America is celebrating another birthday. Fireworks will rise above New York, Chicago, Seattle, Honolulu, New Mexico, New Orleans, and countless smaller towns whose names themselves tell stories of migration. Some come from Indigenous languages, others from Spain, France, the Netherlands, Britain, Russia, Germany, Scandinavia or the many tongues that arrived with those who crossed oceans to begin again. One can travel thousands of kilometres across the country without leaving the history of the world.

From Jerusalem, America appears less as a young republic than as one of humanity’s oldest journeys.

Long before there was a Declaration of Independence, before the Mayflower, before Columbus and even before the Vikings reached Vinland, small groups crossed what is now the Bering Strait. They walked – yes on foot! – from Siberia into Alaska, following animals, seasons and hope. Yet they too had travelled for thousands of years before reaching that northern passage. Their distant ancestors had once left Africa. America therefore begins neither in Europe nor in 1776. It begins with humanity itself.

For those first peoples, the Arctic was not a frozen frontier. It was a homeland. Aleut, Yupik, Inuit and many other northern peoples lived on both sides of what modern maps call an international border. The sea separated them only as much as it united them. Even today, when I occasionally pray in Aleutian with faithful who smile at hearing yet another ancient language beside Hebrew, Greek or Church Slavonic, I am reminded that Christianity in America did not arrive speaking only English. It learned to pray in the languages already living there.

That lesson was not always remembered.

America became the meeting place of almost every major migration of the last millennium. The Vikings reached Vinland. Spain established its missions and settlements across the South and Southwest. France followed the great waterways from Canada to Louisiana. The Dutch brought merchants, printers and religious refugees from Germanic Europe. Britain founded the colonies that would eventually become the United States. Russia crossed from Siberia into Alaska and established the first Orthodox ecclesiastical structures on what is now American soil. Scandinavians, Germans, Italians, Poles, Chinese, Japanese, Jews from every corner of Europe and the Middle East, Armenians, Arabs, the Aramaic-speakers and countless others continued the human current that had never really stopped flowing.

Each group brought more than hands to work.

They brought souls, brains, bodies and words.

For centuries, no one could know which language would one day dominate the continent. Spanish might have become the common tongue – it is a leading languages at present. French stretched from Québec to Louisiana. Dutch survives in New York long after New Amsterdam disappeared from the maps. Russian........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)