America First - Or America Only
JD Vance and "The Poor of Your City"
It was obvious from his body language that JD Vance was uncomfortable listening to Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon at the National Cathedral.
But he was much more comfortable discussing his faith with Sean Hannity. In particular, he said:
There’s this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.
From a Jewish perspective, Vance is articulating the concept of “aniyei irkha kodmim - the needy of your city come first.” As, for example, articulated in Shulchan Aruch (15th century code of Jewish Law), there is indeed a sense of proximity-based priority when it comes to charity:
Helping one's grown-up sons or daughters in need when he is not obliged to—in order to give his sons an opportunity of studying the Law, or to keep his daughters in the right path—and presenting gifts to one's father in need—all this comes under the general head of (tzedakah) charity. In fact, such charity is to be preferred to other forms. Not only a father or child, but any relative should be given preference to a stranger; a brother of one's father, to a brother of one's mother; the poor of his own house to the poor of the city at large; the poor of his own city to the poor of other cities; and the poor that dwell in the Holy Land to those that dwell in other lands.
Many Christian theologians took issue with Vance, arguing from passages such as the parable of the Good Samaritan that:
Jesus’ fundamental message is that everyone is your neighbor, and that it is not about helping just your family or those closest to you. It’s specifically about helping those who seem different, foreign, other. They are all our ‘neighbors.’
“But Jesus’ deeper point can only be understood from the point of view of the beaten man: Our ultimate salvation depends, as it did for that man, upon those whom we often consider to be the ‘stranger.’”
Vance defended his perspective on X:
“Just google “ordo amoris.” Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?"
Writing for
, Rabbi Daniel Feldman offered a charitable reading of “America First” based on the Jewish legal principle “aniyei irkha kodmim - the needy of your city come first.” As he put it, it all depends on how we define “America.”Rabbi Feldman cited the 20th century Rabbi Shimon Shkop who taught a novel interpretation of the famous teaching of Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?”
As human beings, concern for oneself is understandably the starting point. However, the measure of a person is in how expansively one chooses to define the concept of “myself:” me the individual; me and my family; me and my city; me and the Jewish people; me and the world. Thus, the phrase is interpreted: If I am not for myself, who will be?; but if I define “myself” as only me the individual, then I am, in actuality, very small…All of us, necessarily and responsibly, tend to our own needs. Nonetheless, we have agency to define what is considered “our own needs”; and there, true greatness lies.
In Judaism Is About Love, Rabbi Shai Held also gets at the sense that our special relationships are part of our core identities - they are an essential part of the answer to Hillel’s question, “what am I?”
All of this raises the question of what it means to be a self in the first place. Some people (and some philosophers) tend to picture people as separate (or at least separable) individual units: I am a totally independent self and then I decide whether or not to enter into relationships with others. But that is not how human beings actually develop, grow, and interact in the world. As an infant, I don’t decide to enter into relationships with my caretakers - I am connected to and dependent on them long before I make a choice, or even know what a choice is. More generally, and throughout the course of life, who I am as a person is irreducibly shaped by the the people I care about and who care for me, by the people whose well-being I feel responsible for and who feel responsible for mine. I am my parent’s child and my child’s parent; I am not, and do not have, a self apart from those relationships and countless others….to be partial to loved ones, then, is not selfishness; it is just part of what it means to be a self at all. (142-143)
Held agrees with Vance that those closest to us should come first. Held warns:
The consequence of claiming to love all of humanity (or all of creation) equally is that we will end up loving no one at all…If we don’t allow people to care about someone in particular, they will likely end up caring about no one at all. (143)
That sounds like Vance’s allegation that some people hate fellow Americans but profess to love other people somewhere far away. But Held also makes it clear that the ultimate point here is to expand, not limit, our circles of concern:
For Jewish ethics, the path to universal love is through partiality rather than around it. The goal of moral growth, in other words, should be to expand upon rather than replace the narrower loyalties that come more naturally to us….We may - from Jewish law it seems we must - show preference to the near and dear, but we are forbidden from stopping there. (144, 146)
I think this outward motion is what Vance is missing.
So much of Trumpism seems based on protection from (perceived) outside threats, whether they are economic, political, social, cultural, whatever. So it’s “us,” defined strictly narrowly v. “them,” whomever them is. It’s all about retreating behind different kinds of walls, physical or otherwise, and fighting against “them” who are trying to take something from “us.”
Contrary to Rabbi Feldman’s charitable reading, the threats to foreign aid and international alliances demonstrate that America First is really a way of saying America Only. And that even some Americans are clearly more “American” than others.
When Vance cites ordo amoris/“the needy of your city come first,” he means pulling back from others. But the Jewish take on that idea seems to be the opposite - it is giving us a starting point, a foundation to build upon as we expand our reach outward.
Furthermore, we aren’t just extending charity or philanthropy to more and more people outside ourselves - we are actually gradually expanding ourselves. This is what America First/America Only is really reacting against.
My sense is that Trumpism is inherently opposed to any sort of self-expansion. Trumpism would rather fight to preserve a comfortable and familiar narrower self-definition than live with the vulnerability that comes from constantly reaching outward towards others and incorporating their perspectives and concerns into our own.
Vance was not upset with that sermon because Bishop Budde asked him to reconsider a policy position; she did not. He was uncomfortable because she asked him to show compassion to those he had already defined as people on the outside. He was uncomfortable because cultivating that compassion would, by definition, challenge his own self-identity.