A Nation with a Place to Go
Ever since Abram heard the call "Lech L'cha," we have been a people of wanderers and seekers. Some of our wanderings have been forced by cruel circumstances, violence and expulsions. Some have been in search of opportunity, in pursuit of economic prosperity or religious freedom. Although the context and factors may vary, the singular motivation for immigration is the pursuit of a better life. That something, somehow, on the other side of the ocean or across the river can promise more than their homeland.
When God speaks to Abram for the very first time, God tells him, 'Lech L'cha – Go forth from your land, from your land, from your birthplace, from your father's house, to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you.."1 Imagine the faith and trust that it must have required for Abram to pack up and leave the comfort and safety of everyone and everything that he knew for a future blessing. Even thousands of years later, when the early settlers began to arrive in America, they must have been filled with fear and awe. There was so much danger and so much they couldn't know; and also, the taste of freedom and potential that kept calling them across the sea. This land has been a place that has drawn Jews to it since long before it was even America. The first recorded Jews arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, although by that time, there were already Jews in the Caribbean and South America as well as conversos fleeing the Inquisition to the remote parts of the Spanish Empire.2 This country has been a refuge, and even a piece of a promised land, for our ancestors.
When people emigrate, they require both a push and a pull: a reason to leave and a place to go. And America, for far more than 250 years, has held the promise of a place to go — a place to work, to make a life, and to practice religious freedom and to be part of society in a way that Jews did not often experience throughout their history.
In 1820, an almost-23-year-old poet named Penina Moise published a poem in the Southern Patriot in Charleston, South Carolina, called "To Persecuted Foreigners."3 It speaks of how at home she felt in America, and how the call of America — the "lech l'cha" of this land — offered a safe haven to her coreligionists. She urges them: "Fly from the soil whose desolating creed, Outraging faith, makes human victims bleed. Welcome! where every Muse has reared a shrine, The aspect of wild Freedom to refine."4
This is, for Moise, the land of freedom. Her father was born in France, and her oldest siblings were born in the Caribbean, but Penina herself was born in Charleston in 1797 in the fledgling days of the new nation, just as President George Washington was relinquishing his power to go live out his days under his own vine and fig tree. She lived a long life and was a stalwart figure at Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston, and for much of her life she ran one of the first supplementary religious schools at an American synagogue.5 Many of her poems were included in the Union Hymnal, but she also wrote many secular poems about love and joy and sorrow. She was a woman who felt deeply Jewish and deeply American. She understood that both of her identities were important, that to be Jewish to her also included being a patriot and a lover of democracy.
Over sixty years later, another American Jewish woman wrote a poem that now is inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus" offers a vision of America that has welcomed countless immigrants to America's shore: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"6 — calling all those in need to find a new place beside the golden door. Moise's poem likewise welcomes the stranger, inviting them to "Come and repose on Plenty's flowery bed. Oh! not as Strangers shall your welcome be, Come to the homes and bosoms of the free!"7
Emma Lazarus' ancestors had been in the U.S. since at least the 1770s — already, by the time she wrote "The New Colossus," for at least a hundred years.8 Both women write about how the symbols of the old world have been supplanted by those of the new, and how the promise of America stands in contrast to the ancient symbols. Lazarus describes her American sentinel as, "Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame."9 Moise writes, " Upon our Chieftain's brow no crown appears;"10 Both women laud the new symbols of democracy, freedom, liberty, and enlightenment that draw people to America. Although not immigrants themselves, they still want their country to be a safe place for new arrivals. They know that their lives have been enriched both by being here and by those that have come here.
Penina Moise's poem is now over 200 years old. America changed quite a lot over the course of her lifetime, and has continued to change and grow and reinvent itself. Now that America has reached its 250th year, if we want to continue the legacy that Moise and Lazarus loved so dearly, if we want to be a place that can live up to these prayers and poems, that inhabits the legacy of lech l'cha, of going forth, of being a nation filled with blessing as God promised Abraham, we need to continue to be a nation that welcomes those who need a place to go. If we can be a nation that once again says "Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,"11 and "Brave the Atlantic — Hope's broad anchor weigh, A Western Sun will gild your future day,"12 and mean it with a full heart, perhaps then we can truly be great.