America's Prophet (22 page)

“Many Jews had a sense that the words
Jew
and
Judaism
had negative connotations,” Sarna explained. “The hope was that if you could come up with a more positive term, you would transform the way people would view Jews. I think that Jews also saw that Christians emphasized Jesus, and Moses gave Jews an opportunity to point to a similar figure in Judaism, who of course precedes Jesus, was a human figure, and didn’t claim to be the son of God.”

Exactly when the United States was becoming more religiously diverse, Jews subtly redefined what it meant to be American. Instead of a Christian country, they insisted, America was a
biblical
country. Moses played a key role because he resonated with Protestants and Jews. Jews belonged in the United States, they said, because America and Judaism had the same source: Moses.

In his book
American Judaism,
Sarna discusses how Jews used the holidays of Thanksgiving and Passover to stress that they had played starring roles in the defining moments of American history. The 1922
Reform
hagadah,
the book used during the Passover service, calls for an American flag to be placed on the seder table. “Why?” a child is instructed to ask. “America is the child of the Old Testament,” the leader of the service is told to answer.

Several
hagadah
s even called for Jews to end their seders by singing “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee).” Fitting into America had become such a priority that American Jews not only imported Moses into American celebrations, like Thanksgiving, they exported America back into Moses’ chief celebration, Passover.

Sarna said that Jewish immigrants likely did not know they were continuing a pattern of connecting Moses and America that had been occurring since the 1600s. Still, I asked him how seventeenth-century Protestant separatists, eighteenth-century deist revolutionaries, nineteenth-century enslaved Africans, and twentieth-century Jews could all possibly have the same hero.

“What’s fascinating about America,” he said, “is that it’s much more formless than Europe, therefore its imagery is much more open to be changed and molded. Just look at what Jews contribute to American culture. You’ve got the melting pot, that’s a Jewish idea. You’ve got cultural pluralism, that’s a Jewish idea. Like other groups before them, Jews are able to take an existing culture and help shape it in their image.

“On the other side,” he continued, “the Bible is also formless. The lessons of these stories can be applied in different ways. So Moses became like a Rorschach test. He provided a common text for Americans. Today when we don’t have a common text, it’s very hard for people to realize that once upon a time we did.”

“With Moses so interwoven with the American story by 1900, was his presence a reason America was so hospitable to Jews?” I asked.

He thought for a second. “The problem with that theory is that we certainly know that even early Americans who accepted the biblical story saw Jews as interlopers. The Puritans couldn’t be more Hebraic, but they didn’t make it particularly comfortable for Jews who arrived here. Precisely because they saw themselves as God’s New Israel they were quite ambivalent about Jews who made a similar claim.”

“But if I were going to press this case,” I said, “I’d point out that whether they liked Jews or not, they still laid the foundation that America was built on the Moses story. And once you do that, once Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson say Moses should be on the Great Seal, once the slaves start singing ‘Go Down, Moses,’ you begin to say that standing up to authority, leading people out of oppression into an unknown world, then rebinding them under universal law, are central values of our country. And once that happens, the Jews can come along hundreds of years later and say: ‘Hey, that’s our story! We belong here, too.’ Moses helps force the country into being pluralist whether that had been the Puritans’ original intent or not.”

“I agree,” Sarna said. “You had plenty of places in Europe where the Bible was restricted to the elite. In America, the Bible was made available to everyone. Once that happens, the biblical story becomes much more important here than elsewhere. And it’s not just the Bible; a lot does focus on Moses. Because of his presence, it becomes much easier for Jews to link themselves to America. And it becomes
easier for America to see itself as a pluralistic nation, something that seemed impossible almost everywhere else in the world.”

A FEW DAYS
after I spoke with Professor Sarna, Jews around the world celebrated Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which Leviticus 23 refers to as a day of “self-denial,” designed to achieve expiation before God. My wife and I attended services at Brooklyn Heights Synagogue, which we had recently joined. The sanctuary cannot handle the crowds on the holiest day of the year, so services are held a few blocks from our home at Plymouth Church, the mammoth facility that was built for Henry Ward Beecher in 1850.

The exterior of the building—which was the largest in Brooklyn in Beecher’s day—is lined with red brick. A garden features a statue of Beecher and a bas-relief of Abraham Lincoln, who visited in February 1860. Both works are by Gutzon Borglum, who later sculpted Mount Rushmore. Inside, the Yankee-white sanctuary was designed to enhance Beecher’s dramatic style. Like a theater, it has curved pews, and no center aisle, and the proscenium pulpit is surrounded on three sides—church in the round. Though the windows were undecorated in Beecher’s time, today they are filled with majestic stained glass that tells the history of American religion. Three focus on the Pilgrims: John Robinson launching the
Speedwell,
the signing of the Mayflower Compact, and William Brewster landing on Plymouth Rock. The First Great Awakening is honored with Jonathan Edwards, the Second with Lyman Beecher. Harriet appears with her sister Catharine in a tribute to women’s education. Abraham Lincoln peers down on the pulpit, gripping the Emancipation Proclamation. I whispered to my wife, “It’s the story of my book!”

When the time came for the Torah to be read, the rabbi called the half-dozen new members to the pulpit. He handed me one of
the scrolls and asked me to carry it to the back of the sanctuary, then pass it on. I leaned it against my shoulder, and the velour cover spread warmth across my chest. The rabbi chanted in Hebrew, “This is the Torah that Moses gave to the people of Israel, from the mouth of God.” For a second the blood rushed to my head. I began to walk down a side aisle, and people pushed forward, reaching out a prayer book or the corner of a prayer shawl to kiss the Torah.

Afterward, members of the synagogue took turns chanting the Torah portion for the day—sections of Deuteronomy 29 and 30—which are taken from Moses’ farewell speech to the Israelites on Mount Nebo. “You stand this day, all of you, before the Lord your God,” the passage begins, “to enter into the covenant of the Lord.” The reading ends with Moses’ great admonition to choose good over evil. “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life.” This passage is sometimes referred to as the climax of Israel’s constitution. From John Winthrop to Ronald Reagan, it has become part of America’s national story line.

A rabbinic student, Tom Gardner, discussed Moses’ remarks in his sermon that morning. He talked about whether religion could continue to have a role in a modern society that is dominated by science. “I’ll tell you how bad it is,” he said. “
I
don’t like telling people I’m religious, and I’m studying to be a rabbi!” Gardner noted that in his speech, Moses seems to be saying that “if we listen, if we look, religion will make sense to us.”
See, I have set before you this day
.
If you do not listen…, you will perish
. The Israelites on Mount Nebo should have found it easy to see and hear, he pointed out. Their ancestors had seen God send the plagues and split the Red Sea. They had seen the manna and water pour from rocks. They had heard God speaking from Mount Sinai. But still they doubted God.

Religion, Gardner continued, gives us eyes to see and ears to hear in ways that science simply cannot. “With our scientific eyes we can distinguish between true and false. With our religious eyes we can distinguish between right and wrong. When we see with our religious eyes, we live in a world of meaning.”

After services, my wife and I walked home along the promenade that overlooks the East River and lower Manhattan. The stone esplanade has become something of our backyard. It’s where we let our girls take their first steps out of their strollers, where they began to push dolly strollers of their own, and where we were now teaching them how to ride a scooter. Behind us was the Brooklyn Bridge, with its side-by-side pairings of Gothic arches. In front of us, across New York Harbor, was the Statue of Liberty. Between us was a shimmering boulevard of water.

Water. From the very beginning, I had seen my journey as a tale of water, though I didn’t know quite why. Part of this, no doubt, is the importance of water to the Moses story: his birth in the watery Nile Delta, his rebirth in the wicker basket on the Nile, the pharaoh’s daughter naming him Moses because she “drew him out of the water.” Later, a number of the key events of his life involve water: meeting his wife by a well, leading the Israelites across the Red Sea, being denied entry into the Promised Land for improperly extracting water from the rock. Even his farewell speech in Deuteronomy 30 makes reference to the coming crossing of the Jordan. For a desert people, Moses may have been the ideal leader. He was drawn from water.

One reason Moses resonates so deeply in America may be the importance of water to the American narrative. There are the obvious parallels: the colonists crossing the Atlantic, Washington crossing the Delaware, the slaves crossing the Ohio, the immigrant steamers crossing under Lady Liberty. But beyond that, geography has been
central to American history in ways that are strikingly similar to Israelite history. Both nations were bred in exile, by people who traversed a watery threshold, found a way to survive in the wilderness, and built a society of laws. And that pattern never went away in America. Moses has endured in American culture in large measure because his story spoke to the twenty million immigrants who arrived on America’s shores in the first three decades of the twentieth century as much as it did to the one hundred who landed in Plymouth in 1620.

Moses’ stark warning to his people in Deuteronomy became a kind of national slogan for both Israel and America because it captures the fear, experienced by each generation of outsiders, that by going to such a formless place, they will succumb to formlessness. They will forget the values of their native land and be lured by the worship of false gods. Moses’ message to the Israelites is to remember where they came from—the wilderness. Remember what they formed there—a community of laws. And remember how they survived there—with water.

For the exiles, water becomes more than something to cross in order to get into the wilderness. It becomes a surrogate for their covenant. After his farewell speech, Moses gathers the Israelites one more time, in Deuteronomy 32 and reads a poem to them. It opens with these words:

Stopped short of one final crossing, Moses tries to spread his watery blessing to his people. Like
Liberty,
Moses achieves his ultimate pose on that perch, light emanating from his head, the law in his arms, water beneath his feet.
Liberty
and Moses both stride forward, but both fail to reach their destination. They are beacons of promise precisely because they are unburdened by the compromises that come with the land. And their message is the same: Even when you reach your ultimate destination, don’t forget the obligations that come with your freedom.

A
MERICA’S STREET OF
Dreams, Sunset Boulevard, stretches twenty-two serpentine miles from downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean. In the eastern slums, the road has been renamed Cesar Chavez Avenue to honor the Mexican American union organizer. In the glitzy western highlands, Sunset has seen some of Hollywood’s juicier past: F. Scott Fitzgerald had a heart attack here; Greta Garbo lived here as a recluse; Howard Hughes kept suites here for his various girlfriends; and it was here that Jean Harlow had an affair with Clark Gable while on her honeymoon with someone else. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall lived on Sunset for a time, as did John Wayne, who is said to have kept a cow on his apartment balcony so he could have fresh milk every morning. And 10086 Sunset Boulevard was the address of Norma Desmond, the demented silent film diva who murders her captive boyfriend at the end of
Sunset Boulevard,
before uttering the immortal line, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”

Early one Monday, I was heading toward 8148 Sunset to view the private memorabilia collection of the same Mr. DeMille—Cecil Blount, or C.B. to his friends—whose 1923 and 1956 film extravaganzas
The Ten Commandments
did more to define Moses for twentieth-century Americans than anyone since King James. The two films were also landmarks in how American popular culture reflected and shaped the country’s evolving views of God. DeMille used Moses to promote a specific political agenda—anticommunist, pro-morality. In the process, he helped transform the biblical prophet into the figurehead of a strong-armed, open-minded America that DeMille believed could lead the world to a Promised Land of peace and prosperity. If the twentieth century was America’s century, DeMille tried to turn Moses into its public face.

In many ways, DeMille was working against his times. The undermining of the Bible as the central plank of American life that began in the late nineteenth century did not abate in the early decades of the twentieth century. Even as World War I triggered a temporary surge in faith, and Darwinism and other forms of modernity led to a blossoming of fundamentalism, the Bible continued to recede as the ultimate source of authority in contemporary life. Americans attended church in extraordinary numbers and espoused a near-universal belief in God, but they relied less on the Bible as the chief source of public rhetoric. By the close of the 1930s, one scholar wrote, Americans had grown accustomed to using “a secular rather than theological vocabulary when issues really seemed worth arguing about.”

While this transition might have signaled the disappearance of biblical figures from everyday discourse, something unexpected hap
pened. Moses, along with Jesus and a few others, was decoupled from the Bible and moved into the realm of popular culture. In something akin to their own literary exodus, these figures left the bondage of the biblical narrative and set out into the wilderness of make-believe. Moses, in particular, became a star of American belles lettres. In 2004, Brian Britt, a scholar of religious studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, analyzed every American literary work featuring Moses. He counted thirty-five, from J. H. Ingraham’s novel
The Pillar of Fire
in 1859 to Lynne Reid Banks’s
Moses in Egypt
in 1998. More than half were written between the Civil War and World War II, including novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Graves, and Thomas Mann, an opera, two plays, and several books of poetry. The story lines touch on major themes, from Christian-Jewish relations to Freudian self-discovery. Freud wrote
Moses and Monotheism,
a “historical novel” published in 1939, which portrayed Moses as an Egyptian and claimed that the Israelites murdered him in the desert and sublimated their rebellion, thereby creating Jewish guilt.

Unmoored from the Bible, Moses became a polemical figure in the great debates of the day, which is one reason he stayed relevant. America was once again in a period of spiritual realignment. Could a fictionalized Moses help lead the way?

METROPOLITAN ART STORAGE
may have an address on Sunset Boulevard, but its entrance is on a side street, a block away. I was greeted there by Helen Cohen, a vivacious costume designer who for twenty-five years has been the caretaker of the DeMille estate and the public face of the very private Cecilia Presley, Mr. DeMille’s granddaughter and principal heir. I had to follow a meticulous protocol that seemed one step removed from Buckingham Palace to gain
entry into this inner sanctum of Hollywood royalty. First Helen screened me, then I had to submit an application. In time I was invited to view the collection, then have an audience with Mrs. Presley, who had been on the set of
The Ten Commandments
in Egypt and had a much-discussed love affair with Yul Brynner’s chariot driver.

Helen turned a key and opened the door into a room a little smaller than a one-car garage. It had fluorescent lights and a concrete floor and was covered from floor to ceiling with Hollywood artifacts: dusty plumes, faded trapeze costumes, the occasional chariot wheel, and several Roman helmets. It was like walking into your grandfather’s attic, if your grandfather had directed seventy films, including some of Hollywood’s grandest spectacles—
The Crusades, Samson and Delilah
, and
The Greatest Show on Earth
, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1952. One of the first objects that caught my eye was a corroded Golden Globe that DeMille also won for his circus epic.

For the next hour, Helen pulled objects from the collection and told me about the man dubbed “the Barnum of the movies.” Cecil B. DeMille was born on August 12, 1881, to Henry DeMille, an Episcopal lay minister and playwright from North Carolina, and Matilda Samuel, a Sephardic Jew who converted to her husband’s faith. In his autobiography, DeMille lingers over the $175 college scholarship his father received from a society to promote religion. “When I sign the contracts involving millions of dollars,” he wrote, for
The King of Kings,
about Jesus, or
The Ten Commandments,
“and still more when I receive letters from all over the world, witnessing the religious values of these pictures…I like to think the good men who voted that grant might not be displeased.” He fondly remembered his father teaching Bible classes in their home every Sunday and reading a chapter of the Old and New Testaments every night. But nowhere in his book does DeMille reveal that his mother was Jewish.

After dabbling in acting, DeMille joined with playwright Jesse Lasky and producer Sam Goldwyn in 1908 to enter the nascent film industry. They went on to pioneer a number of screen inventions, from indoor lighting to publicizing stars to the sneak preview. But DeMille became best known for using the big screen to promote biblical morality. His fifty-first film, the silent
Ten Commandments,
produced in 1923 for the staggering cost of $1.4 million, was his initial foray into religious spectacle. The film uses the story of Moses as a prologue to a modern parable in which two brothers have differing attitudes toward the Ten Commandments.

DeMille was part of a new wave of writers and artists trying to use the Bible to effect social change. As early as the 1890s, ministers began advocating the so-called prosperity gospel, which suggested that the Bible wanted you to be rich. Soon, biblical figures were turned into Horatio Alger–style models of success. In 1925 advertising honcho Bruce Barton published
The Man Nobody Knows,
depicting Jesus as the ultimate entrepreneur and Moses as a cunning executive.
The Man Nobody Knows
was the number four best-selling book of 1925 and the number one best-selling book of the following year. It earned Barton a coveted job as a consultant to Cecil B. DeMille. In 1927 the popular
Notebook of Elbert Hubbard
claimed that Moses was the ultimate adman. “Out of all the Plenipotentiaries of Publicity, Ambassadors of Advertising, and Bosses of Press Bureaus, none equals Moses.” That same year, the Metropolitan Casualty Life Insurance Company published the lavishly illustrated
Moses, Persuader of Men,
a book that called Moses “one of the greatest salesmen and real-estate promoters that ever lived.”

Yet capitalists weren’t the only ones to embrace Moses as their hero. Communists did, too. The left’s answer to the prosperity gospel began with the social gospel. It was based on the idea that in the exploding business climate many Americans were being left behind.
In 1906, Charles Reynolds Brown, a Congregational preacher, wrote
The Social Message of the Modern Pulpit,
which presented Moses as the ultimate advocate for the poor against the robber barons. He even labeled John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil the “modern pharaoh.” Brown homed in on Moses’ line to the pharaoh; “Let my people go.” “The very heart of the whole industrial question is contained in that brief sentence,” he wrote.

The most extraordinary use of Moses during this time came from Lincoln Steffens, the celebrated muckraking journalist. In 1919 Steffens visited Russia and returned to make the infamous comment “I have seen the future and it works.” In 1926 he published
Moses in Red,
which identified the Exodus as the model for revolution and Moses as the archetypical revolutionary leader. “Think of Moses as the uncompromising Bolshevik; Aaron as the more political Menshevik; take Pharaoh as the ruler who stands for the Right, and the children of Israel as the people—any people. Read the book of Moses thus and they will appear as a revolutionary classic.” For a figure whom Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams once proposed to grace the seal to be a plausible candidate for the founding father of modern communism suggests he was the only one who could sell a new social movement to Americans. The Bible may have been under assault, but Moses was still the go-to figure of choice.

In 1923, DeMille viewed Moses as a perfect vessel to restore America’s values. His was not
Moses in Red,
it was
Moses in Red, White, and Blue
. Moses had been a film favorite since the earliest days of the medium. In 1907 the Pathé company made
Moses and the Exodus from Egypt,
and in 1909 the Vitagraph Company spent fifty thousand dollars on a five-reel version of Moses’ life. At a time when theaters were still considered places of sin, the film industry embraced biblical story lines to show that they could be virtuous and should be
allowed to have screenings on Sundays. DeMille got the idea for his film from a contest Paramount Pictures drummed up to solicit subjects. An oil manufacturer from Michigan wrote and suggested a tribute to biblical values. His letter began, “You cannot break the Ten Commandments—they will break you.” As DeMille recalled, “Here was a theme that stirred and challenged in me the heritage of being Henry DeMille’s son, a theme that brightened memories of his reading the Bible aloud to us and teaching his sons that the laws of God are not mere laws, but are the Law.”

Filmed in black-and-white, the 1923
Ten Commandments
is presented in two parts. The first relates the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt, their trek across the desert, and their receipt of the Decalogue. The Exodus scenes were filmed in the sand dunes of Guadalupe, California, and DeMille transported hundreds of Orthodox Jews from New York, because he believed that “in appearance and in their deep feeling of the significance of the Exodus, they would give the best possible performance as the Children of Israel.” But on their first day on set, the extras were forced to fast because the commissary served ham for dinner.

The bulk of the film focuses on a modern family. One brother keeps the commandments and is rewarded; the other is a cheat, has an adulterous affair, and listens to jazz on the Sabbath. When his mother reprimands him, he announces, “We’ll break all of your old Ten Commandments, we’ll finish rich and powerful with the world at our feet!” But when he builds a church with cheap materials, the church crumbles and kills his mother. Her dying words could have come from Henry Ward Beecher: “It’s all my fault. I taught you to fear God instead of love Him—and LOVE is all that counts.”

At the height of Jazz Age flamboyance, Cecil B. DeMille tried to reclaim the importance of law and morality. His Moses was not a radical figure, nor was he a beacon of antiauthoritarianism as he had
been for the Pilgrims, slaves, and immigrants. Instead, he was an authority figure. Gone was the emphasis on the liberation of Exodus; now the focus was on the stern dictates of the Ten Commandments. As the film’s opening cards put it:

THE FURTHER WE
dug into the shelves at the back of Metropolitan Storage, the more interesting the items became. Helen Cohen directed me to two black, 1950s-style snap-ring binders that looked like the ones my mother uses to collect recipes. They were DeMille’s personal casting books in which he chronicled every film he watched, every screen test he viewed, and every interview he conducted. His secretaries typed up his whims in different-colored ink, at a time when that meant changing ribbons on their typewriters.

“James Stewart: 9 August 1950, Screened
Winchester ’73,
originally Mr. DeMille had discussed him for the part of Coco in
The Greatest Show on Earth,
but after seeing him in this thought he could play Brad.” (Stewart was eventually cast as the clown.)

“Natalie Wood. 21 September 1950. Screened
Our Very Own
. You thought the little girl, about 11 years old, was very good and wanted to be reminded of her.”