Reomended reading, as it is the basis, for WHY Hope4uall in the promised land, is my moto, with humility, I help those who with me walk.

Why Americans See Moses In The Mirror

By David Hazony

Since the earliest days of American history, no figure has loomed larger in our culture than the biblical Moses. Christopher Columbus compared himself to Moses. The Pilgrims retold Moses’ story to each other on the Mayflower. Benjamin Franklin wanted him emblazoned on the seal of the new Union. Washington and Lincoln both quoted him and, in retrospect, were compared to him. Every movement of social progress in American history from the Founding to the Emancipation to women’s suffrage to the civil rights movement has looked to Moses and the Exodus story for inspiration. So do most presidential candidates, at one time or another, whether Republican or Democrat.

“For 400 years,” Bruce Feiler wrote, “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.”

But why? What is it about Moses that makes him so compelling for Americans? The simple answer is that there’s something about his story, and the story of the Exodus as a whole, that rings so true to the hopes, dreams, and deepest concerns of the American spirit, it’s almost as if we wrote it ourselves.

If we go back to the Bible and read the story carefully, we can detect as many as five different themes that make Americans intuitively see themselves in Moses.



1. OVERCOMING HARDSHIP FROM THE GET-GO

Moses is born into an unspeakably horrible personal and national reality. Not only are his people enslaved to Pharaoh, but he is targeted for murder by the king’s decree that all Israelite newborn males be thrown into the Nile.

Moses survives, taken in by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised in the privilege of the royal palace. But his whole life continues to be one of struggle and triumph. After he kills an Egyptian taskmaster who was beating one of his Hebrew brothers to death, Moses flees into the forbidding desert, where nothing is as unlikely as survival itself. Still he overcomes. And even after he returns to Egypt to lead the people to freedom, the Bible shows his constant struggle to overcome threats from without (Pharaoh’s armies chasing the fleeing Hebrews; the military assault of the Amalekites), threats from within (the Israelites’ constant failure of spirit and pining for the "flesh pots" of Egypt), and even threats from God himself, who more than once threatened to wipe out all of Israel and start from scratch with Moses alone. In every case, it’s Moses’ strength of spirit, his determination to overcome, that wins the day.

Every truly American story begins, similarly, with a struggle to overcome immense hardship. Whether it’s the Pilgrims’ escape from persecution in England, the emergence of African-Americans from the horrors of slavery and its aftermath, or the difficulty of immigrants arriving on American shores carrying little more than the dream of a better life, America was founded on the belief that the strength of character needed to overcome is of far greater value than the wealth or status into which one is born.



2. WE MAKE MIRACLES HAPPEN

Although God’s hand weighs heavily in Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, every step of the way requires that human beings, too, play an active role to bring about their own redemption. Even God’s most dramatic miracles — the Ten Plagues, the parting of the Red Sea — require that the Israelites paint their doorposts with the blood of the Paschal Lamb to set themselves apart; or that Moses hold out his staff to bring on the plagues or make the sea split.

But the most impressive miracles of all aren’t the ones that required special effects in the movie version. Rather, they were man-made miracles. Again, as a baby, Moses was saved from genocidal decree of Pharaoh. But who saved him? It wasn’t divine intervention, but the unthinkable defiance of Pharaoh’s orders by five different women—the midwives Shifra and Pua, who deliberately fail to carry out the decree; his mother, Jochebed, and sister Miriam, who contrive to smuggle him downstream in a pitch-lined basket; and Pharaoh’s own daughter, who pulls him out of the river and raises him, even though she knew he was a Hebrew.

And the greatest miracle of all was convincing the Israelites to leave Egypt. A whole nation of slaves, given nothing other than the reckless rhetoric of some crank named Moses and a distant memory of God’s promise to their forefathers, now have to make a gargantuan mental switch, tossing out an entire lifetime of subjugation and oppression and convincing themselves that freedom is possible, that they want to be free. According to rabbinic tradition, only one out of 10 Hebrews actually left Egypt — the rest staying behind, enslaved to their own passivity. God may have taken the Hebrews out of Egypt “on eagles’ wings,” but the Hebrews had to decide to get on board for the flight.

Americans, too, have always rejected passivity in the face of national need. The idea that “God helps those who help themselves” is not in the Bible. It is, rather, an American expression dating to the time of the Founders. No-thing happens if we don’t take responsibility and act decisively.



3. GOOD CAN AND MUST TRIUMPH OVER EVIL IN OUR WORLD

It has almost become a cliché. But there is a right way to live our lives, and a wrong way. In the Bible, the right way is symbolized by having one God, by following the Ten Commandments, and by freeing the Israelites from the slavery of Egypt. The wrong way is symbolized by Pharaoh’s brutality; by worshipping the Golden Calf; and by the Israelites grumbling in the desert and threatening to turn back every time things don’t go their way.

In the end, Pharaoh and the Golden Calf were destroyed, but Israel’s spirit took a lot longer to fix: God refused to bring them to the Promised Land until a whole new generation arose — one that believed in the rightfulness of the redemption.

This belief in the righteousness of our collective cause is the central pivot of America’s success, and of all the good that’s been brought into the world by America’s values: representative democracy, economic freedom, the rights and equality of every individual, technological and scientific progress. All of these begin not just with good ideas, but with an impassioned, unblinking belief that these things are good and must be affirmed in our world, and that their opposites — the violent, brutal, hope-abandoning regimes that still make life wretched for hundreds of millions of people today — are evil and must be stopped.



4. OUT OF MANY, ONE

The Bible really tells us two different stories about Moses — stories that are surprisingly similar. One is of Moses’ private life, from his birth under Pharaoh’s death sentence, to his escape from Egypt after smiting an Egyptian, his wandering in the desert and finally the revelation of God at the Burning Bush. At that point, he becomes a public figure — God tells him to return to Egypt and bring the Israelites out of bondage. And then the story begins again, only now it’s about the whole Israelite people. They, too, are born under Pharaoh’s murderous decrees; they, too, leave after the smiting of Egypt; they, too, wander in the desert; and they too encounter God’s revelation on the mountain.

The story of Moses, in other words, is also the story of the Israelites themselves: Moses carries it inside himself, in his own life. But there’s a difference. Moses alone could never go beyond meeting God; he could never get to the Promised Land. Only Israel as a whole could do that. Individuals are the center of everything, but only reach their greatness, their personal Promised Land, when they bring the nation with them.

But this, too, is the most American story there is. Only in America is the individual not just a cog in a greater national machine but the carrier of the whole American story inside him, bearing the potential for greatness and realizing it for the benefit of all. Only in America is there an assumption that every citizen, regardless of their birth, can become a great leader, whether in business or arts or politics. Only in America is the fate of the nation tied so deeply into the decisions of every single one of us. (That’s why Americans’ national pastime is baseball, a team sport like no other, where every player takes his turn at being the focus of all our hope, where teamwork alone can never win the game.) Only in America
is everyone a potential Moses.



5. LEAVE THE GLORY TO OTHERS

At the end of Deuteronomy, with Israel on the cusp of entering the Promised Land, Moses bids his nation farewell and dies on the mountains overlooking Canaan. We are told that God punished him for striking the rock that produced the water for Israel, rather than speaking to it. But the symbolism of Moses looking out over the land he will never enter carries a power far beyond his punishment.

Had Moses led the Israelites into Canaan, he would have broken the bonds of humanity and become a deity himself. His glory would have competed with God’s own. He would have been not only the Lawgiver and the Redeemer, but the King as well. The entire enterprise would have been about him, instead of being about the Israelites.

Moses’ humility made it possible for the nation to grow beyond the worship of the man — to build themselves rather than him. It was the same humility that led George Washington to refuse titles like “His Majesty” for the presidency, and which led him to refuse to run for a third term in office, setting the two-term tradition. Great leaders always carry the risk of becoming a focus of worship — just look at all the petty dictatorships around the world, with their statues and posters of the leader littering every public square and building. In America, the people, not the leaders, are the great ones.

Struggle, activism, the triumph of the good, individualism as the heart of community, and humility — America really is the Mosaic nation. No other country on Earth has so thoroughly adopted him as their ancient symbol encapsulating their national spirit. No other nation reverberates each and every day with the values affirmed by his story.

Moses truly is the heart of who we are and the vision of who we can be.

David Hazony is the author of The Ten Commandments: How Our Most Ancient Moral Text Can Renew Modern Life, published recently by Scribner.