It’s a clear, windy spring afternoon full of daffodils and green grass. I went up the mountain from which Moses saw the promised land (from where you can now see the West Bank and Gaza) and it was more emotional somehow than I expected.
Moses has long been my favorite persona in the Bible. My admiration is not so much about the miracles or the commandments or the parting of the Red Sea, but the courage it must have taken to have been raised in subjugation and to see something different so clearly, to believe in it so strongly, and to convince an entire people into action.
There’s a great book Zora Neale Hurston wrote in the 1930’s that I read when I was in college—called Moses, Man of the Mountain. It is the story of the Exodus, set in the American south during slavery, told in contemporary Black dialect. Also, the Nora Ephron essay about how much self-criticism women internalize, and how Moses was wise to let a civilization who had been enslaved wander around in the desert for a generation before taking the new generation to the promised land to start a new society—it takes time to root out the mentality of being less than others. Anyway-- Moses, man. What an amazing person.
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