by Bruce Feiler
“The Modern Moses.” Cartoon depicting Moses dressed as Uncle Sam, splitting the Atlantic Ocean and allowing Jewish immigrants to cross to the new Promised Land. Drawn by Frederick Burr Opper and Joseph Keppler. Puck, December 1881. (Courtesy of The Library of Congress)
Up to this point, Uncle Sam had not been a particularly religious figure. He is thought to have earned his name when “Uncle” Samuel Wilson, a meat packer in upstate New York in the 1810s, teased that the initials “U.S.” on barrels of pork bound for American troops referred to him. The joke stuck. By the Civil War, Uncle Sam was being depicted as an old man with white hair and a goatee. He was often shown as a male companion to the Statue of Liberty. And like her, Uncle Sam emerged during the immigration debates in the late nineteenth century as a kind of surrogate Moses. As Emma Lazarus did with Liberty, the editors of Puck imagined Uncle Sam addressing Jewish immigrants.
I don’t invite you Jews to come here because you are Jews, but because I want a lot of intelligent and ill-used people to become citizens of my glorious Republic. As my ancient predecessor, Moses, did with the Red Sea, I do with the Atlantic Ocean. The waters are divided, and you can safely pass through them to the land of liberty, and leave oppression, persecution, and brutality behind you.
In the tradition of nearly every great American icon—the seal, the flag, the Liberty Bell—Uncle Sam now took a turn as Moses. The Hebrew prophet had become so ingrained in the country’s consciousness that he served as a kind of American Hamlet, a role that every actor, in order to be considered great, had to play at least once.
Jews, too, began converting Moses into a pillar of American identity, a kind of supra–Founding Father. As early as Thanksgiving 1852, a Philadelphia rabbi preached that “with the spangled banner of liberty in one hand, and the law of [Sinai] in the other, we will continue as faithful citizens in this glorious republic.” A Cincinnati rabbi created a bookplate that portrays Moses on the left and George Washington on the right, with the American flag and the Ten Commandments in front. The founder of Reform Judaism, Isaac Mayer Wise, said at the centennial of Washington’s inauguration in 1889 that Moses and Washington are “the two poles on the axis about which the history of mankind revolves.”
I asked Jonathan Sarna why Jews worked so hard to show that Moses went hand in hand with America.
“Jews’ greatest fear was that America would become a Christian nation,” he said. “That there would be a Christian amendment to the Constitution. And that that would undermine everything that made America special for Jews. By emphasizing Moses, they showed that Jews belonged here as well. Jews were fortunate that so many American Protestants were Old Testament–focused.”
The movement among American Jews to stress their kinship with Moses had another benefit. Liberal Jews wanted to return to the Mosaic roots of Judaism and downplay the myriad of laws governing food, dress, and prayer that rabbis had imposed over the years. Judaism should scrap these archaic ideas and modernize, they said. The back-to-Moses movement went so far that some prominent left-wing Jews actually proposed changing the name of Judaism to Mosaism, in part because Moses was perceived to be a more appealing figure to Christians.
“Many Jews had a sense that the words Jew and Judaism had negative connotations,” Sarna explained. “The hope was that if you could come up with a more positive term, you would transform the way people would view Jews. I think that Jews also saw that Christians emphasized Jesus, and Moses gave Jews an opportunity to point to a similar figure in Judaism, who of course precedes Jesus, was a human figure, and didn’t claim to be the son of God.”
Exactly when the United States was becoming more religiously diverse, Jews subtly redefined what it meant to be American. Instead of a Christian country, they insisted, America was a biblical country. Moses played a key role because he resonated with Protestants and Jews. Jews belonged in the United States, they said, because America and Judaism had the same source: Moses.
In his book American Judaism, Sarna discusses how Jews used the holidays of Thanksgiving and Passover to stress that they had played starring roles in the defining moments of American history. The 1922 Reform hagadah, the book used during the Passover service, calls for an American flag to be placed on the seder table. “Why?” a child is instructed to ask. “America is the child of the Old Testament,” the leader of the service is told to answer.
It is the “Moses and Prophets” of modern times. The Pilgrim Fathers landed here inspired by Israel’s wandering to go out even to the wilderness and worship God. The immortal Declaration of Independence is the Great Charter announced before Pharaoh by Moses. The Abolitionists are the product of the Bible…. The Fourth of July is the American Passover. Thanksgiving is the American Feast of the Tabernacles.
Several hagadahs even called for Jews to end their seders by singing “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee).” Fitting into America had become such a priority that American Jews not only imported Moses into American celebrations, like Thanksgiving, they exported America back into Moses’ chief celebration, Passover.
Sarna said that Jewish immigrants likely did not know they were continuing a pattern of connecting Moses and America that had been occurring since the 1600s. Still, I asked him how seventeenth-century Protestant separatists, eighteenth-century deist revolutionaries, nineteenth-century enslaved Africans, and twentieth-century Jews could all possibly have the same hero.
“What’s fascinating about America,” he said, “is that it’s much more formless than Europe, therefore its imagery is much more open to be changed and molded. Just look at what Jews contribute to American culture. You’ve got the melting pot, that’s a Jewish idea. You’ve got cultural pluralism, that’s a Jewish idea. Like other groups before them, Jews are able to take an existing culture and help shape it in their image.
“On the other side,” he continued, “the Bible is also formless. The lessons of these stories can be applied in different ways. So Moses became like a Rorschach test. He provided a common text for Americans. Today when we don’t have a common text, it’s very hard for people to realize that once upon a time we did.”
“With Moses so interwoven with the American story by 1900, was his presence a reason America was so hospitable to Jews?” I asked.
He thought for a second. “The problem with that theory is that we certainly know that even early Americans who accepted the biblical story saw Jews as interlopers. The Puritans couldn’t be more Hebraic, but they didn’t make it particularly comfortable for Jews who arrived here. Precisely because they saw themselves as God’s New Israel they were quite ambivalent about Jews who made a similar claim.”
“But if I were going to press this case,” I said, “I’d point out that whether they liked Jews or not, they still laid the foundation that America was built on the Moses story. And once you do that, once Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson say Moses should be on the Great Seal, once the slaves start singing ‘Go Down, Moses,’ you begin to say that standing up to authority, leading people out of oppression into an unknown world, then rebinding them under universal law, are central values of our country. And once that happens, the Jews can come along hundreds of years later and say: ‘Hey, that’s our story! We belong here, too.’ Moses helps force the country into being pluralist whether that had been the Puritans’ original intent or not.”
“I agree,” Sarna said. “You had plenty of places in Europe where the Bible was restricted to the elite. In America, the Bible was made available to everyone. Once that happens, the biblical story becomes much more important here than elsewhere. And it’s not just the Bible; a lot does focus on Moses. Because of his presence, it becomes much easier for Jews to link themselves to America. And it becomes easier for America to see itself as a pluralistic nation, something that seemed impossible almost everywhere else in the world.”
A FEW DAYS after I spoke with Professor Sarna, Jews around the world celebrated Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which Leviticus 23 refers to as a day of
“self-denial,” designed to achieve expiation before God. My wife and I attended services at Brooklyn Heights Synagogue, which we had recently joined. The sanctuary cannot handle the crowds on the holiest day of the year, so services are held a few blocks from our home at Plymouth Church, the mammoth facility that was built for Henry Ward Beecher in 1850.
The exterior of the building—which was the largest in Brooklyn in Beecher’s day—is lined with red brick. A garden features a statue of Beecher and a bas-relief of Abraham Lincoln, who visited in February 1860. Both works are by Gutzon Borglum, who later sculpted Mount Rushmore. Inside, the Yankee-white sanctuary was designed to enhance Beecher’s dramatic style. Like a theater, it has curved pews, and no center aisle, and the proscenium pulpit is surrounded on three sides—church in the round. Though the windows were undecorated in Beecher’s time, today they are filled with majestic stained glass that tells the history of American religion. Three focus on the Pilgrims: John Robinson launching the Speedwell, the signing of the Mayflower Compact, and William Brewster landing on Plymouth Rock. The First Great Awakening is honored with Jonathan Edwards, the Second with Lyman Beecher. Harriet appears with her sister Catharine in a tribute to women’s education. Abraham Lincoln peers down on the pulpit, gripping the Emancipation Proclamation. I whispered to my wife, “It’s the story of my book!”
When the time came for the Torah to be read, the rabbi called the half-dozen new members to the pulpit. He handed me one of the scrolls and asked me to carry it to the back of the sanctuary, then pass it on. I leaned it against my shoulder, and the velour cover spread warmth across my chest. The rabbi chanted in Hebrew, “This is the Torah that Moses gave to the people of Israel, from the mouth of God.” For a second the blood rushed to my head. I began to walk down a side aisle, and people pushed forward, reaching out a prayer book or the corner of a prayer shawl to kiss the Torah.
Afterward, members of the synagogue took turns chanting the Torah portion for the day—sections of Deuteronomy 29 and 30—which are taken from Moses’ farewell speech to the Israelites on Mount Nebo. “You stand this day, all of you, before the Lord your God,” the passage begins, “to enter into the covenant of the Lord.” The reading ends with Moses’ great admonition to choose good over evil. “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life.” This passage is sometimes referred to as the climax of Israel’s constitution. From John Winthrop to Ronald Reagan, it has become part of America’s national story line.
A rabbinic student, Tom Gardner, discussed Moses’ remarks in his sermon that morning. He talked about whether religion could continue to have a role in a modern society that is dominated by science. “I’ll tell you how bad it is,” he said. “I don’t like telling people I’m religious, and I’m studying to be a rabbi!” Gardner noted that in his speech, Moses seems to be saying that “if we listen, if we look, religion will make sense to us.” See, I have set before you this day. If you do not listen…, you will perish. The Israelites on Mount Nebo should have found it easy to see and hear, he pointed out. Their ancestors had seen God send the plagues and split the Red Sea. They had seen the manna and water pour from rocks. They had heard God speaking from Mount Sinai. But still they doubted God.
Religion, Gardner continued, gives us eyes to see and ears to hear in ways that science simply cannot. “With our scientific eyes we can distinguish between true and false. With our religious eyes we can distinguish between right and wrong. When we see with our religious eyes, we live in a world of meaning.”
After services, my wife and I walked home along the promenade that overlooks the East River and lower Manhattan. The stone esplanade has become something of our backyard. It’s where we let our girls take their first steps out of their strollers, where they began to push dolly strollers of their own, and where we were now teaching them how to ride a scooter. Behind us was the Brooklyn Bridge, with its side-by-side pairings of Gothic arches. In front of us, across New York Harbor, was the Statue of Liberty. Between us was a shimmering boulevard of water.
Water. From the very beginning, I had seen my journey as a tale of water, though I didn’t know quite why. Part of this, no doubt, is the importance of water to the Moses story: his birth in the watery Nile Delta, his rebirth in the wicker basket on the Nile, the pharaoh’s daughter naming him Moses because she “drew him out of the water.” Later, a number of the key events of his life involve water: meeting his wife by a well, leading the Israelites across the Red Sea, being denied entry into the Promised Land for improperly extracting water from the rock. Even his farewell speech in Deuteronomy 30 makes reference to the coming crossing of the Jordan. For a desert people, Moses may have been the ideal leader. He was drawn from water.
One reason Moses resonates so deeply in America may be the importance of water to the American narrative. There are the obvious parallels: the colonists crossing the Atlantic, Washington crossing the Delaware, the slaves crossing the Ohio, the immigrant steamers crossing under Lady Liberty. But beyond that, geography has been central to American history in ways that are strikingly similar to Israelite history. Both nations were bred in exile, by people who traversed a watery threshold, found a way to survive in the wilderness, and built a society of laws. And that pattern never went away in America. Moses has endured in American culture in large measure because his story spoke to the twenty million immigrants who arrived on America’s shores in the first three decades of the twentieth century as much as it did to the one hundred who landed in Plymouth in 1620.
Moses’ stark warning to his people in Deuteronomy became a kind of national slogan for both Israel and America because it captures the fear, experienced by each generation of outsiders, that by going to such a formless place, they will succumb to formlessness. They will forget the values of their native land and be lured by the worship of false gods. Moses’ message to the Israelites is to remember where they came from—the wilderness. Remember what they formed there—a community of laws. And remember how they survived there—with water.
For the exiles, water becomes more than something to cross in order to get into the wilderness. It becomes a surrogate for their covenant. After his farewell speech, Moses gathers the Israelites one more time, in Deuteronomy 32 and reads a poem to them. It opens with these words:
May my discourse come down as the rain,
My speech distill as the dew,
Like showers on young growth,
Like droplets on the grass.
For the name of the Lord I proclaim;
Give glory to our God.
Stopped short of one final crossing, Moses tries to spread his watery blessing to his people. Like Liberty, Moses achieves his ultimate pose on that perch, light emanating from his head, the law in his arms, water beneath his feet. Liberty and Moses both stride forward, but both fail to reach their destination. They are beacons of promise precisely because they are unburdened by the compromises that come with the land. And their message is the same: Even when you reach your ultimate destination, don’t forget the obligations that come with your freedom.
VIII
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
AMERICA’S STREET OF Dreams, Sunset Boulevard, stretches twenty-two serpentine miles from downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean. In the eastern slums, the road has been renamed Cesar Chavez Avenue to honor the Mexican American union organizer. In the glitzy western highlands, Sunset has seen some of Hollywood’s juicier past: F. Scott Fitzgerald had a heart attack here; Greta Garbo lived here as a recluse; Howard Hughes kept suites here for his various girlfriends; and it was here that Jean Harlow had an affair with Clark Gable while on her honeymoon with someone else. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall lived on Sunset for a time, as did John Wayne, who is said to have kept a cow on his apartment balcony so he could have fresh milk every morning. And 10086 Sunset Boulevard was the address of Norma Desmond, the demented silent film diva who murders her captive boyfriend at the end of Sun
set Boulevard, before uttering the immortal line, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
Early one Monday, I was heading toward 8148 Sunset to view the private memorabilia collection of the same Mr. DeMille—Cecil Blount, or C.B. to his friends—whose 1923 and 1956 film extravaganzas The Ten Commandments did more to define Moses for twentieth-century Americans than anyone since King James. The two films were also landmarks in how American popular culture reflected and shaped the country’s evolving views of God. DeMille used Moses to promote a specific political agenda—anticommunist, pro-morality. In the process, he helped transform the biblical prophet into the figurehead of a strong-armed, open-minded America that DeMille believed could lead the world to a Promised Land of peace and prosperity. If the twentieth century was America’s century, DeMille tried to turn Moses into its public face.
In many ways, DeMille was working against his times. The undermining of the Bible as the central plank of American life that began in the late nineteenth century did not abate in the early decades of the twentieth century. Even as World War I triggered a temporary surge in faith, and Darwinism and other forms of modernity led to a blossoming of fundamentalism, the Bible continued to recede as the ultimate source of authority in contemporary life. Americans attended church in extraordinary numbers and espoused a near-universal belief in God, but they relied less on the Bible as the chief source of public rhetoric. By the close of the 1930s, one scholar wrote, Americans had grown accustomed to using “a secular rather than theological vocabulary when issues really seemed worth arguing about.”
While this transition might have signaled the disappearance of biblical figures from everyday discourse, something unexpected happened. Moses, along with Jesus and a few others, was decoupled from the Bible and moved into the realm of popular culture. In something akin to their own literary exodus, these figures left the bondage of the biblical narrative and set out into the wilderness of make-believe. Moses, in particular, became a star of American belles lettres. In 2004, Brian Britt, a scholar of religious studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, analyzed every American literary work featuring Moses. He counted thirty-five, from J. H. Ingraham’s novel The Pillar of Fire in 1859 to Lynne Reid Banks’s Moses in Egypt in 1998. More than half were written between the Civil War and World War II, including novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Graves, and Thomas Mann, an opera, two plays, and several books of poetry. The story lines touch on major themes, from Christian-Jewish relations to Freudian self-discovery. Freud wrote Moses and Monotheism, a “historical novel” published in 1939, which portrayed Moses as an Egyptian and claimed that the Israelites murdered him in the desert and sublimated their rebellion, thereby creating Jewish guilt.