Travel

"Life is a journey," we are often told, and summer is a season of journeying. In a unique way, this is a particularly Jewish activity, and the vacations we take now actually have significant precedents in history.

You see, our people have a long and varied tradition of travel. We might not see it that way from the inside, of course, because so much of it has been involuntary in nature, but it’s true nonetheless. We began as the descendants of "a wandering Aramean," the patriarch Jacob. The very name "Hebrew", our first appellation, was given because we came to town from "across the river Jordan," ever haYarden. In one sense or another we have been traveling men and women ever since.

In our earliest days as a nation we wandered through the Sinai Wilderness for 40 years, following Moses in our quest for the Promised Land, and for centuries, and even millennia, we have moved from land to land and nation to nation seeking the same thing. At the time of the Babylonian Exile, we journeyed to Mesopotamia (Iraq), Iran, Egypt, Anatolia, and India, establishing communities that remain today, over 2500 years later. In Roman times, Jews traveled throughout the Mediterranean world, from North Africa to Italy to the Balkans, establishing a fertile Diaspora life throughout what was then the known world. In the Middle Ages, Jewish travelers transited the unknown world of Asia as well, moving regularly from Spain to China, bringing products and knowledge from the farthest east to the very ends of the west, creating trading posts and communities along four different routes and serving as the only bridge between the warring Christian and Moslem worlds.

In the centuries that followed, Jews moved from one European country to another, creating new centers of culture and scholarship wherever we went--from the Rhineland, Poland, and Lithuania in Central Europe to the Netherlands and England to the west to Venice and Po River Valley in Italy. Not only did Jews play a formative role in the development of modern commerce and finance, but we did it in virtually every important trading country in the world. The Expulsion from Spain sent Jews east to Turkey and Greece, while in the New World, Jews were members of many of the first expeditions and settlements. Our presence on these shores includes synagogues founded in the 16th century that are still flourishing.

We are celebrating the 350th anniversary of North American Jewry this year—you can hear a weekly story drawn from that history on the Too Jewish Radio Show each Sunday morning at 10 AM—and the record of that experience is as far-flung as it is influential. From the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island to the formative congregation in Charleston, South Carolina, and from the Supreme Court in Washington to a man named Isaacson creating the town of Nogales right here in Southern Arizona, it turns out that there are very few places in this country that have not been positively influenced by our people’s presence and involvement. Most of our own ancestors traveled across half of the globe to seek freedom and promise in the latest "Promised Land," America.

And, of course, in the past 125 years or so we have reestablished Israel as the center of Jewish life and experience, and brought together what is now over five million Jews from 150 different countries. That’s simply an unprecedented historical accomplishment, and an immigration story and accomplishment that still boggles the mind.

And so when you do journey to other lands and places this summer, I urge you not only to enjoy and feel refreshed by your trips—for the great lesson of travel is always one of enhanced perspective—but to seek out the Jewish presence and influence that can be found and felt almost everywhere on our globe. Visit the local synagogue or historical site. Go online, before you travel, and find out a bit about the Jewish communities in the places you are visiting. Refresh you own memory and meaning by connecting to the immense tradition of Jewish migration and creativity, the ways in which we have moved our lives, our traditions, and our great historical memory to new places throughout history.

You are, in your own way, following in the footsteps of great ancestors. May you travel in safety and health, and bring back memories of some special places that our people have touched and changed for the better. And may God make your travels meaningful and good.