by Bruce Feiler
“So is America weaker because of that muting?”
“I think if we lose our religious underpinnings, we lose our compass. And not just because of abortion and same-sex marriage. That includes decency, how we view the poor, helping those in need. The biblical overtones in all those are significant, and if we lose that, we lose something about our culture.”
One irony of this decline in biblical influence is that it forces combatants like Saperstein and Sekulow into a shared allegiance. They may disagree about the degree of religion’s involvement in contemporary American life, but they absolutely agree that the Bible forms one of the main threads of the country’s DNA. And I couldn’t help wondering if that alliance might provide an opening to crack the cultural gridlock the country faces. As I had found, one biblical story has served as a touchstone for all Americans. Could understanding the role of Moses in American history illuminate the changing role of faith in our national life? Could Moses restore some of the civility that both left and right say is missing?
Could all those marble Moseses scattered around the nation’s capital remind us of our shared heritage of freedom and law?
“I think so,” said Jay Sekulow. “Christians, by nature, accept the biblical story of Moses with no hesitation. It’s a political story. Jesus, on the other hand, was above politics. His was a kingdom not of this world. Plus, if you look at the way Moses approached issues and leadership, there’s a great example there. Moses never presumed he had the complete allegiance of the people. He operated under the assumption that you had to maintain people’s allegiance.”
David Saperstein said: “I believe he can, because every generation is a new generation. So every generation is reinspired by the narrative. Every generation feels that if we march down the right path, we can really make it to the Promised Land. The difference now is that our generation faces threats so lethal to our planet that they can truly alter human history. This is the generation that has to make it to the Promised Land. This generation truly needs a Moses.”
BEYOND HIS ROLE in politics, Moses also plays a part in what may be the country’s larger conversation: the path to personal fulfillment. During our visit to Boston, I slipped out one morning to meet one of the most famous Jews in the city (after Kevin Youkilis, the Red Sox first baseman, and Bob Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots). Harold Kushner was a little-known suburban rabbi in 1981 when he wrote a book inspired by the loss of his first child, Aaron, from a rare genetic disease that produces premature aging. When Bad Things Happen to Good People became one of the most influential books of popular theology in American history, selling more than four million copies and making the soft-spoken Brooklyn native America’s rabbi-in-chief.
Kushner went on to write numerous pastoral books, and one of them, Overcoming Life’s Disappointments, published in 2006, uses the story of Moses to explore how individuals can cope with personal crisis. “What was the wisdom of Moses that enabled him to carry on day after day, year after year, as leader of a people who exasperated him more often than they appreciated him?” Kushner asked. “It was a recognition of the frailty of the human character, the occasional unreliability of even the best of people, and the sometimes unexpected goodness of even the worst of them.”
Moses has long been a pivotal figure in the mixing of psychology and religion, beginning with Sigmund Freud. The founder of psychotherapy had a lifelong fascination with Moses, and in his final book, Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939, he portrays the leader of the Israelites as the father figure of Western thought. Freud contended that Moses was a renegade Egyptian priest, who led a rebellious group of monotheists into the desert. The former slaves could not handle the burdens of a new faith and murdered Moses, then repressed their crime. The memory of the murder returned over time in the form of respect for morality, ethics, and other “intellectual” ways of relating to God. This interest in ideas over idolatry and sensuality became the centerpiece of Western civilization.
In 1946, Joshua Liebman, another Boston rabbi, published one of the first pop-psychology mega-sellers, Peace of Mind, which argued that spiritual health was related to psychological maturity. Of Americans’ obsession with material success, he wrote, “We are still like the Children of Israel dancing around the golden calf. Psychology today can aid religion in giving many people insights into the reason for this neurotic idolatry.” In the 1990s, Promise Keepers, the evangelical men’s movement, trumpeted Moses as the ultimate role model, a “man’s man [who] was God’s man.” “For Moses, the call was to lead a nation,” wrote one of the group’s leaders, “whereas your call and mine will likely be less visible. But make no mistake, we are leaders!” Even the 1998 animated film Prince of Egypt presents Moses as a confident youth showered with love and his rival, Rameses, as starved for fatherly attention. “All he cares about is your approval,” Moses tells the pharaoh about Rameses.
Is this what Moses has become in America—a self-help guru?
“In many ways, yes,” Rabbi Kushner said. “There is still a population of immigrants for whom America represents leaving Egypt and coming to a better life. And there are minorities—blacks, Asians, Hispanics—who are teaching us what it means to be American today. But there is a phenomenon going on in this country. For the first time there’s a generation of Americans growing up who cannot look forward confidently to being more successful than their parents. The American promise always was: You can outdo your parents. But we have a generation of parents—my generation—who are so well educated and so successful they leave very little room for their children to outstrip them. And I think that’s a psychological need, especially for males. So what a lot of people are doing is redefining success, saying things like, ‘Okay, I’m not going to make as much money as my father made, but I’m going to have my priorities straight. I’m not going to be so busy I can’t watch my kids at a dance recital.’ I think they’re redefining the Promised Land. And I think Moses becomes the one who shows the way.”
“How?”
“He sets an example. As you know, the biblical name for Egypt means ‘the confining place.’ So both in geographical terms and individual terms, Moses resonates with the idea of leaving the confinement of Egypt and heading out into the desert. You’ve left the confinement of parents, upbringing, hometown, expectations. You may even have made it across the desert. But you’re not going to find the Promised Land you envisioned when you started out. How do you define fulfillment? Come up with your own sense of promised land. That’s what Moses calls people to do.
“I had occasion just a few weeks ago to speak to a woman who’s recently gone through a divorce,” Rabbi Kushner continued. “She was very uncomfortable about facing Passover for the first time without the husband that she had shared the occasion with for years. I said, ‘See it as a Passover story—that you’re leaving a belittling, confining situation. It’s scary to go out into the desert, but the desert is something you have to get through to find the reward at the other end.’ There’s something universal, and something specifically American, about that.”
“There’s a risk in what you’re saying,” I mentioned. “The risk is that you become so involved with your own personal drama that you forget that caring for others is a central part of the story.”
“Perhaps, but look at what Moses does when he realizes that everyone else is going to the Promised Land and he isn’t,” Rabbi Kushner said. “He doesn’t go off and sulk. He doesn’t go somewhere for counseling. He gathers the people together on Mount Nebo and prepares them for what they will face in the future. In the Jewish tradition, we speak of him as Moses Rabeinu—Moses, Our Teacher—not Moses, Our Political Leader; not Moses, Who Freed the Slaves. Moses, Our Teacher. He dedicates himself to getting the people to embrace the ideas that they have to live by when he’s no longer around to remind them.
“The example I gave before,” he said. “The no-longer-young man who says, ‘Okay, I’ll never earn the amount of money my father earned.’ Where do
es he find his fulfillment? In being a better father. In being a better husband. That’s not narcissism. That’s not saying, ‘I’m going to spend my sixteen hours of wakefulness figuring out how I can make myself a success.’ That is defining success as caring for other people.”
“How much of Moses’ message on Mount Nebo is ‘Take care of your own house?’” I asked, “and how much is ‘Take care of your neighbor’s house, too?’”
“Ninety percent is take care of the house of your neighbor—maybe even more than ninety. The whole idea is that this is a communal enterprise. It is the biblical ethos that says, ‘You can’t make it through this world alone. You can only make it in community.’”
“So when I sit down with my daughters at future seders, what should I tell them is the story’s central lesson?”
“That in every generation, there are forces, individual and collective, that try to inhibit our human fulfillment. And in every generation, God acts as the impulse to strike out for freedom, even though the path to freedom is not always easy. But in the end, the burden is on each of us to finish the journey. When we were slaves, God had to break our chains. We couldn’t do it for ourselves. In fact it took an outsider like Moses to be a catalyst, as it took an outsider like Martin Luther King, Jr., to lead the civil rights movement. But once we’re no longer slaves, we can’t say to God, ‘Fix this for us.’ Now we have the opportunity and obligation to fix it for ourselves.”
I’VE BEEN TO a lot of seders in my life. When I was growing up, my parents used a popular hagadah with contemporary watercolors, abundant songs, and readings from Anne Frank, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and others. Published in 1974, the book was unabashedly liberal; it says of the plagues, “Our triumph is diminished by the slaughter of the foe.” In Jerusalem one year, I attended a more traditional seder where they read every prayer and followed every dictate and the evening didn’t end until 2 A.M. That night answered a question I’d had since childhood: In Jerusalem they also end the service by saying, “Next year in Jerusalem.”
The start of Passover brings the two nights a year when my father-in-law, Alan, an attorney and elder sage around Boston, is in charge of a portion of his home, which is otherwise dominated by women. In keeping with contemporary Jewish custom (and in violation of international copyright laws) he has gone through numerous hagadahs and pieced together his own service. The word seder means “order,” and the Passover service follows a strict order of rituals re-creating the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. These include drinking four glasses of wine, which recall the four acts of redemption God performs for the Israelites; dunking greens, which represent the lowly Israelites, into salt water, which symbolizes their tears; and breaking matzoh, bread baked without leavening because the Israelites were hurrying to flee Egypt. Other observances include tasting bitter herbs, representing the harshness of slavery; eating haroset, a mixture of apples, nuts, cinnamon, and wine, symbolizing the mortar used to build the pharaoh’s cities; and opening the door for Elijah, the prophet who is believed to herald the Messiah.
At the heart of the seder is a deeper message: History is not prerecorded. It is something we write ourselves. As Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Britain, put it: “We are not condemned endlessly to repeat the tragedies of the past. Not everywhere is an Egypt; not all politics are the exploitation of the many by the few; life is something other and more gracious than the pursuit of power.” The seder, which Sacks calls the “oldest surviving ritual in the Western world,” calls on participants to do more than retell the story of the Exodus; they are to relive it themselves: “In every generation, a person should look upon himself as if he personally had come out of Egypt.” Passover is not a commemoration, it’s a call to action. Participants are summoned to become cocreators of a better world.
In America, Passover has long maintained a sacred time for Jews, in part because of its deep parallels with American history. In 1997 Rabbi David Geffen, an Atlanta native whose grandfather was asked in 1935 to guarantee that the secret formula for Coca-Cola was kosher (he insisted they remove glycerin made from beef tallow), compiled a survey of Passover traditions in the United States. As early as 1889, on the centennial of George Washington’s inauguration, anyone who bought ten pounds of matzoh got a free picture of the first president. The chief rabbi of New York composed a special prayer for Washington that year to be read in all American synagogues, many of which decorated their buildings with red, white, and blue bunting.
American wars, with their language of defending freedom, have provided many poignant settings for seders. During the Civil War, the Union Army actually provided matzoh to some regiments. Joseph Joel, a soldier from Cleveland, hosted a seder—which included lamb and a scavenged bitter herb—for twenty comrades in West Virginia in 1862. “The ceremonies were passing off very nicely,” he recalled, until the time came to eat the mysterious “weed.” “Each ate his portion, when horrors! The herb was very bitter and fiery like cayenne pepper, and excited our thirst to such a degree that we forgot the law authorizing us to drink only four cups and the consequence was that we drank up all the cider. Those that drank more freely became excited and one thought he was Moses, another Aaron and one had the audacity to call himself a pharaoh.”
“In every generation one should regard oneself as though he had come out of Egypt.” The large letter “bet” contains the word “bad” and images of ancient Egypt at top and Nazi concentration camps at bottom. Drawing by Yosef Dov Sheinson from A Survivors’ Haggadah. (Courtesy of The Jewish Publication Society)
In 1946, the Third United States Army hosted two “Survivors’ Seders” in Munich for four hundred people liberated from Nazi concentration camps. The front cover of their special hagadah declared, “We were slaves to Hitler in Germany,” and the introductory essay called Eisenhower “Moses the Liberator.” “They spoke of Pharaoh and the Egyptian bondage,” the text observed. “They spoke of slave labor and torture cities of Pithom and Rameses…. [But] Pharaoh and Egypt gave way to Hitler and Germany. Pithom and Rameses faded beneath fresh memories of Buchenwald and Dachau.”
During the civil rights movement, many American Jews paid tribute to blacks in their seders. In 1961, President and Mrs. Kennedy attended the seder of secretary of labor Arthur Goldberg and his wife, Dorothy, whose Passover meals for Washington’s elite were famous. The margin notes in Dorothy’s hagadah reminded her to mention that “one of the best descriptions of the exodus is the great Negro spiritual ‘Go Down, Moses,’” a clear paean to the marches going on across the South. By the 1970s, presidential seder attending had become more challenging. President Jimmy Carter and his wife attended a seder at the home of advisor Stuart Eizenstat. When the time came for Eizenstat to open the front door for Elijah, a Secret Service agent jumped up and stopped the two-thousand-year-old ritual, declaring it a security risk. Back and forth the two sides went, Eizenstat recalled, until “I was able to persuade him to permit me to open our rear door—the only time Elijah has been relegated to the back door in my home.” In 2009, Barack Obama hosted the first-ever seder in the White House, a milestone merging of African-American culture, Jewish ritual, and the American story.
From seder wineglasses in the 1920s that were molded like Lady Liberty to honor immigration to “matzohs of unity” for Soviet Jews during the Cold War to prayers against genocide in Darfur in 2008, Passover has always been a time for American Jews to renew the bond between America’s struggles to fulfill its own ideals of liberty and the Israelites’ flight of freedom. The holiday has thrived in settings like war zones and Washington precisely because it is so universal to the American experience. The Passover story is America’s story.
At the start of my journey, I knew I would find the themes of Moses’ life in key moments in America’s past. But I did not anticipate the depth, breadth, and intensity of America’s attachment to the Exodus. I hadn’t known that the Pilgrims were so steeped in Mosaic language or that Americans took the words of Moses on a cracked state bell
and turned it into an international symbol of liberty. I hadn’t known that Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams proposed Moses for America’s seal, or that Washington was eulogized as the American Moses. I hadn’t realized how deeply Moses motivated the slaves or how richly he echoed at Gettysburg. I was surprised how directly he shaped the Statue of Liberty and how vividly he colored popular culture, from Cecil B. DeMille to Superman. And I was inspired that nearly every defining American leader—from Washington to Lincoln to Reagan—invoked the Moses story in times of crisis. From Christopher Columbus to Martin Luther King, from the age of Gutenberg to the era of Google, Moses helped shape the American dream. He is our true founding father. His face belongs on Mount Rushmore.
At the beginning, I hadn’t even thought to compare the influence of Moses in America with that of Jesus. The United States at its founding was essentially 100 percent Christian and is 80 percent Christian today. Of course, Jesus was influential in American life. But I found a real difference in their public roles. As important as Jesus was to the faith and private lives of Americans, he seemed to have had far less influence than Moses during the great transformations of American history. The themes of Jesus’ life—love, charity, the alleviation of poverty, forgiveness, spreading the good news of salvation, developing the kingdom of God—certainly echo throughout American history, but they would not make many lists of the defining characteristics of Americans. By contrast, the themes of Moses’ life—social mobility, reluctance to lead, standing up to authority, forming a persecuted people into a nation of laws, dreaming of reaching a promised land, coping with the disappointment of falling short—would be at home on any short list of America’s defining traits.
