In a topsy turvy world, antisemitism has burgeoned, incidents of Jew hatred have exploded over the past two years, and a pervasive sense of being threatened, demonized, and caricatured haunts many of us. It is precisely at such times that we resist the temptation to catastrophize. We must mobilize to fight the hate and distortions, yes. But we also would do well to remember the many ways we Jews continue to enjoy a unique and positive role in America, and to use that asset for the benefit of all.

A story from a couple years ago will help drive the point home. Most years, the ordination of the Ziegler ordination is held on a Monday night. But the only thing more powerful than this unbroken tradition is my daughter, Shira, who that year graduated from Ithaca College, which you know is in upstate New York. A piece of advice to Los Angeles parents, if you want to be sure that your children move home after college: send them somewhere very, very cold and very, very rural. 

But here’s what I want to share with you about Ithaca College and its graduation ceremony. There are not a lot of our people there, if you know what I mean. Like there’s basically no landsmen, no MOTs. At that graduation ceremony, I saw only one kippah, and that was only when I took aerial selfies. Of course, being a Jew in a place where there are not many Jews leads people to respond to you in unusual and piquant ways. 

Like, for instance, at a gathering of the women’s crew team on which my daughter is a coxswain, (that’s the person who shouts at everybody else).  She turned a lifelong character default into a valuable leadership asset. Somebody from across the room saw my kippah and felt the need to tell me that they’ve always loved the Jewish people. In fact, they assured me, they teach in a school, and every year in December they make a point of bringing one of those candelabra. And they teach people about Hanukkah as well as Christmas because it’s so important that we should all love each other, isn’t it? 

And it is. 

But my favorite moment of the graduation ceremony came about as a result of the College honoring with an honorary doctorate, the remarkable playwright Tony Kushner. 

He was given five minutes to speak, and he stuck to his deadline. His talk was brilliant and brief. At the reception afterwards, someone came over to me and told me that they were 79-years-old and they had never heard a better graduation speech. And I said, “yeah, it was pretty good.” They looked at me with some confusion, then told me their name. So I responded with my own, “Brad Artson.” And he brushed it off, now with some annoyance. 

Then he proceeded to tell me that he’s a great admirer of my plays. 

Now, I’m a rabbi, so my job is to let people believe what they want. So I just responded by noting that the concept of that angel with wings was a stroke of luck. 

But here’s the serious lesson I learned from my time in upstate New York: We Jews are a strange and exotic creature. We are odd, we are unusual, we are slightly magical, and we are wonderful. This gentleman came up to me with genuine affection and admiration for us. (He just couldn’t tell us apart).

The question that his assessment of us raises is what is the appropriate set of values and practices to cultivate a Judaism that is also strange, slightly weird, magical and wonderful. That is where our strength and vitality remain. It is where they have always been found.

There are some voices out in the world, Jewish and Gentile, who try to force us to cower in fear, to hide behind a Judaism of boxes and walls, a Judaism on retreat, a defensive sort of Judaism in which we put our energy into trying to minimize our losses. 

But that’s not the Judaism that those sincere and well-meaning people looked at me and saw. They saw weird, and wonderful, and magical. So, my invitation to us all is: can we rise to give them what they want? Can we live a Judaism that is open and bold and boundary-crossing and brave and world- shattering and world-shaping? 

Can we offer the world a Judaism that does not cower in fear, that does not assume a defensive posture, but proudly speaks to the world because we have wisdom, community, and vision that the world still needs?

Can we offer the world a Judaism that does not cower in fear, that does not assume a defensive posture, but proudly speaks to the world because we have wisdom, community, and vision that the world still needs?

We are not alone. The model exists in our own Scripture. I think of Joseph in Egypt being that expansive Jew. Imagine the stories he was told! And he was one shrewd visionary who achieved some remarkable breakthroughs. I think of our Queen Esther and how she was able to mobilize our people and to bring allies to the table to fight an unjust decree. 

And I think of the greatest of them all, our Rabbi Moses, who wandered in diaspora his entire life saying the corrupt power of pharaohs always will crumble, so long as we are willing to march out and to split seas. The example of Moses reminds us, don’t stand too close to the palace. Don’t become attached to the glory and the pomp. It will fall. But we, a people wandering, pledged to a God we do not see with our eyes, but intuit with our hearts, graced with an ancient text of love, justice, and yearning, we will see the empires rise and crumble and rise and crumble and will outlast them.  But only if we are true to who we are meant to be.

I think of the values that move us in the world and that I hope move you as well. “Some trust in chariots, some in horses, but we devote ourselves to the Holy One, our God. “

I think again of Joseph. “Now therefore, let Pharaoh select someone discreet and wise. And Pharaoh said to his servants, can we find such a one as this, a person in whom the Spirit of God resides?” Discreet and wise and filled with the Spirit of God, that is who we are called to be. That is who we are invited to be. That is what the world expects us to be. We betray ourselves and our friends when we allow ourselves to be made into a tinsel Pharaoh, into some cheap version of Empire, when we hide behind the convenient illusions of coercion, injustice, or domination. 

We become a poor version of something we are not. We are the grateful heirs of thousands of years of diaspora living. We celebrate with our brothers and sisters the resurgence of Jewish life in the Land of Israel, and its work to attain a just settlement for Israelis and for Palestinians for democracy and for security in our land. Israel is at the center of our souls, but we are here. And we must turn to our roots, to those great models of diaspora life, 

• Who knew enough to rely on wisdom and not coercion. 

• Who were able to rely on resilience rather than retribution. 

• Who excelled in learning and in compassion. 

• Whose patience was one of limitless depth of faith and of hope. 

As we approach the days of Hannukah, the holiday of sharing our Light, I bless each of us that we should resolve to represent to the world a Torah that is a source of wisdom not only for our own but for all peoples. A tradition that is a source of justice, not only for our tribe, but for all tribes and for the tribeless. I bless us that we should be a source and a channel for holiness, both for those with faith and those whose faith has been wounded and damaged and left behind. 

And finally, I invite you to live the vision of our prophet Isaiah, to become truly “a beacon to the nations,” so that in the Judaism we breathe and live and walk, the world will know through us greater light, greater justice, and greater peace.

Rabbi Dr Bradley Artson, a Contributing Writer to the Jewish Journal, is the Abner and Roslyn Dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and Vice President of American Jewish University. He is also Rabbinic Leader for the Abraham Joshua Heschel Seminar, training Conservative/Masorti Rabbis for Europe.

Ever since Joseph, coat torn, was tossed into that fateful pit by his brothers in the book of Genesis, the Twelve Tribes of Israel have never fully reconciled. Benjamin, Naftali, Issachar, Judah and Co.’s descendants squabbled over subsequent biblical books, leading to a divided Israelite kingdom shortly after the reign of King Solomon. Ten of the tribes were exiled by the Assyrians during the 8th century BCE and lost to assimilation within the vast empire. Only two – Judah and Benjamin – remained as identifiably Israelite over subsequent centuries.

Tradition believed that should those lost Ten Tribes be found, the reunification would signal the start of the Messianic Era. 

A long-forgotten theory, unmentioned in the latest debate over Christopher Columbus’ Jewish origins, is that with the discovery of the Americas, the hope quickly emerged that the New World’s Natives might in fact be these long-vanished Jews. 

In 1650 in Spanish and two years later in English, the popular Amsterdam-based Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel published his book “Mikveh Yisrael” (“The Hope of Israel”). It reflected the Messianic hopes swirling in his time, spurred in the Dutch Republic as Ashkenazi Jews reunited there with their once-distant Iberian Sephardic coreligionists. As Lipika Pelham has written, ben Israel’s community, inspired by the coming together of those who had been apart for centuries, believed that “perhaps the Jewish wandering, the aspiration of the previous Diasporas, had reached its completion. The next and final step would be the Jews’ return to the land of their ancestors.” In “Mikveh Yisrael,” ben Israel cites the findings of a crypto-Jew named Antonio de Montezinos, whom he had met. The itinerant Portuguese-born Montezinos claimed to have bumped into members of the tribe of Reuben in the northern Andes, in modern-day Colombia after escaping the Inquisition in 1639. In his travelogue, he recounted how these Natives could recite the Shema prayer in Hebrew and told him, much to his surprise, “‘Our Fathers are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ … then they joined Reuben adding another finger to the former three” that they had lifted up in counting off their biblical-era ancestors.

Enthralled by this discovery, Rabbi ben Israel saw prophetic potential. After all, he claimed, once Jews settled in the corners of the world, the Messiah would swiftly arrive, based on the verse in Deuteronomy, “Then the Lord will scatter you among all the nations, from one end of the earth to the other.” Ben Israel even used this argument to encourage the Lord Protector of the British Commonwealth Oliver Cromwell to allow the exiled Jews back into England. After all, England, “land of the angles,” was believed to be one such corner of the globe. The country’s name in French translates to Angleterre – end of the land.

Ben Israel wasn’t alone in his belief, as the Americas had sparked millennial expectations in Christianity as well. As the historian Elizabeth Fenton has documented in her “Old Canaan in a New World,” the Puritan Edward Winslow, in his 1649 work “The Glorious Progress of the Gospel Amongst the Indians in New England,” saw his community’s role in spreading their faith to the Natives as helping them return to their biblical roots. 

Roughly a decade later, the English Presbyterian minister Thomas Thorowgood published a similarly-minded tract, “Jews in America; or Probabilities, that those Indians are Judaical.” It was inspired by Rabbi ben Israel’s writings. He listed, among other purported commonalities: “They constantly anoint their heads, as did the Jews … They delight exceedingly in dancing … eate no swines flesh tis hateful to them as it was among the Jewes” (sic) and “The Indian women are easily delivered of their children, without Midwives, as those in Exod. 1.19,” a reference to Shiphrah and Puah’s explanation to Pharaoh as to why they hadn’t killed Jewish male babies in the delivery room. Alas, the Judaic origins of the Natives weren’t necessarily to their credit. “The Jews were a sinful people,” Thorowgood wrote, “the Indians were and are transcendent sufferers.” It would be, in his opinion, Christianity that would redeem them.

The Hebraic Indian theory was considered by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams.  Jefferson mentioned that he had read a work by the historian James Adair that “believed all the Indians of America to be descended from the Jews: the same laws, usages, rites & ceremonies, the same sacrifices, priests, prophets, fasts and festivals, almost the same religion, and that they all spoke Hebrew.” Jefferson cautioned, however, “his book contains a great deal of real instruction on its subject, only requiring the reader to be constantly on his guard against the wonderful obliquities of his theory.” 

Adair’s book, “The History of the American Indians,” had been published in 1775, based on the recommendation by Benjamin Franklin to the publisher. Its support for the Judaic origins of the Indians included claims such as the Natives calling God “Yohewah,” which sounds like the ineffable name of the Jewish God, and the “Cheerake” (sic) observing the biblical law of offering cities of refuge to accidental murders “so inviolably; as to allow their beloved town the privilege of protecting a wilful murtherer.” Adair also noted what struck him as observance of the “Mosaic laws of uncleanliness,” with women separating themselves from their husbands for a certain period every month, and “their frequent bathing, or dipping themselves or their children in rivers, even in the severest weather,” which, in his opinion, “seems to be as truly Jewish, as the other rites and ceremonies which have been mentioned.”

The theory was taken so seriously that the Founding Father Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, acting as a medical advisor to the expedition of Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark in 1803, supplied the adventurers with a list of exploratory questions, including “What Affinity between [Native American] religious Ceremonies and those of the Jews?”

Other Christians saw in the Native tribes not lost Israelites but to-be-defeated Canaanites, from whom the Children of Israel had conquered the Promised Land. In a representative example, Yale College president and Congregationalist minister Timothy Dwight IV, in his 1785 poem “The Conquest of Canaan,” described the mission of the Christian Americans to subdue the native pagan peoples through the biblical prism of Israel’s defeat of the also-pagan Canaan.

Nineteenth century America’s most famous Jew held firm to his hope that the Hebraic Indian theory was true. In 1837 the former diplomat, popular playwright and journalist Mordecai Manuel Noah published “Discourses on the Evidences of the American Indians Being the Descendants of Lost Tribes of Israel.” In it he listed as supporting evidence “their belief in one God,” “the computation of time by their ceremonies of the new moon,” “their divisions of the year in four seasons, answering to the Jewish festivals of the feast of flowers, the day of atonement, the feast of the tabernacle, and other religious holydays,” “the erection of a temple after the manner of our temple, and having an ark of the covenant, and also the erection of altars,” and “the division of the nation into tribes with a chief or grand sachem at their head.”  

Nineteenth century America’s most famous Jew held firm to his hope that the Hebraic Indian theory was true. 

Noah concluded: “… in their daily prayers and sacrifices, in their festivals, in their burials, in the employment of mourners, and in their general belief, I see a close analogy and intimate connection, with all the ceremonies and laws which are observed by the Jewish people; making a due allowance for what has been lost, and misunderstood, in the course of upwards of 2000 years.” 

A few years earlier, Noah, embracing America’s emergence as a land premised on biblical covenants, had attempted to build a homeland for the Jews in upstate New York. He invited the nascent Jewish community to join, alongside their coreligionists in Europe, who, Noah believed, would come to escape European antisemitism. They would be joined by, naturally, the Native Americans. In language echoing ben Israel’s two centuries before, he proclaimed, “If, as I have reason to believe, our lost brethren were the Ancestors of the Indians of the American Continent, the inscrutable decrees of the Almighty have been fulfilled in spreading unity and omnipotence in every corner of the globe.” If all these scattered Jews could come together on his island near Buffalo, “what joy to our people, what glory to our God, how clearly the prophecies have been fulfilled … how providential our deliverance.” Alas, nothing came of Noah’s initiative, and Jewish national renewal would have to wait until 1948.

By the second half of the 19th century, as the U.S. hurtled towards the Civil War, national interests had swayed from pondering the potential ancient origins of the land’s original settlers. The whereabouts of Israel’s Ten Tribes settled back into the sands of history. But at least for a time, Americans had believed that Naftali and Issachar’s descendants could be found right next door.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”