Daniel Gordis is right to cite the American tradition of optimism as a key to understanding the difference in mentality, and what he calls attitudes of “resilience,” between America’s liberal Jewish denominations, on the one hand, and Orthodox and Israeli Jews, on the other. He is right, too, to identify the quintessentially American “assumption that nature’s providence would always satisfy American desires, coupled to a relative absence of concern about security,” which is, as he notes, “precisely the opposite sensibility of that which is formed by traditional Jewish devotion.”