Third Founding of our democracy. To hold fast to the core principles of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution – the principles and the statements that are 250 years old and deserve to be sustained – but to deliver an answer that is wholly modern, that takes a look at “what do our people expect in an age of profound disruption,” from income inequality to innovation, from climate change to cell phones, from mass migration to artificial intelligence. This is a period of dizzying, disorienting change in our society, where our people don't trust each other or their government anymore, and the work of renewing that would be hard, hard work.
So how can we start that process? How can we start moving towards rebuilding? During the Reformation – I am a Protestant, forgive me – Luther taught of the principle of the priesthood of all believers. That simple, radical step set in motion a change in Christianity and a change in history. And it simply said it was the obligation of everyone in the congregation to engage with their faith as intensely and devoutly as the priests.
Democracy today and moving forward requires the same of you and me – that we live as if we are its disciples, its congregation, its true believers, its proselytizers. Democracy is and must be, a verb. It is not a dusty principle set under glass. It is not scribbled on parchment in Philadelphia. Democracy either lives in our hearts and motivates our actions and drives us toward a certain blessed insistence on the human dignity of all our fellow citizens – those with whom we agree and those with whom we disagree – or it doesn't. And the time of testing is right in front of us.
So, like the scholars of Hillel, you have to risk your beliefs – to acknowledge the dignity of others and to remind others of who our neighbors are. And we need, in the best traditions of JTS, to reach out to different faiths, to those who believe and worship differently, to those who have no religious belief at all, to people with whom we disagree, to those whose ideas we find curious, unfounded or even abhorrent. I know there are many in this nation – in this room – who've never had the luxury of ignoring those beliefs that are marginal, that are aggressive, that are scary, and for whom this request would weigh heaviest – who've been hurt by a nation that hasn't seen their full dignity. That's why those of us who can turn away from ignorance and division shouldn't. So here's my pledge to you, in closing.
I want to work with you to lift up this burden and opportunity; to genuinely live into a real representative democracy, to really represent the changing electorate – the million Delawareans, who I serve. Not just those who think like me, vote like me, like me, and support me, but the near-majority that don't. If I'm not asking questions and listening, I'm not doing my job.
It's easy to believe that the project of bipartisan action is hopeless, but I've seen Republicans begin to stand up to President Trump. I've seen it in their refusal to do away with the filibuster, in rejecting cuts to SNAP and housing, NIH and the CDC, and in voting – God willing – to release the Epstein files this week. My friend Senator Isakson often said, “We don't have to agree on everything. We just have to agree on one thing.” That doesn't mean papering over our differences. That means listening and respecting each other despite them.
In my legislative work, I try to introduce bills that are pragmatic, and bills that are prophetic. Bills that have a real chance of becoming law and solving problems today, that are always bipartisan; and bills that, frankly, I know have no chance of passing in this Congress, but I'm putting down as a marker of what ought to be in the future.
I wanted to close with one last reflection – forgive me – about the framing that I think we need to hold if we're going to reinvigorate our democracy. And this comes from campaigning all over the country as co-chair of the Harris campaign and listening to people in Delaware. As I'm trying to say, what are the few core principles that, if we actually embrace them, would re-engage those who've lost hope in our system and in their future? Opportunity. Security. Justice. In that order.
If middle Americans no longer believe that working hard will create a better life for them and their children, if they think we only care about, and will dispense and support, opportunity for a few select groups – however decided – we lose their attention and engagement. If we fail to show that we care about security – and that's both financial security, retirement and physical security from chaos, disease, disaster, attacks – folks stop listening to us and change the channel.
What made me a Democrat was moving from opportunity, security, liberty – a Republican formulation – to opportunity, security, justice. Our Pledge of Allegiance ends with “liberty and justice, for all.” And those who are steeped in a Torah understanding of righteousness often are the fiercest advocates for justice. Every major justice movement in American history has had Jewish leadership at its very core. Whether it was the Civil Rights movement, the labor movement, the efforts to deliver clean air and clean water, the efforts to deliver gender equity, from trans rights today to organizing rights for labor more than a century ago, often that sense of justice is what drives us to act.
The point I'm making simply is this, that if we don't understand and recognize in all of our fellow citizens the fundamental human drive for opportunity for yourself and your family, and for security for yourself and your family, we don't get to have a conversation about justice. And how we implement possible solutions to opportunity and security has to be done through a lens of justice, or it will be not just unjust, but unsustainable, ineffective – ultimately a horror.
So, these ideas, which I suggest to you today, are just the first few stones in rebuilding those walls of dignity and democracy, of conversation and hopefully conversion – how we figure out the beginnings of the structures of the third dispensation in our society that might sustain our democracy another 250 years.
In just a few days, the new moon begins the month of Kislev – the celebration of the lights of Hanukkah. And I understand that Beit Shammai started with eight candles and took one away each night as the lights of Hanukkah dwindled. But Beit Hillel said, “add a candle each night, because the candles are not the reflection of an event, but the celebration of a miracle – of wonder, of awe, and of hope.”
One flame that lights others against all odds, spreading an imaginable, unexpected, unimaginable light in the darkness – like Nehemiah who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, like the abolitionists who reframed our Constitution on the wreckage of a civil war, like Bernard Segal and many other leaders of the Civil Rights movement in our nation who made that Second Founding real. They changed our world and moved us forward one stone at a time, and we must do the same – to cultivate hope, to pursue awe, and to share them with our fellow citizens.
Fear of democracy, fear of the loss of democracy in this moment, can be suffocating, but we can't let it extinguish our flames. Each time we ask a question, listen to our differences, risk a challenge to our core beliefs, we shine just a little bit brighter, and we start that desperate, earnest, necessary project of building our democracy stronger. Thank you.