Born in 1899 and raised in the heart of Orthodox Jerusalem, Samuel K. Mirsky came as a young man under the influence of Abraham Isaac Kook and his disciples, who sought to infuse a number of modern ideas, including Zionism, into Orthodox Judaism. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1926, and spent the rest of his career as a teacher at what was soon to become Yeshiva University. Deeply committed to religious Zionism, the Hebrew language, Jewish education, and the synthesis of modern and traditional scholarship, Mirsky published hundreds of articles, founded and edited four journals, and produced scholarly editions of classical rabbinic works. He also harbored a unique vision of what it meant to be a Jew in America, as his grandson, Yehudah Mirsky, writes. (Free registration may be required.)
In 1939, deeply moved by the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution, [Mirsky] published in the pages of [the Hebrew journal] Hadoar a paean to the Constitution, noting its quasi-religious character and its leavening of hope with a healthy skepticism about human limitations. He added that the Constitution must be internalized by each individual, and that this is all the more important amid the gathering shadows of what he called “the Leviathan of the states.”
A month later he wrote that democracy is not only a procedure but a spirit, and is inseparable from Torah. . . . Just as the Torah educates to trust, in an ultimate sense, none but God, so too democracy teaches the illegitimacy of any human tyranny, and that the state exists to serve human dignity. God’s universal fatherhood is the ultimate source of fraternity. The social contract is no more a fiction than is the covenant at Mount Sinai. He concludes: “The foundation of Jewish religion and the foundation of social and political democracy are one and the same.”
How does this celebration of America square with his Zionism? In 1953 he put forth . . . a suggested fusion: “Democracy from America, and Torah from Zion.” . . . The democracy to be learned from America, when joined to the spirituality of Torah, would achieve its fullest synthesis, he hoped, in the longed-for realization of mishpat ivri [a modern legal system that incorporated elements of halakhic jurisprudence] in the new state of Israel.
[Elsewhere, he wrote that] for Israel to attract Diaspora Jews it would have to undertake the renewal not only of Jewish peoplehood but of Judaism: “If no new heavens will be created along with the new world, and there be no soul to the people of the state and spirit for its inhabitants, there will, God forbid, be no Jewish unity.”
Read more on The Paths of Daniel: https://www.academia.edu/32223263/The_New_Heavens_in_the_New_World_The_Religious_Hebraism_of_Samuel_K._Mirsky_in_Adam_S._Ferziger_ed._The_Paths_of_Daniel_Studies_in_Judaism_and_Jewish_Culture_in_Honor_of_Rabbi_Professor_Daniel_Sperber_Ramat_Gan_Bar-Ilan_University_Press_2017_pp._101-128