16 million Jews inhabit this world, nearly 7 million in Israel and America. In Israel, Jews form the majority, woven into the state itself. In America, Jewish identity remains precarious; as a diaspora people, our footing is never fixed, and history shows how quickly the ground can shift. To understand the forces shaping that reality, this article interprets American history through Jewish mysticism. I treat history not just as events among real people but as conflicts between symbolic, collective “Beings.”

Kabbalah teaches that we experience the world on more than one level. The physical, measurable world is called Asiyah, the realm of action. That’s where history happens: dates, laws, wars, and migrations. Above Asiyah lies Yetzirah, the world of formation, where emotions, symbols, and shared meanings take shape. If Asiyah tells us what happened, Yetzirah helps explain the stories nations tell, the myths they embody, the emotional identities that outlast any single election.

I’m using that second layer, Yetzirah, as a tool to understand American history. Each American culture has its own personality, values, and emotional logic. Colin Woodard’s American Nations maps these cultures through history; Kabbalah gives us a vocabulary for their symbolic, collective Beings. Think of what follows as American history interpreted through both layers: Asiyah for individual actors and Yetzirah for the collective Beings they unconsciously serve.

America began not as one unified people but as a collision of six founding cultures: Tidewater, Yankeedom, the Deep South, Appalachia, New Netherland, and the Midlands, each with its own Being in Yetzirah. “The Declaration........

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