Leaving It All Behind

Moses Striking the Rock (Tintoretto,ca.1555–1570)

Chicago Professor Leon Kass points out the similarities between the stories of Exodus and America: [bold added]

The three parts of the Exodus story—slavery and deliverance; covenant and law; worship and presence—become the three pillars of the Children of Israel’s enduring national existence.

The tale of oppressive slavery in prosperous Egypt and of the astonishing deliverance and miraculous sustenance in the wilderness—the first pillar—is the constitutive national narrative, memorialized and retold annually by parents to children at the Passover Seder. Absent a relation to God, the Jewish people might still be enslaved to man; remembering our own servitude, we should deal kindly with the vulnerable.

The covenant and constituting Law—the second pillar—establish the way of life under which the people are to live and rule themselves. Not content merely to provide instruction for rectifying mutual wrongdoing, the Law is also a moral teacher, touching all aspects of human life. Its guidelines protect human dignity against abuse and self-abasement and encourage reverence for life and property, care for the needy and fair dealing in all transactions. Aiming beyond justice, the Law seeks to promote grace and gratitude, lifting human beings to fulfill the promise implied in man’s being in the image of God.

The human longing for something better than our mortal selves is satisfied in the third pillar, a place for the community to meet and to seek and commune with God. The center of communal life, it is a home for showing gratitude and seeking atonement, for prayer and sacrifice, and for dedicating personal and collective life to serving God and His higher purposes for humankind...

(Image from pinterest)

Thoughtful people have long detected numerous parallels between the United States and biblical Israel. We Americans, too, owe our origins to an escape from despotism and a desire for religious freedom. We, too, are a particular and distinctive people with a universal creed, one of biblical provenance: In announcing our birth, we declared that “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” We too have a constituting national law, a Constitution approved by the consent of the people. And when in the mid-19th century our Union was challenged and its founding creed repudiated, we renewed it through the sacrifice of a bloody civil war, so that, as Abraham Lincoln said, “this nation under God shall have a new birth of Freedom.”

Like Israel of old, we, too, have stumbled and fallen, and committed apostasy against our creed. But half a century ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. , like an ancient Hebrew prophet, summoned us to return to our ideals of liberty and justice for all, appealing explicitly to our founding creed and the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God. Until only yesterday, it could be said of America that it was, in G.K. Chesterton’s words, “a nation with the soul of a church.”

But times have changed. For today’s reader of Exodus, a crucial question cries out from the three-pillared structure of Israel’s founding. Can a people endure and flourish if it lacks a shared national story, accepted law and morals, and an aspiration to something higher than its own comfort and safety? Can a devotion to technological progress, economic prosperity and private pursuits of happiness sustain us when our story is contested (or despised), our morals weakened and our national dedication abandoned?

At crucial times in history--the 1860's and 1960's--the American nation was riven by extreme differences but came back from the brink--in one case it also took a Civil War--when Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., called it to live up to the "better angels of our nature."

We need such a powerful voice or voices to remind us Democrats are not Communists and Republicans are not Nazis. (Both Communists and Nazis slaughtered millions of people, including their own, during the 20th century.) We need voices to remind us that we have vastly more in common in our values and dreams than in our differences.

President-Elect Biden called for us not to treat each other as enemies on November 8th, and this humble blogger, for one, will resist that temptation no matter how much I may disagree with my fellow citizens:

I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify. Who doesn’t see red and blue states, but a United States...

But now, let’s give each other a chance. It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again. To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.

The Bible tells us that to everything there is a season – a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow. And a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America.

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.