ABSTRACT
It was a peculiar way to start a religion. The first words God spoke to the first Jew were not some majestic declaration of God’s presence, power or oneness, but a pithy command to migrate: ‘Lekh lekha me-artzekha umi-moladetekha umi-beit avikha. Ve-e’eskha le-goy gadol…’ (Go forth from your country, your birthplace and your father’s household. And I shall make you into a great nation.) Two words, three syllables, and the Jewish people were on their way. They have never stopped moving. Indeed, an entire sidra of the Tora is devoted to chronicling the early migrations: ‘vayis’u….vayahanu’ (and they went forth…and they encamped) becomes a kind of motto of the Israelites and their descendants. Their formative experiences are connected with migration: the formation of the nation in Egypt, the acceptance of the Tora while wandering in the Sinai, the entry into Canaan to form a sovereign nation and state, and then the exile and formation of a diaspora people. When other peoples of the ancient Near East disappeared, the Jews survived, probably because they made their religion portable and did not differentiate between religion and nationality until modern times. Though some places were designated as sacred and the land itself was deemed holy, Jews did not generally make a fetish of particular locales. Jerusalem was preserved in Yavne, Sura in Cordova, Pumpeditha in Volozhin and, most recently, Slobodka in New York and Jerusalem. It is little wonder that the classic texts of Jews are in various languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Yiddish and others.
