The Uprooted

Before Oscar Handlin, there was one dominant narrative of American self-understanding – the frontier experience. From the Colonial “errand into the wilderness” to Daniel Boone’s trip west, to Lewis and Clark’s explorations, to Huck and Jim on the Mississippi, to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, to Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” our national story had been about an epic journey. All that changed in 1951, when Oscar Handlin wrote a book that forever revised how Americans see themselves. He didn’t mean to. The Pulitzer Prize winning book was meant to be a quiet study about immigration, entitled, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People. In the first sentence of the book Handlin explains: “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.” The Uprooted argues that far from being at the margins of the American story, the immigrant experience – specifically of the tens of millions of immigrants who poured into America between 1820 and World War I – was the American story. Handlin, who died this past month at the age of 95, had an impact far beyond the ivory tower of academia. His testimony before congress on immigration law, quotas and discrimination of all kinds played an important role in a national conversation that is only taking on increased importance day after day.

This morning, on this festival of Sukkot, I want to focus on one dimension of Handlin’s book – not so much the impact that immigrants had or have on America, but rather the effect that the experience of emigration has on the immigrants themselves. There is something autobiographical about Handlin’s research; he was himself the son of Russian Jewish immigrant shopkeepers. In an almost lyrical style, Handlin tries to capture the voice and experience of people undergoing the process of uprooting. He explains the series of dislocations that occurred as immigrants went from a peasant European society, via a harsh and brutal crossing, into their port of arrival. Some are obvious: families were split apart, modes of labor shifted from agrarian to urban economies and of course, there were the complications that came with changes in language, culture and the like. Handlin’s most interesting observations describe more subtle but more profound changes from the shift in gender roles as women entered the workforce to dramatic reversals in intergenerational relationships. In the Old World, wisdom and authority was based on the experience of the prior generation. But when an immigrant sends a child to public school, the direction of learning and authority reverses, as the children are acclimated at a faster pace than the parents. Not all of the “uprootings” were negative. Handlin explains it was precisely because immigrants lacked any natural entree into established professions, that they often distinguished themselves in the arts, on the baseball diamond, or in other meritocratic pursuits. Handlin also points out that because immigrants were so uprooted from the structures of the Old World, they established a tight-knit sense of peoplehood and faith in America. In the shocks and aftershocks of alienation, one’s church and ethnicity became a critical stabilizing element for each immigrant and every immigrant community.

This festival of Sukkot is the Jewish festival of uprooting, a study of our people’s first and most formative national migration and all migrations since. Reflect on what it must have been like for 600,000 male Israelites, over two million souls, to leave hundreds of years of servitude in Egypt and travel though the wilderness for forty years towards the Promised Land. In many respects, I think the experience of ancient Israel fits Handlin’s template quite neatly. First and foremost, we know that the sum effect of the forty years of wandering transformed the Israelites from a people longing for Egypt to a nation eagerly anticipating their arrival in the Promised Land. It wasn’t easy. The desert generation died out, uprooted from the world they knew, unable to make the shift into their new setting. Even Moses himself was deemed unfit by God to lead the Israelites beyond the Jordan.

The second dimension of ancient Israel’s uprooting was both necessary and ultimately, though not immediately, positive. They had to uproot themselves from being dependent on Pharaoh and Egyptian society and become dependent on God and themselves. As slaves under Pharaoh, the ancient Israelites had no notion of self-sufficiency. The manna, the miracles, the hunger, the trials of the desert, all were meant to teach Israel two critical traits that they lacked in the old world and would need in the new: “In order to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but that man may live on anything that the Lord decrees.” (Deut 8:3) The sukkah, both in ancient times and today, provides a corrective to the tendency to be excessively attached to turf, to rely on the idolatry wrought by materialism. A sukkah is an opportunity for every Israelite to remember that we stand subject not the pyramids of Pharaoh, but to the majesty of God’s creation.

And finally, as in the American immigrant experience, being uprooted from Egypt went hand-in-hand with the formation of a national identity. Of course, Israel knew they were a people apart when they were slaves in Egypt. But in Egypt it was a social stigma, not a mark of distinction. Only in the desert did being an Israelite mean standing in a covenantal relationship with God. Only in the desert did being an Israelite signal being party to a Promised Land and sacred destiny. Only in the desert, did being an Israelite become something to be proud of.

On Sukkot we are supposed to reflect on the effects of being uprooted. But the real question, the really interesting question for us, is not so much about American immigrants or Israelites of old but how this question applies to us, the present American Jewish community. America Jewry is far from monolithic, but at risk of making huge generalizations about an incredibly diverse landscape, let me suggest that our current condition reflects a unique blend of being both rooted and unrooted at the same time. Let me explain. We are rooted in the sense that unlike past generations we are totally at home in America. We are not fighting the establishment – we are the establishment. With our synagogues, summer camps, schools and federations, our political, philanthropic and social stature, American Jewry has made a footprint in America that far exceeds its nominal numbers. If you need proof of the rootedness of American Jewry, you need look no further than this beautiful synagogue to see evidence that we are here and here to stay.

But this is only half the story. While we are institutionally rooted, as individual Jews, we are probably more “unrooted” than any other time. Take me for example. My parents are British, I was raised in Los Angeles, I went to school in Michigan and Chicago, and I live in New York married to a woman from Pittsburgh who I met during a year living abroad. It is a fairly typical story. There is no reason to believe that at 21, a Jew will be living in the same community as she did at age 13, or as she will at age 24; in fact, the odds are heavily against it. There are many reasons why the affiliation rates of Jews are so low, but I have to believe one of the most obvious reasons is that through no fault of their own, a typical American Jew uproots him- or herself over and over again, in ways unimaginable to past generations. It is incredibly difficult to establish and re-establish one’s roots, all the more so if you have no reason to believe that your present station in life is your final destination. If there ever was a holiday that reflected the challenges of being a contemporary American Jew, it is Sukkot. We live it not just this week, but every week of the year.

I think it is the responsibility of forward-looking Jewish institutions to embrace the sukkah-like reality of American Jewry. There should exist a coordinated network of Jewish life and living, whereby uprooted Jews can be identified and welcomed in by the very institutions that need their presence for their continued vitality. I am thinking of a global JDate or Jewish Facebook with a virtual profile of Jews wherever they are. For instance, when a child of Park Avenue Synagogue goes to college, the campus Hillel director should receive a call from me telling them that a terrific young adult is on his or her way, and we at Park Avenue will in turn be invested in the success of that Hillel. And on the other end, every Hillel or Birthright program should track their alumni into the Jewish community of their first graduate or professional position and should program accordingly. It is incumbent upon all of us to support a seamless transition from one chapter of Jewish existence to another. It would take a lot of money, and a lot of staff hours. Most importantly, it would demand that all Jewish institutions from synagogues to summer camps to Chabad houses to Birthright, recognize that it is not solely their own programs that are of paramount importance, but rather the soul of every Jew they claim to be serving. In a world of rooted institutions and unrooted Jews, we have to realize that the metric of success for any Jewish institution is that institution’s ability first to cultivate a Jewish identity that can translate into a new context, and second, to warmly receive the products of other like-minded institutions.

In my own personal Jewish journey, Shabbat hol ha-moed Sukkot holds a special place. It was on this Shabbat that I first walked into my campus Hillel my junior year of college – the beginning of a journey that continues to this day. It seems so silly in retrospect. I went to Jewish day school, my parents were leaders in their synagogue, we had Shabbat dinner every week, but I never entered college Hillel for the first two years of college. For all the seeds that were planted in me, what now seems painfully obvious was not so obvious way back then. Namely, that the most important feature of Jewish identity is its mobility; its ability to go with you wherever you go, a sense of peoplehood, of faith, of intellectual curiosity that – like a sukkah – moves with you at every stage of life.

From the experiences of ancient Israel, through every immigrant wandering, our strength is measured according to how our Jewishness withstands the uprooting process. The uprootings today are different than they have ever been, neither better nor worse, but uprootings every bit as momentous as those of former times. We ignore that fact at our own peril. This Sukkot, may we, yet another generation of wandering Jews, be attentive, vigilant and creative in our response to the uprootings of the present generation, so that we, like generations before, can arrive safely at our promised land.