America's Prophet Read online

  America’s Prophet

  Moses and the American Story

  Bruce Feiler

  For Debbie and Alan Rottenberg

  Next year with you

  Contents

  I Moses! Moses!

  II An Errand into the Wilderness

  III Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land

  IV A Moses for America

  V Let My People Go

  VI The War Between the Moseses

  VII Mother of Exiles

  VIII The Ten Commandments

  IX I’ve Seen the Promised Land

  X A Narrative of Hope

  Giving Thanks

  The Books of Moses

  Select Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by Bruce Feiler

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I

  MOSES! MOSES!

  THANKSGIVING IS THE mandatory holiday in my family. It’s the one time of year when we clear our calendars, pack up gifts, and travel across the country for a ritual that is one part Americana, one part Hanukkah, one part nostalgia. The event begins when my mother polishes dozens of apples, pears, pomegranates, and kumquats and arranges them with a pumpkin, some Indian corn, and cranberries to create a cornucopian centerpiece. It continues with Thanksgiving dinner, a mix of trendy roasted this and that along with some embarrassing 1950s classics we love, notably a hot fruit compote made with five different kinds of canned fruit baked with macaroons and sherry. During the meal, in a custom that makes me cringe yet always seems to work, my sister insists that we go around the table and say why we are thankful. The weekend concludes with an early celebration of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights. It’s a classic American event, a mix of church, state, shopping, and turkey.

  Passover is the equivalent holiday for my in-laws. Every spring, my mother-in-law hosts thirty-five people on one night and a different thirty-five people the second night for a ritualized retelling of the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt. The food is equally ritualized: chicken soup with matzoh balls; gefilte fish with hot pink horseradish sauce; “Debbie’s tasty brisket” with carrots and potatoes; and Auntie Barbara’s Jell-O mold with, yup, canned fruit. Passover is so important to my in-laws that when they expanded their home some years ago they redid not their bedroom or bathroom but their dining room, just for these two nights a year. The centrality of these two holidays to our respective families is such that when my mother met my future mother-in-law for the first time they retreated into a corner and came out a few minutes later with smiles on their faces: The Feilers would get Thanksgiving; the Rottenbergs would get Passover.

  Though it took me a while to realize it, discovering the unexpected bridge that links these two holidays would occupy the coming years of my life.

  Before attending my first Passover with my in-laws, I warned them that I would make the world’s most insufferable seder guest. I had just returned from a yearlong journey through the Middle East, in which I actually crossed the likely Red Sea, tasted manna, and climbed the supposed Mount Sinai. In the liturgical list of Four Sons included in the seder service, I would surely be the Pedantic One. In ensuing years, I continued my biblical wanderings, traveling through Israel, Iraq, and, with my bride, Iran. “A honeymoon in the Axis of Evil,” she called it. A year later she gave birth to identical twin girls: Eden, for the Garden of Eden; and Tybee, for the beach near Savannah where I grew up and where we celebrated our wedding. They seemed like emblems of our lives: ten toes in the Middle East, ten toes at home.

  One theme of these travels was exploring the explosive mix of religion and politics. But I realized upon returning that the front line of that battle had migrated back home. The United States was involved in its own internal war over God that in many ways mirrored—and in some cases fed—the wars being waged in the Middle East. The buzzwords only hinted at the battle lines: left/right, red/blue, believer/nonbeliever, extremist/moderate.

  These tensions were reflected in all the usual places of modern discourse—the ballot box, the call-in show, the Bible study, the book group. Yet they were most acute at home. So many of the laments I heard about religion were variations on a theme: “I can’t talk to my brother about it without getting into a fight.” “My father is a Neanderthal.” “My daughter is making a big mistake.” “He doesn’t understand what made this country great.” With greater mobility and more choices, we no longer passed down religion seamlessly from one generation to the next. Nearly half of Americans change religious affiliations in their lives, a Pew study concluded. Stuck with our parents’ genes, we seemed less interested in being burdened with their God as well. And we certainly didn’t want to talk to them about it.

  Thanksgiving, the symbol of American blessing, the one holiday that marked the union of God, the people, and the land, had, for many families, become a minefield of fraught conversation.

  Around this time I began noticing something else. On a trip to visit my in-laws on Cape Cod, we stopped off in Plymouth and I took a tour of the Mayflower II. A reenactor was reading from the Bible. “Exodus fourteen,” he explained. “The Israelites are trapped in front of the Red Sea, and the Egyptians are about to catch them. The people complain, and Moses declares, ‘Hold your peace! The Lord shall fight for you.’ Our leader read us that passage during our crossing.” Moses, on board the Mayflower.

  On a trip to visit my parents in Savannah, I stopped off at my childhood synagogue. A letter from George Washington hangs in the lobby, sent after his election to the presidency: “May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivered the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors, planted them in the promised land, whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation, still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven.” Exodus, on Washington’s pen in the first weeks of the presidency.

  On a trip to visit my sister in Philadelphia, we went to see the Liberty Bell. The quotation on its face is from Leviticus 25, which God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai: PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF. The law of Sinai, in the bell tower where the Declaration of Independence was signed.

  In coming weeks, I found a similar story over and over again. Columbus comparing himself to Moses when he sailed in 1492. George Whitefield quoting Moses as he traveled the colonies in the 1730s forging the Great Awakening. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, comparing King George to the pharaoh. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, in the summer of 1776, proposing that Moses be on the seal of the United States. And the references didn’t stop. Harriet Tubman adopting Moses’ name on the Underground Railroad. Abraham Lincoln being eulogized as Moses’ incarnation. The Statue of Liberty being molded in Moses’ honor. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson tapping into Moses during wartime. Cecil B. DeMille recasting Moses as a hero for the Cold War. Martin Luther King, Jr., likening himself to Moses on the night before he was killed. The sheer ubiquity was staggering and, for me, had been completely unknown.

  For four hundred years, one figure stands out as the surprising symbol of America. One person has inspired more Americans than any other. One man is America’s true founding father. His name is Moses.

  For two years, I traveled to touchstones in American history and explored the role of the Bible, the Exodus, and Moses in inspiring generation after generation of Americans. I examined how American icons of different eras—from the slave girl Eliza carrying her son to freedom across the Ohio River in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to an orphaned Superman being drawn out of a spaceship from Krypton—were etched in the image of Moses. And I probed the ongoing role of Moses today, from the Ten Co
mmandments in public places to the role of the United States as a beacon for immigrants. Even a cursory review of American history indicates that Moses has emboldened leaders of all stripes—patriot and loyalist, slave and master, Jew and Christian, fat cat and communist. Could the persistence of his story serve as a reminder of our shared national values? Could he serve as a unifying force in a disunifying time? If Moses could split the Red Sea, could he unsplit America?

  Just as I was completing my journey, the 2008 presidential election was reaching its historic climax. Once again, Moses played a prominent role. Hillary Clinton compared herself to the Hebrew prophet. With “every bit of progress you try to make,” she said, “there’s always gonna be somebody to say, ‘You know, I think we should go back to Egypt.’” She asked, “Do we really need to move forward on transformative social change?” before answering: “Yes, we do.” Barack Obama also placed himself in the Mosaic tradition, though he claimed the role of Moses’ successor. “We are in the presence of a lot of Moseses,” he said in Selma, Alabama, in 2007. “I thank the Moses generation; but we’ve got to remember that Joshua still had a job to do. As great as Moses was…he didn’t cross over the river to see the Promised Land.” He concluded: “Today we’re called to be the Joshuas of our time, to be the generation that finds our way across this river.”

  Obama’s use of the Exodus story became so prominent that his rival, John McCain, issued a video in which he mocked Obama for anointing himself “The One.” The video concluded with a clip of Charlton Heston splitting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments. But the echoes of the Exodus only continued. On the day before the election, the African Methodist Episcopal Church bishop for Ohio stood up before 60,000 people in Columbus and thanked God for “having given us a Moses and a Martin called Barack Obama.” As civil rights pioneer Andrew Young said to me days later, “We are living in biblical time. The amount of time that passed between Martin’s assassination and Obama’s election—forty years—is the same amount of time the Israelites spent in the desert.”

  Four centuries after the earliest colonists in North America likened themselves to their Israelite forebears, Americans once again found meaning by drawing parallels between their ongoing struggles and those of the central figures of the Hebrew Bible. The analogy took on added poignance as Americans again confronted challenging times, with economic turmoil at home and a shifting role in the world. As with every hard time in American life—from the frozen cliffs of early New England to the snowy camps of Valley Forge; from the fractured fields of the Civil War to the bloody streets of the civil rights era—Americans turned to the Exodus for direction, inspiration, and hope. And so they did in another moment of national anxiety, when the country was asking, What is the meaning of America? What are our values? Will we rise again? As he had for generations, one figure held the answers and pointed the way. And I couldn’t help wondering if our ability to repair our damaged sense of purpose and reclaim our national unity might depend on our ability to recall the centuries-old interplay between the Thanksgiving and Passover narratives and remember the central figure in both stories and why he had proven so inspirational all along.

  II

  AN ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS

  THANKSGIVING BEGINS EARLY in America’s Hometown. It doesn’t start on the last Thursday in November, the day Abraham Lincoln first invited Americans to observe a festival of praise to honor the country’s “fruitful fields and healthful skies.” It doesn’t begin on the second Saturday in October, the day the re-created Pilgrim village outside Plymouth, Massachusetts, hosts the first of its seventeenth-century Harvest Dinners with turkey, mussels, corn pudding, and psalms. It kicks off, instead, on a Friday in mid-June, the day the members of the Old Colony Club, the “oldest gentlemen’s club in America,” board rickety vessels on Plymouth’s clam-covered shore and set out toward the mysterious Clark’s Island. For these Keepers of Thanksgiving, this excursion is their annual pilgrimage to the accidental spot of America’s First Sabbath.

  Clark’s Island is the forgotten front door of America’s founding story. On a stormy Friday evening in 1620, a band of nine beleaguered Pilgrims, half a day’s sail from their families on the Mayflower, were scouting the Massachusetts coastline in an open boat for a suitable place to settle. Having barely escaped from a skirmish with Indians that morning, the Pilgrims were frightened, lost, and out of food. But as the afternoon wore on, their situation worsened. And at dusk, fierce winds and rain nearly overturned their vessel, forcing the men ashore. The wreck was the latest deflating detour on the Pilgrims’ flight from slavery to freedom. For these men had crossed the sea and arrived in this great and terrible wilderness, convinced they were on a mission from God to escape the oppression of a latter-day pharaoh and build in America a new Promised Land.

  Everything the Pilgrims had done for two decades was designed to fulfill their dream of creating God’s New Israel. When they first left England for Holland in 1608, they described themselves as the chosen people, casting off the yoke of their pharaoh, King James. A dozen years later when they embarked on a grander exodus, to America, their leader, William Bradford, proclaimed their mission to be as vital as that of “Moses and the Israelites when they went out of Egypt.” And when, after sixty-six days on the Atlantic, they finally arrived at Cape Cod, they were brought to their knees in gratitude for safe passage through their own Red Sea. “May our children rightly say,” Bradford wrote, echoing a famous passage in Deuteronomy, the fifth book of Moses, “Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in the wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard their voice.”

  And the Pilgrims weren’t alone in applying the Exodus story to their lives in the New World. The settlers at Jamestown had likened themselves to Moses when they arrived in Virginia in 1607. John Winthrop, gliding into Boston Harbor aboard the Arbella in 1630, quoted Deuteronomy three times in his sermon, “Model of Christian Charity,” and ended by quoting Moses’ farewell speech to the Israelites on Mount Nebo. Cotton Mather, writing in 1702, said these pioneers had no choice. “The leader of a people in a wilderness had need be a Moses,” he said. “And if a Moses had not led the people of Plymouth Colony,” he wrote of Bradford, then the colony would not have survived.

  Yet these leaders did have a choice. For centuries, European explorers had set out for new lands without using expressions like pharaoh and promised land, New Covenant and New Israel, Exodus and Moses. By choosing these evocative lyrics, the founders of America introduced the themes of oppression and redemption, anticipation and disenchantment, freedom and law, that would carry through four hundred years of American history. Because of them, the story of Moses became the story of America.

  But why? Why did these leaders choose this three-thousand-year-old story? Why did they take an ancient tale, unproven and unprovable, and transform it into a revolutionary ideal that would sacrifice lives, launch wars, unmoor millions of families from their lives and propel them through uncertain waters into an unknown wilderness based only on an untested notion of freedom? In short: Why did this story have such power?

  ON BOARD THE small fleet of boats heading toward Clark’s Island this afternoon, the men of the Old Colony Club were ebullient. This annual excursion was one of the highlights of their year, along with the August clambake, Past Presidents Night in the fall, and Forefathers Day, held every December since 1769, when the members dress in top hats, bear arms, and celebrate the landing on Plymouth Rock with “a breakfast that can’t be beat.” The men, ranging in age from old to older, were more casual today, drinking beer and waving at other boaters on the water.

  “Plymouth Harbor is naturally shallow,” explained Roger Randall, a lifelong resident. When I first pitched up in town, I quickly learned that the Pilgrims’ legacy is nursed by a tight-knit gentry of descendants and devotees who protect the Mayflower like Beefeaters guarding the crown jewels. Roger was kind enough to invite me along on their expedition.


  “It’s very difficult to get in and out of this harbor,” he continued, “but it’s well channeled. There’s conjecture that if Plymouth had been a deepwater harbor, this could have been Boston today.”

  “So why did the Pilgrims settle here?”

  He smiled. “The wreck.”

  Almost everything about the Pilgrims’ mission was spectacularly poorly planned. Like the Israelites, the Pilgrims were so convinced they were chosen by God that they didn’t prepare themselves for the harsh conditions they would face in the wilderness. From their outpost in Holland, they had secured a charter to settle near the Hudson River. A small group left Holland on the Speedwell over the summer, and more joined in England on the Mayflower. The two vessels departed Southampton on August 5 but were diverted to land when the Speedwell began taking on water. The ships sailed a few weeks later but again turned back when the Speedwell proved unseaworthy and had to be abandoned. On September 6, 1620, the Mayflower successfully set sail with 102 passengers.

  For all the poetry it later inspired, the Mayflower was hardly a beautiful craft. A merchant ship that mostly shuttled wine across the English Channel, the one-hundred-foot vessel was said to have a sweet hull, which meant the spillage of French Bordeaux had seeped into the planks, tempering the noxious fumes from the bilge. In 1957 a replica of the Mayflower was built using the exact dimensions of the earlier craft. Roger Randall worked as a rigger on the ship. “It was like a big old tub,” he remembered. “Part of the problem was it had such a high freeboard. A low-sheer vessel you can control a lot better, but the Mayflower had a lot of flat surfaces that present themselves to the wind. It must have been very harrowing crossing the ocean at that time of year.”