Moses: face to face with God & Pharaoh and writer of the Torah

Our religion storytelling class at Lang College in The New School University mobilized our curiosity, courage and sympathetic objectivity to deal with the Bible’s report about Moses, a man who means so much to many people around us on 14^th Street in Manhattan. Can you meet that challenge too?

It is likely that a reader of A Journey may read about Moses and find that Bible’s description is unfamiliar (or all too familiar!), makes one uncomfortable, or seems foreign to his or her everyday life. Yet, in today’s New York City, you must mobilize some courage to put yourself into another person’s religious story.

One way to develop empathy and understanding about admirers of Moses is to pick one of the readings below about Moses that you will diagram, draw, construct, paint or map. The quality of your drawing can range from the primitive to sublime. The most important thing is that you think it through and do it yourself. The experience can be quite enlightening. Further, I believe that more and more religion storytelling will from time to time use the handmade illustration by the writer. It conveys authenticity, personality, and unique perspectives. You should also keep in mind that the language of religion may be indecipherable by your friends and relatives.

You may use any Bible translation. If you love literature, use the King James Version. If you want clear. workable English, use the New International Version. If you want the latest translation by a great Hebrew literary scholar, use Robert Alter’s The Five Books of Moses (which is also called The Torah.)

We are taking what Yale’s Brevard Childs called a canonical approach to the Bible. That is, we as reporters try to see and understand the Bible through the eyes of the historical traditions of the religious communities that use it. We will take the same approach to the New Testament, the Q’uran, the Buddhist canon of writings, and the core writings of Hinduism.