Claiming Exodus: Whose promised land?

I've been curious about what's happening with the New Center for Arts & Culture, which is the Jewish organization that is attempting to construct a kind of intellectual center along the lines of New York's 92d Street Y here in Boston, so this afternoon I swung by a symposium the New Center was sponsoring called "Promised Land: Exodus and America.'' The program was co-sponsored by Nextbook.

At the moment, the New Center is closer to dream than reality -- as with other building projects planned for the Rose Kennedy Greenway, no shovelfuls of dirt have yet been turned -- so the sessions took place at a lecture hall in Northeastern University's West Village. About eighty folks attended the talk I saw, which featured Harvard English Professor Elisa New interviewing Boston University Religion Department Chairman Stephen Prothero and the writer/critic Adam Kirsch about adaptations (co-optations?) of the Exodus story by the Pilgrims, by Mormons, and by African-Americans.

Kirsch explored the appropriation of the Exodus story by Puritan preachers like John Winthrop, who explicitly depicted America as the promised land (later interpreters saw George Washington as Moses, or Joshua). Prothero talked about how Mormons saw Brigham Young as Moses and the Salt Lake Valley as the promised land, and about how African Americans saw Martin Luther King Jr. as Moses and the North, or simply an egalitarian United States, as the promised land. Interestingly, although those who established America read themselves as the Jews fleeing the Egypt that was the British Empire, Mormons and African-Americans later came to identify themselves with the Jews and saw the United States as Egypt.

A few thoughts struck me as particularly provocative. Prothero suggested that American national uses of the Exodus metaphor faded after the Civil War, and he seemed to connect that to the rise of an evangelical Christianity that was more personal, and more Jesus-centered, than the communal and God-the-Father-centered Christianity of early Americans. He noted that at the time of his death, Lincoln (who died just before reaching the promised land of freedom) was sometimes compared to Moses, but that later comparisons to Jesus (Lincoln was killed on Good Friday) became more common.

New and Kirsch both talked about a lack of identification with the Exodus story by contemporary American Jews -- "what astounds me is that Jews don't seem to want it," New said -- which they suggested was linked to ambivalence about whether the United States or Israel is the promised land. "If America is the promised land, what does that say about our relationship to the original Promised Land," Kirsch asked. Prothero took that idea further, saying, "The obvious answer is Jews in America can't read themselves into the story as clearly as blacks can, or Puritans can, or Mormons can. You have a problem: You have a Promised Land, and this isn't it. So the story gets taken over.''

(Image from Nextbook.)