I’m working my way through Barack Obama’s presidential memoir A Promised Land. Actually it is just the first volume and 712 pages plus index it’s a big read. He set out to write the whole thing in one 500 page volume but it’s ended up a much bigger work. He admits that often his speeches went into more detail than some people preferred (his academic lawyer training no doubt), and maybe that’s true here too.
The story tracks his personal life after college, his marriage and family, but essentially begins with his decision to seek election to the US Senate. It’s within that role that we find the first sense of the meaning of his title. The idea of ‘the promised land’ derives from the biblical story of a dispossessed people, slaves in ancient Egypt, whose leader Moses tells them that God has promised them a homeland, a land flowing with milk and honey, a place of freedom—and there they will be a distinctive people, ‘God’s own people’. Moses will lead them to freedom and a promised land.
Now there is a strong sense of ‘American exceptionalism’ here, as this concept is adopted by a modern nation to refer to their land. I record here my discomfort with the use of the word ‘America’ to refer only to the United States, as there are two whole continents of Americans, most of whom do not identify with that one nation. In addition, this particular American nation has taken the land and its identity from the First Peoples and, like my own nation ‘Australia’, has substantially failed to acknowledge that reality.
In Obama’s work and thought, however, the concept of the promised land has a very distinctive resonance, because of its significance for an enslaved people. As the first African American President of the United States, he symbolizes the question of whether his own people will indeed live in the land and be free as part of that nation, or are they still ‘in Egypt’ or at best in the wilderness en route to the promised land?
All this brings me to the idea of passing on the baton, an image drawn from another concept of race, a relay race where one runner completes her part and then hands the baton to the next team member who will carry it on towards the finish line. At a critical moment in this memoir, Obama recounts the time when he sought guidance and support from deeply respected senior leaders of the civil rights movement associated with Dr Martin Luther King. One of these was Dr Otis Moss, close friend of Dr King and now pastor of one of the largest churches in Cleveland, Ohio. Moss spoke to Obama of the contribution each generation makes, limited by what it knows. He said that he and his colleagues were ‘the Moses generation’—’we marched, we sat in, we went to jail, sometimes in defiance of our elders, but we were in fact building on what they had done. We got us out of Egypt, you could say. But we could only travel so far.’ (page 122)
He then said that Barack Obama is part of ‘the Joshua generation’, responsible for the next leg of the journey. This expression, the Joshua generation, is a reference to the ancient Israelite leader who followed Moses. In the story, Moses himself did not live to enter the promised land. Joshua was given that role.
Here then was the idea that in this people’s movement the elders were now looking to another generation to take hold of the baton and press forward to what Martin Luther King had famously called cashing in the promissory note first written at the time of emancipation. That freedom was yet to be fully delivered.
Obama thus began with the sense that he would be part of the next wave of social transformation, leading his people towards reforms in health care, housing, educational opportunity, and so much more.
It is difficult now, amidst a pandemic and with the Trump years still haunting us, to recall just how much hope there was—the audacity of hope, indeed—at the time of Obama’s election and how profoundly disappointing it was that he was thwarted at almost every turn. Was this ‘the Joshua generation’ and, if so, was it a failure?
It occurs to me that the metaphor needs to be a more nuanced. Perhaps there is something of both Moses and Joshua in every generation, in every leader and every movement for communal change. We receive from those who have gone before, as Dr Moss acknowledged. We receive the baton, to run with, and we pass it on to those who follow.
In biblical thought there is the idea of ‘handing over’ or ‘handing on’, which is properly translated as tradition. Though this idea is often disparaged, in Australia at least, in reality we are always handing on something. We are always traditioning, creating a living tradition. We are creating a way of life, values, attitudes, and the challenge is to do this wisely. What do we want to pass on? What values and hopes do we want to hand to those who will run further than us?
Each person, each family, each community in each generation has something of the Moses figure to engage. We will not achieve all our hopes nor fulfil all we promised. But we can push further than our forebears. We can strike out across the deserts and mountains, to exercise that hope. In so doing we are also somewhat like Joshua, entering ‘the promised land’—claiming that freedom, though perhaps also contributing, wittingly or unwittingly, to the disruption and loss of other people’s lives and community.
Obama’s story is all of this. So is ours. It is wise, then, to contemplate what we want to pass on and how, when and to whom. We do not get to choose all of this. Some of what we give is already determined. Some of it we do unawares—that, too, is worthy of deep reflection. We may need to listen more deeply to our children to discover that.
Much of what we have to give is the simple reality of living, doing and being, laughing and crying, making things and growing things, belonging to each other and to the earth. In short, ‘living in the land’ as the biblical phrase goes.
Living into every land as the land of promise, every land, with every people, with God, who is continually passing on the baton: this is life.