Bruce Feiler: June 2008 Archives

The AJC says the number is at 150,000 in the U.S. alone -- and rising. The paper profiles a former evangelical couple who are making the conversion. "For a black male to put on a kipah and go wandering around in a predominately black community, you get the strangest looks," said Pamela Harris.

Highland, where Pamela Harris works as the senior nonclerical staff member, at least eight of the roughly 20 people learning about Judaism with Rabbi Hillel Norry are black.

At the Marcus Jewish Community Center in Dunwoody, roughly 20 percent of the nearly two dozen people enrolled in Steven Chervin's introduction to Judaism classes are black.

Although there are no sound statistics on the subject, anecdotal evidence suggests that, in the past 15 years, increasing numbers of black Americans are exploring Judaism, said Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research in San Francisco.

"Ten years ago, it was almost unheard of that a black person would come in and want to convert," said Rabbi Ilan Feldman, who is working with the Harrises and two other black people pursuing conversion.

Jesse Jackson on Barack Obama: “I cried all night. I’m going to be crying for the next four years,” he said. “What Barack Obama has accomplished is the single most extraordinary event that has occurred in the 232 years of the nation’s political history. ... The event itself is so extraordinary that another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance.”

John Lewis, the only living person to have spoken at the lectern the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, on what King would have thought: “He would have been very, very pleased. He probably would have said, ‘Hallelujah!’”

Jim Clyburn: “I thought this day would come, but I didn’t think I’d live to see it. I got home, and I was so emotional I couldn’t feel myself. I was numb.” He poured himself a Jack Daniels and Diet Coke and watched Obama speak.

And my favorite line, from a reader of Andrew Sullivan: "Tomorrow I will go to the African American cemetery outside of Chicago where my great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, neighbors, and my mother and father are buried. And I will tell them that they were right -- that if we studied hard, worked hard, kept the faith, fought for justice, prayed, that this day would come.

And it has."

No Moses at AIPAC this morning, but Joshua! "Together, we can join our voices together, and in doing so make even the mightiest of walls fall down."

And a life narrative that aligns his story with the great Jewish story -- and the great American story -- the search for the Promised Land.

I first became familiar with the story of Israel when I was eleven years old. I learned of the long journey and steady determination of the Jewish people to preserve their identity through faith, family and culture. Year after year, century after century, Jews carried on their traditions, and their dream of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds.

The story made a powerful impression on me. I had grown up without a sense of roots. My father was black, he was from Kenya, and he left us when I was two. My mother was white, she was from Kansas, and I’d moved with her to Indonesia and then back to Hawaii. In many ways, I didn’t know where I came from. So I was drawn to the belief that you could sustain a spiritual, emotional and cultural identity. And I deeply understood the Zionist idea - that there is always a homeland at the center of our story.

Three-year-olds can't really know, but I tried to tell my daughters at breakfast what this morning really means: That anybody can grow up to be president of the United States. That anything really is possible. That pyramids can be flipped.

I know that he's not president yet; that she (the first woman!) is not going to be president; and that many Americans are apprehensive about what just happened in the Democratic primary. Yesterday I spoke to a deeply Christian Republican in Indiana who grumbled about who Obama was hanging around with in Chicago. We all know the attacks are coming. He seems to have been so careful about what he did and who he hung out with and how he dressed and what he took from the different cultures of his life. How could he not have been more careful about who he hung out with? Didn't he know it would come back to haunt him? As a Southerner, I'm afraid my personal theory is that he may not have truly understood the depth of the racism and resentment that would face him when he got outside of Kansas, Hawaii, Cambridge, New York, and Chicago. It's different in the places where slaves used to life. It just is.

But that's not the part of slavery that today is about: Today is about the triumph over slavery. Today is about looking at a situation in the world in which one is oppressed, or ghettoized, or despairing, or hopeless, and realizing that there is a rival narrative. There is an alternative. And make no mistake, that view -- the central narrative of revolution, the central premise of America -- comes directly from the Bible. Specifically, it comes from the story of Moses.

Moses is the one who created the template for how to escape from slavery. Moses is the one who wrote the script for how to stand up to tyranny, how to carve out a claim for human dignity and social justice, how to look up at an authority figure who offers no escape, reach out to a higher authority, and take the first steps to a better future. For 400 years, Americans have tapped into that story -- Columbus quoted it; the Pilgrims invoked it; Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams proposed it for the seal of the United States; slaves sung it on the Underground Railroad; Lincoln echoed it; the Statue of Liberty reflected it; Martin Luther King tapped into it; and now Barack Obama is once more bringing it to the fore of American public life.

At times he has made his debt to Moses public -- as he did last year in Selma -- but last night it was more subtle. He stitched some wounds in St. Paul. Quoted the founders and Lincoln (the last at least twice, I believe). Brought up Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy. He was trying to innoculate himself against the patriotism charge. He even wore a flag pin. But he didn't, at least on my first read and hearing it live on television, quote the Bible. That's another wound he has (the Muslim shadow and the Wright cloud), and my one criticism of an otherwise stirring, properly sternly delivered (impressive that he didn't gloat), and emotional appearance is that he could do with a bit more biblical imagery. The kids in the audience may not recognize it; the punditry will surely miss it; and most people will not care. But a lot of people will hear it and take note.

So bravo to the return of the Exodus narrative in American life.

And more Moses, please, Mr. Obama.

BTW: For those of you who are new to FeilerFaster, the connection between Moses and America is the subject of my new book, AMERICA'S PROPHET: Moses and the Spirit of a Nation, which will be published early next year.

From a NYT profile of Lee Child:

He is the sort of person who carefully outlines his replies, explaining that there are three reasons for this or two causes of that, and he has a mind that’s a midden of trivia. He knows why watches in ads are always set at 8 minutes past 10, for example (too complicated to explain), and while watching the Britney Spears Pepsi commercial during the Super Bowl a few years ago, he saw instantly how “Pepsi Cola” is an anagram for “Episcopal” and “Britney Spears” an anagram for “Presbyterians.”