Exactly two hundred years ago this week, on September 15, 1825, a Jewish colony was ceremonially dedicated on Grand Island in northern New York State, just a few miles downstream from Buffalo on the Niagara River. Its name was Ararat, after the mountain where Noah’s ark came to rest following the flood. Not coincidentally, the founder of the colony was himself named Noah: Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785–1851), a journalist, politician, playwright, consul to Tunis, correspondent with James Madison and James Monroe, and arguably the most prominent American Jew of his generation. As historian Jonathan Sarna recounts in his authoritative biography, Noah staged the dedicatory event with great flourish: a grand procession of soldiers, politicians, and clergy; he himself robed as a “Judge of Israel” with a gold medallion on his chest; while a band played Handel’s “Judas Maccabaeus.”
Theatrics aside, Noah’s plans for a self-governing Jewish community reflected his vision of a “New Jerusalem,” not for Jews already in America, but for persecuted Jews abroad, seeking refuge and political emancipation. He dreamed of Ararat as an asylum for the oppressed, a place to “revive, renew, and reestablish” Jewish life, a temporary resting place on the way to an ultimate millennial restoration, prayed for by Christians and Jews alike. Only in America, with the freedoms it offered, could the dream of a self-governing Jewish enclave be realized.
To this day, scholars debate Noah’s true motives. Was he driven by concern for his people, by personal ambition and enrichment, or by a kind of messianic self-delusion? Whatever the case, the plan quickly collapsed. Ridiculed by many and ignored by the very Jews Noah sought to save, Ararat never moved beyond its inaugural dedication. Its only surviving remnant is a 400-pound marble cornerstone, now displayed in the Buffalo History Museum. Carved on it in Hebrew are the words sh’ma yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai ehad, the central declaration of our people’s faith, and then, in English, “Ararat: A City of Refuge for the Jews.”
Two hundred years later, Noah’s Ararat serves as an enduring parable. Torn between the possibility of integration and the value of Jewish particularity, Ararat was Noah’s third way. Neither an assimilationist nor an isolationist, Noah believed the freedoms of America held the promise of total acceptance, but not at the cost of losing our distinctive faith and identity. In Sarna’s words, Noah was “the first Jew to confront openly . . . the challenge of American freedom.” (p. 159)
Ki tavo, “When you enter the land.” Long before Mordecai Noah, our Torah reading describes a moment when the children of Israel were on the cusp of entering the Promised Land to establish a self-governing Jewish community. First and foremost, the scene signals the fulfillment of the promise first made to Abraham and Sarah, a covenantal identity based on blessing, progeny as numerous the stars of the sky, and yes, land. It is why our Torah reading opens with the anticipated declaration of the pilgrims offering their first fruits: “My father was a wandering Aramean who went down to Egypt . . . was liberated by God’s mighty hand . . . and brought to this land flowing with milk and honey” (Deuteronomy 26:5–9). Genetically speaking, that Israelite pilgrim was as related to that initial wandering Aramean, the patriarch Jacob, as I am to whoever landed at Plymouth Rock. But DNA has little to do with identity. The promise of the land, the hold it has on Jewish identity, then and now, is all that matters. No different than Shabbat, kashrut, or any other pillar of Jewish identity, to be a Jew is to be connected to the Land of Israel.
But the promise of the Promised Land was not just about the covenant, checking off some theological box. Israel’s national identity was first forged at Mount Sinai in the wilderness. Throughout their desert sojourn, the greatest enemies the Israelites faced were hunger, thirst, a few warring tribes, and of course, their own inner demons. But now, in this final book of Deuteronomy, the Israelites are readying for entry into the Land, where they will conquer some inhabitants but live side by side with others. A new question, a new anxiety rears its head: How will Israel balance the tension between integration into the Land and the abiding threat of assimilation? The laws of worship, the prohibitions against intermarriage and foreign ritual, the repeated warnings not to forget God, all are variations on the same question: how to live fully in the world without losing oneself to the world? The blessings of our Torah reading are bestowed upon those who, in the midst of their new neighbors, maintain their identity. The litany of curses is reserved for those who blur the line and engage in foreign practices.
It is a bit like, if not exactly like, how a parent feels when they send their kids off to college. You want your kid to expand their horizons, meet new people, make new friendships, and at the same time, call home, go to the Hillel on campus, find a nice Jewish boy or girl, not forget where they belong. Yes, the Land is the fulfillment of a theological promise; yes, the Land is the establishment of a nation, a refuge and bulwark against enemies. But sociologically speaking, the Land is an anxiety-inducing experiment in identity building. Can the children of Israel embrace the fruits of freedom without allowing those very freedoms to erode the covenantal identity that made them and continues to make them who they are.
This question faced by the Israelites, the balancing act of integration and separation, remains ours to this very day. For a long time, it wasn’t such an active question. The thousands of years in which the Jews were exiled from the Land — our fears were more about antisemitism than assimilation. We may have absorbed elements of our host cultures, but the force of their hatreds for us and our insularity from them kept us distinct. Only relatively recently – with modernity, when our two friends the Enlightenment and emancipation entered the scene – did the question become an active one. As David Kraemer of the Jewish Theological Seminary traces in his recent book on the Jewish diaspora, some Jews circled the wagon, like the early nineteenth- century rabbi the Hatam Sofer, who declared that Jews must not change their names (shemot), their language (lashon) or their dress (malbush) if they were to remain shalem, separate and whole. Others, such as the late past chancellor of JTS Gerson Cohen, held otherwise. In his essay “The Blessing of Assimilation,” Cohen contended not only that Jewish identity has always interacted with our surrounding culture, but that this very cultural exchange is the source of our creativity, continuity, and renewed vitality.
And the debate is not just one between scholars; it plays out in all our lives. Shall we send our kids to Jewish day schools or secular schools? Jewish summer camps, Jew-ish summer camps, or just summer camp? Both the blessing and the challenge of our circumstances in America, and especially in Manhattan, is the sheer surfeit of choices and the absence of immediate consequence. Shall I spend my Shabbat morning at synagogue or Soul Cycle? Volunteer my time and resources at UJA or another non-profit? Take my family to Israel or Iceland? It is not always either/or, but every choice to do one thing is necessarily the choice not to prioritize another. And other than the threat of losing your child’s bar mitzvah date – which any other synagogue would happily pick up – the forces keeping one in the Jewish communal fold are located in one’s conscience and not in some external constraint. And while as a rabbi, I know that the “I told you so” speech is better delivered in my head, one need not be a rabbi to know that the decisions add up. We reap what we sow; our children’s identities are shaped by a million small decisions that add up to a few big ones, at which time, more often than not, it is too late.
All of which brings us back to our friend Mordecai Manuel Noah. In founding Ararat, Noah hoped to build a community in which the freedoms of America could be harnessed to ensure Jewish distinctiveness. Interestingly, in the 1840s, towards the end of his life, Noah shifted his attention away from America to another place: Palestine. Over fifty years before Herzl and a full century before the founding of the State of Israel, Noah wrote: “The Jews are in a most favorable position to repossess . . . the promised land, and organize a free and liberal government.” Noah was a proto-Zionist, perhaps the first modern Zionist, and an American one at that. He never gave up his dream of creating a place where Jews could be fully free to embrace the fullness of what it means to be a Jew.
It is two hundred years later and that dream, that debate, that anxiety is still ours to embrace. There are no plans, so far as I know, for our community to establish a self-governing Jewish enclave in upstate New York. Foundational as Israel is to my being, my Jewish being, like yours, has and will most likely continue to take shape outside of the actual Promised Land. And yet, as we enter this new year, this season of renewal and resolve, we can turn the mirror onto ourselves with a spirit of aspiration and possibility, rather than the could’ve, would’ve, should’ves of yesteryear. We can turn the page and write a new chapter. A self-audit of the choices we have made and resolutions for the choices we will make going forward for ourselves, our children, and our families. The allocation of our time, our resources, and our spirit by which we can live fully in the world without losing ourselves to the world. No different than the Israelites of old, our freedoms are made sacred only insofar as they are leveraged toward strengthening both our Jewish personhood and peoplehood.
Call it Ararat, call it New Jerusalem, call it what you like. Perhaps a physical location, but definitely a spiritual one, rooted in tradition, connected to community, and shaped by the rhythms of Jewish time and practice. May this be a year in which we, too, will revive, renew, and reestablish our Jewish lives.
Cohen, Gerson. “The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History,” delivered as a commencement address at the Hebrew Teachers College in Brookline, Massachusetts in June, 1966. Printed in Gerson D. Cohen, Jewish History and Jewish Destiny. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997.
Jewish Buffalo History Center. Exhibition Pamphlet, “A City of Refuge.”
Kraemer, David. Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.
Sarna, Jonathan D. Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordechai Noah. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980.
Shalev, Eran. American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.