Moses: America's Unseen Founding Father

Long before George Washington crossed the Delaware or Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration, another figure had already shaped the American imagination: Moshe Rabbeinu, otherwise known to the world simply as Moses. When the Pilgrims fled England in 1620, they cast themselves as the Israelites escaping Pharaoh, and King James as the tyrant they left behind. That founding metaphor — a chosen people crossing water into a promised land — became the template through which generations of Americans understood their own story. The Puritans read the Mayflower Compact as their Sinai covenant. Patriots recast King George III as Pharaoh. Enslaved Americans found in the Exodus the deepest expression of their own hope for liberation. Moses was not simply a biblical figure imported into American rhetoric; he became, as historian Bruce Feiler argued in his book America’s Prophet, the nation's true spiritual founding father — its founding narrative before it had a founding document. This inheritance is not just rhetorical. It is carved into the architecture of American government itself. In the U.S. House Chamber, twenty-three marble reliefs of history's great lawgivers ring the gallery above the Speaker's podium — from Hammurabi to Blackstone. Twenty-two are sculpted in profile. Only one faces forward: Moshe , positioned at the center of the north wall, with every other lawgiver angled to look toward him. Each time the Speaker rises to address the House, Moses looks directly down on the chamber where American law is made. The Supreme Court tells the same story in a different key. On the building's east pediment, Moses sits at the center of a sculptural group titled "Justice the Guardian of Liberty.” Inside, on the courtroom's south wall frieze, Moses appears again among a procession of lawgivers, this time holding tablets inscribed with Hebrew text. The exterior tablets are left blank — a symbolic gesture — while the interior tablets bear script, positioned where the Justices themselves sit in judgment. Together, these choices reveal something Americans have rarely stated outright but have consistently built into stone: that the nation's understanding of liberty is inseparable from its understanding of law, and that both trace back to the same figure who led a people out of bondage and then handed them commandments to live by. The word Moshe does not appear in the Constitution. But he stands, quite literally, over the rooms where it is interpreted and applied. Recently, Mike Huckabee, the American Ambassador to Israel, stated, "without Israel, without the Jewish foundation, there would not be an America.” He added, “if the United States forgets its heritage and the G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," it will not remain the great nation it has become.” As America celebrates its semiquincentennial anniversary, there are voices and political winds that are attempting to detach America from its foundation that was inspired by Moshe leading the Jews as a free people to its promised land. At this inflection point of the country's history, we hope and pray that America doesn't lose its way. ​ Have a Peaceful Shabbos, ​ Rabbi Yaakov Fisch