The United States Dissolved after 85 Years and Was Saved by One Man. Who Will Be Israel’s Lincoln?

Eighty-five years — that number has an eerie echo in the history of nations. The United States, founded in 1776, lasted only eighty-five years before the secession of the Southern states in 1861 tore the Union apart. The great democratic experiment appeared to have failed. Two rival nations emerged, each claiming divine sanction.

Lincoln and the Indivisible Idea

America’s founding miracle — a republic born from rebellion against empire — carried within it a fatal contradiction: slavery. By 1860, it had metastasized into two incompatible visions of freedom. When South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter, the Union collapsed like a bridge with one rotten beam. The Confederacy triumphed early under Robert E. Lee, while the Union floundered under hesitant generals. The outcome rested on one man’s moral will: Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln was no warrior king. He was a melancholy lawyer, steeped in Scripture and Shakespeare, yet forged from moral steel. He saw the Union not as a contract to dissolve but as a covenant to preserve. His Emancipation Proclamation gave the war meaning beyond geography — transforming it into a crusade for human freedom. When Lee surrendered at Appomattox in 1865, the republic was reborn. Lincoln fell to an assassin’s bullet, but his victory proved that democracy could survive its own contradictions.

Standing before the Lincoln Memorial, one feels that lesson carved in stone: endurance redeems nations.

Israel’s Crossroads

Israel now approaches a similar reckoning. Founded in 1948, it will reach its own eighty-fifth year within a decade. Like America before its Civil War, Israel is a miracle under siege — surrounded by enemies and strained by internal division. Both nations were built on revolutionary ideals, both doubted by the world. Just as monarchs once mocked America’s democracy as doomed, many in the Arab and Islamic world see Israel as a transient anomaly.

Lincoln understood that nations endure not through might but through meaning. The Union survived because it fought for moral purpose, not just survival. Israel’s strength, too, must rest on moral conviction — that a Jewish and democratic state in the Holy Land is not an accident of history but a moral necessity.

Division from Within

America’s civil war began long before the cannons fired — in the corrosion of trust and shared story. Israel faces its own internal rifts: religious versus secular, left versus right, Ashkenazi versus Mizrahi, soldiers versus the Hareidi who mostly refuse service. These divisions could achieve what no enemy army ever has — unraveling the national idea from within.

The Civil War was fought over freedom’s meaning; Israel’s struggle is over identity’s. Can it remain both Jewish and democratic? Can unity survive without uniformity? Lincoln proved that moral clarity can heal even a broken nation. Israel must rediscover that clarity now.

Leadership and the Test of Year Eighty-Five

History often turns on one person’s moral imagination. Lincoln’s genius was endurance — the refusal to despair. Israel needs such leadership: vision rooted in purpose, strength tempered by humility, unity without coercion.

As Israel nears eighty-five, the warning is clear. When America reached that age, it was wealthy and complacent — and nearly died. Civilizations imagine themselves permanent just before they fracture. Israel faces war on multiple fronts, from Hamas and Hezbollah to global campaigns of delegitimization. Yet its gravest danger may be internal — forgetting why it exists.

The Lesson of Endurance

During America’s Civil War, the world watched gleefully as the “bubble of democracy” seemed to burst. Only after Lincoln’s triumph did they believe democracy could endure. Israel faces the same scrutiny today; every flaw magnified as proof of its fragility. But the doubters were wrong in 1861 — and can be wrong again.

Lincoln’s immortal words — “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” — were not prophecy but command. Israel’s equivalent must be: that the nation of the Jewish people, sovereign in its land, committed to democracy and moral courage, shall not perish from the Middle East.

The United States survived its eighty-fifth year because one man refused to let freedom die. The question for Israel is simple — who will be its Lincoln?

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, widely known as “America’s Rabbi,” is the international bestselling author of 36 books and winner of The Times of London’s “Preacher of the Year.” Follow him on Instagram and X @RabbiShmuley.