Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig: Always on the Move: The Jewish People’s “Sauce” for Success
The past two years have seen an increase in the number of Israelis moving overseas. A reason to worry? Hardly. Jews moving from one place to another (even from their national “home”) has been going on for the past 3500 years.
Indeed, the very start of the Jewish People as a nation is found in this past week’s Torah portion: Lekh Lekha, roughly translated as “Start walking.” Turns out, as banal as that Torah parsha’s name sounds, it’s the secret sauce not only for the Jewish People’s longevity, but also in large part to its huge success in so many walks of life.
Abram’s departure from Ur Casdim (today’s Iraq) to trek all the way to Canaan (stopping in Haran, today’s Syria) constitutes the archetype of Jewish movement – setting a pattern that has been repeated throughout the ages. Moreover, once he reached Canaan, he didn’t stay put, sojourning to Egypt and then back again to Canaan. His grandson Jacob also left home to find a wife far away, only to return home after twenty years.
Moses’s story is even more well-known: escaping from Egypt to Midian, then returning to Egypt, and finally leading the exodus through forty years of wandering in the desert with the newly formed Israelite nation.
These biblical migrations were transformative – repeated numerous times in the following three thousand plus years of movement in and out of the Holy Land: in the 6th century BCE from Israel to Babylon and (only some of them) back; the ensuing centuries saw mass voluntary migrations to Egypt and other parts of the Middle East (as far as Rome and Spain); and so on through the next two millennia, with Jews finding a temporary “home” in dozens of places around the world, frequently moving from one to another every century or so.
To be sure, lots of this migration was due to oppression – but just as many Jews moved for the purpose of personal betterment, whether economic or otherwise. The greatest sage of this medieval period, Maimonides, migrated several times to different countries: from Cordoba (Spain) to Fez (Morocco), then to Acre, Jerusalem, and Hebron (Palestine), and finally to Cairo (Egypt).
By the modern era, not only were Jews to be found almost everywhere, but their dispersion led to the creation of several Jewish “sub-cultures”: Ashkenazi (Europe), with sub-sub-groups (Litvak and Galician); Sephardi (Spain and environs), and Edot Ha’Mizrakh (whose very name – the “eastern communities” – represents a high level of intra-cultural differentiation). Not to mention smaller diaspora communities: Ethiopian Jewry, Bnei Menashe (India), etc.
It is here that we find the secret(s) of Jewish success – involving two central elements. First, dispersion. We all have been taught “don’t put your eggs in one basket.” Over the centuries, the Jews certainly haven’t. As a (macabre) thought experiment, imagine for a moment all of world Jewry living in Europe in the 1940s. Better not to think about it – not only because such a situation for world Jewry would have been even more calamitous than it actually was, but because it would have been a total anomaly in Jewish history: such a demographic concentration had not occurred in the past 2700 years! Indeed, there was almost never a period in ancient, medieval, or modern history where all Jews suffered persecution or danger everywhere at the same time. Many Jewish “eggs” would break, but others remained intact in their geographic shell.
If such constant migration ensured Jewish physical survival, it also led to cultural efflorescence through what can best be called “adaptive adoption.” Wherever they went, Jews were influenced by the general culture. A few examples (among many) will suffice here. The Ten Commandments are highly similar to those laws found in the Code of Hammurabi (where Abram came from); names of the “Hebrew” calendar months are Babylonian (either deities, or natural seasonal events); even the fur-capped “Shtreimel” worn by the ultra-Orthodox on Jewish holidays was taken from the 16th-century Polish aristocracy.
However, very few foreign practices were swallowed wholesale by Jews; rather, they were filtered through a Jewish religio-cultural lens. Nevertheless, there is no denying the inclusion and metamorphosis of Gentile customs into the Jewish way of life. To return once more to Maimonides: his ultra-rational and even “scientific” approach to Judaism was Aristotelian through and through – without any apologizing on his part.
The modern world has come around to understanding that both elements – dispersion through migration and mutual intellectual fertilization – are the key to survival and flourishing. After all, birds, salmon, whales et al – they all migrate thousands of miles to stay alive. As for us, humanity only started to become true homo sapiens sapiens (speech, culture etc.) when migrating out of Africa some 70,000 years ago.
In our modern world, countries with the greatest mix of peoples tend to be the most successful. Notwithstanding Trump’s policies against immigration and for economic isolationism, it was mass migration that always made America great; indeed, last year 46% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants! (https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/new-american-fortune-500-2024/) Perhaps the most famous Jewish example of this: virtually all the great movie studios in the early 20th century were set up by Jewish immigrants (they established “Hollywood”). That also explains why immigrant-heavy Israel has become the “Startup Nation.”
What does all this mean for Israel and Zionism? For one, we shouldn’t get too uptight about Israelis leaving the country – just as we ought not to be overly surprised by even greater numbers of Jews who have immigrated to Israel over the years. In both directions, that’s simply the “Jewish” way of living.
Perhaps, then, Lekh Lekha doesn’t really mean “start walking” but rather a far more productive: “get going.” Abra(ha)m and his progeny certainly would have agreed.
