Aloha: From America to United States

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 crossed the Pacific with monks, traders and sailors. German became the daily language of entire regions and was about to take the lead in the early days of the birthing Union. Yiddish filled neighborhoods with newspapers, theatres, schools and prayers. Indigenous languages preserved memories reaching back thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. English eventually became the common civic language, but it did not erase the remarkable polyphony that still characterizes America.

The first Christian history of North America was equally diverse. Long before anyone imagined an American Pope, Christianity had already crossed the continent through different traditions. Spanish Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits established missions. French Catholic communities grew along the great rivers. On the Pacific coast and in Alaska, Russian Orthodoxy developed diocesan life and translated Scripture and the liturgy into local languages. The Gospel did not always arrive as an enemy of culture. Sometimes it entered by learning the language already spoken around the fire.

Yet every civilization carries shadows alongside its achievements.

The history of Indigenous peoples cannot be told without speaking of epidemics, displacement, broken treaties and forced assimilation. Entire nations disappeared or were reduced to fragments of what they had once been. Christian missions themselves reflected the contradictions of history. Some defended native peoples and preserved their languages. Others accompanied the destruction of cultures they scarcely tried to understand.

The contradiction became even sharper through slavery.

A nation that proclaimed liberty accepted for generations that human beings could be bought and sold. Later came segregation, discrimination and the long struggle for civil rights whose echoes remain audible today. Even the country built by immigrants closed its doors to many Jewish refugees fleeing Europe before the Second World War. Fear of the stranger is not unique to old civilizations. New societies also discover and often deploy it.

That contradiction finally tore the country apart. The Civil War was not a distant episode but one of the decisive moments in which the United States had to discover whether it was truly a Union or merely an agreement that could be broken when slavery, power and state sovereignty collided. The war ended secession, but it did not end the questions that had produced it. Federal authority, racial justice, regional memory and the meaning of citizenship remain marked by that wound.

Asian America also belongs to this story. Chinese workers helped build the railroads that bound the continent together, even while they faced exclusion and violence. Japanese immigrants created communities across the West Coast and Hawaii, only to see more than one hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry imprisoned during the Second World War. The same country that fought fascism abroad violated the liberty of many of its own citizens at home. Yet Asian Americans – including soldiers, scientists, physicians, artists and entrepreneurs – became central to the country’s modern life. The Pacific, like the Atlantic before it, continued to bring new peoples whose work quietly transformed the nation.

The Jewish contribution followed the same pattern. During the great migrations from Eastern Europe, millions brought with them not only prayers and synagogues but habits of learning, commerce, publishing, music, theatre, medicine and craftsmanship. Yiddish was once heard daily in the streets of New York, Chicago and countless smaller communities. It gradually receded as English became the language of new generations, yet its influence did not disappear. It entered American humor, literature, journalism, business and everyday speech. Families from Warsaw, Vilnius, Odesa, Białystok or Lemberg helped shape department stores, apartment buildings, neighbourhood bakeries, garment workshops, universities, laboratories and cultural life. Sometimes the names remain familiar, such as Helena Rubinstein, whose cosmetics became known throughout the world. More often, the influence survives in the configuration of kitchens, apartments, schools, hospitals and countless ordinary features of American daily life. Like many immigrant cultures, Yiddishkeit became less visible precisely because it had become part of the country itself.

Perhaps nowhere else has one political union assembled so many different peoples while allowing each state to preserve its own legal traditions, institutions and character. The very name “United States” still reminds us that this is not a centralized nation in the European sense but a federation whose diversity remains one of its principal strengths and one of its permanent tensions.

Behind American federalism stands another inheritance from Britain: the tradition of common law and the spirit embodied in habeas corpus. The citizen exists before the administration, not the administration before the citizen. That philosophy helps explain why the United States has never adopted a universal compulsory national identity card. Americans identify themselves in many different ways, but the state has traditionally been cautious about reducing every individual to a single administrative document. It is an imperfect system, sometimes untidy, yet it reflects an old conviction that liberty begins by limiting the power of government over ordinary lives.

In Jerusalem, I have often thought of this. One can spend years in this city without fitting neatly into anyone’s categories. Pilgrims, refugees, scholars, clergy, diplomats and labourers cross one another’s paths, sometimes leaving almost no trace. America has preserved something of that possibility. One may arrive from elsewhere, begin again and allow one’s work rather than one’s documents to become one’s true identity.

The map itself continued to grow. Louisiana, Texas, California, Alaska and Hawaii entered the Union through entirely different histories. Puerto Rico still raises questions about belonging. Alaska looks towards Asia. Hawaii looks towards the Pacific. America is continental, Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific at the same time.

Its horizons have continued to expand beyond geography.

The laboratories, universities, hospitals, observatories and space programmes of the United States have drawn researchers from every continent. Here again, migration explains much. America has repeatedly welcomed women and men who carried their education, imagination and discoveries across oceans. It has often imported not only workers but futures.

This year another image quietly accompanies the national celebrations. The first Pope born in the United States chose to spend Independence Day not beneath fireworks but at Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island that has become one of the defining symbols of migration in our own age. One need not be Roman Catholic to recognize the force of the gesture. An American Pope, shaped by several cultures and years of ministry in Peru, stood where humanity still asks ancient questions about hospitality, borders and dignity. It is difficult not to see in that choice a reflection of America’s own historical memory, for the nation itself was built by successive journeys across oceans, frontiers and cultures.

From Jerusalem, that image carries particular resonance. This city has watched peoples arrive and depart for more than three thousand years. America has experienced many of the same encounters in only a few centuries. Here civilizations accumulated layer upon layer. There they met almost simultaneously. Jerusalem remembers and creates. America experiments and develops.

Perhaps that is why the Fourth of July can be more than the anniversary of a republic. It is an invitation to remember that before there were states, constitutions and flags, there were human beings walking across continents, speaking new languages, meeting strangers, fearing them, welcoming them, fighting them and learning, slowly and imperfectly, to live together.

The strength of the United States has never rested only on its territory, its armies, its economy or even its Constitution. It has rested on a fragile balance: the individual before the state, the states within the Union, the stranger becoming neighbor, the migrant becoming citizen, the many languages slowly entering one shared public life. The balance has never been pure. It has been broken by slavery, secession, segregation, exclusion and fear. Yet it has also allowed extraordinary renewal.

The United States did not create the human journey. It inherited one of humanity’s oldest journeys and continues to write one of its newest chapters.