Moses the Man

In his Rosh Hashana sermon today, Rabbi Levi Meier is taking a bold step. For the Jewish New Year, he’ll peel the mask off Moses. The pivotal man among Hebrew patriarchs, who led his people out of slavery in Egypt into the land that is modern-day Israel, is now under investigation. Close to 15 centuries after his death, two new books and a movie about his life unveil a new portrait--the sugarcoating he has worn for so long gets reduced to a semisweet glaze.

Like his sermon, Meier’s book, “Moses: The Prince, the Prophet” (Jewish Lights), profiles an imperfect hero, which makes him all the more credible as a guide through modern dilemmas.

For his remake, Jonathan Kirsch burrows into the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, in “Moses: A Life” (Ballantine) and finds some discrepancies. Unlike the familiar, granite image of Moses, Kirsch sees a man torn by fits of violence, prone to arguing with God, marked by physical handicaps, reluctant to be a savior.

Both books are due in stores next month.

On the big screen, DreamWorks Pictures’ animated film “The Prince of Egypt” comes closest to preserving the godlike facade of Moses, but it diverts from the original story by playing him up as an alienated man, born a Hebrew but raised an Egyptian, struggling with divided loyalties. The film premieres in December.

Old Gray Beard has been down this road before. Leaders of such mythic proportion seldom rest in peace. In the ‘50s, Hollywood captured Moses as a tower of physical and moral strength in “The Ten Commandments,” with Charlton Heston playing the paragon of courage and virtue.

In the ‘60s, Moses was the liberator who inspired modern Jews in “Exodus,” a bestselling-novel-turned-epic-movie that equates the struggle of the Jews to create a homeland in Palestine with the ancient escape from slavery.

The movies were anything but the first round of remakes.

Moishe, as his Hebrew mother would have called him, has been a work in progress since around 1200 BC, the estimated era of his life. Over time his image has been built on legends and lore more than sacred Scripture.

“The most important thing to know about Moses is that he’s depicted in the Bible in stark contrast to the way he’s portrayed in popular and religious culture,” says Kirsch. “Those versions are sanitized, because a close look at the Bible text shows how the details of his life are perplexing and challenging.”

According to the Bible, he was born a Levite--one of the 12 tribes of Israel--nearly put to death in a purge, rescued by an Egyptian princess and raised in the royal court. As a young man, he killed an Egyptian who was abusing a Hebrew slave.

Not long after that, he heard the voice of God on a mountainside but argued against God’s plan that he lead the Israelites out of captivity, afraid he couldn’t do it. A testy relationship grew more tense. It seems God was upset because Moses didn’t circumcise his son--and nearly killed Moses for it. By that point in the story, it is clear, Moses was a man of inner conflicts and God was given to emotional extremes.

“Moses is shown to be timid and cowardly. It’s hard to explain why he’d run away from his responsibilities, but I don’t sweep things like this away. I celebrate them. To me, it’s provocative to go behind the scenes and ask what the Bible really says,” says Kirsch, who also is the author of the bestselling “The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible” (Ballantine, 1997), which covered the steamier side of the Bible.

Kirsch holds with scholars who say the Bible is the work of many authors who edited and rewrote it over centuries.

“Pious people would not be comfortable with that,” he says. “They consider the Bible to be the delivered word of God.”

The many-authors theory holds that the first oral accounts of Moses’ life were written down, then rewritten over some 600 years. Moses may have been an actual man in history, although there are no known references outside the Bible. Over the centuries, he was given new scenes and dialogue by successive generations of writers--priests and scribes with so few facts to go on they felt free to invent things. Hebrew Midrash or Bible commentaries, sermons and written reflections slowly stretched a selection of the facts into a portrait of Moses to compare with a Greek god.

“If DreamWorks makes up new scenes for Moses,” says Kirsch, “the rabbis have made up much more.”

The fact is, DreamWorks does rewrite the story once again. An invented friendship between young Moses and Ramses II, the Egyptian prince, heightens the drama. Historians believe Ramses II was the pharaoh whose army drowns when the Red Sea parted for Moses and the Israelites. The sea then flooded the Egyptians, who chased them.

Kirsch points out that an even more disturbing betrayal than the one between Ramses II and Moses exists in the Bible text but gets overlooked. Pharaoh first turned against Moses when he killed an Egyptian to save a Hebrew slave. Scripture says Moses committed the act when there were no witnesses. The slave he rescued told Pharaoh what happened.

Although imperfectly, perhaps, Moses did manage to complete his mission and deliver his people to the promised land.

“His message to us is this,” Kirsch says. “It’s in your power to choose between good and evil.”

Kirsch’s probing study seems to grow out of his professional training as a journalist and lawyer. He practices copyright and publishing law in Los Angeles.

Rabbi Levi Meier’s book reflects his work too. He is a chaplain at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center who also counsels patients of his own. Meier doesn’t enter the debate about who wrote the Bible or when.

“My work as a counselor and hospital chaplain is about how to live your life,” he says. “To me, the most important thing about Moses is his relationship to God. He kept a dialogue going.”

The Ten Commandments, the legal code God carved in stone for Moses, condemn such acts as murder, theft and infidelity. Meier says they also teach us that God can change his mind.

“The first time God gave the commandments, he expected people to keep them perfectly,” Meier says. “But he had to give them twice.” (Moses smashed the first set when he saw the Israelites worshiping a golden calf they had made.) “By the second time, God recognized that humans make mistakes, and that’s OK.

“The most important thing about Moses is he accomplished that change in God. He appealed to God’s compassion and forgiveness, and God gave us another chance. Our job is to be a catalyst too. We can elicit compassion from ourselves and others, instead of holding too rigidly to what is written in stone.”

Early in their relationship, Moses asks God not to rely on him; he doesn’t see himself as a rescuer or the builder of a new nation. For one thing, the Bible says he had problems with his speech. Perhaps he stuttered. For another, his face was deformed after he saw God for the first time. It seems it was burned by divine radiation.

“A lot of people feel they are the victims of circumstance,” Meier says. “My question is, how do we respond to hardships?”

Moses is a victim’s role model, says Meier. Raised a child of two races, married to a convert (his wife, Zipporah, was from Media, a polytheist culture), Moses contended with physical handicaps, character flaws, the limits of old age. “He never allowed circumstances to dictate his choices,” Meier says.

The books, the movie, the wish to update an ancient hero’s image say something about our times, Meier believes.

“We’re looking for moral leaders, which our generation is lacking,” Meier says.

Kirsch sees his subject as the malleable man.

“Moses has been the liberator, the law giver, the intercessor between God and man,” he says. “I see him as the goad, who nags at us to do the right thing.

“If DreamWorks makes him over into a figure we can relate to in modern culture, well, he’s been put to many uses in the past. The great thing about Moses is he’s still the same enduring figure.”