Fall 2020 Elie Wiesel Memorial Lectures on “Finding Moses”
The Elie Wiesel Memorial Lecture Series was launched in 2018. Now in its third year, the series honors Holocaust survivor, Noble laureate, writer, and long-time Boston University Professor Elie Wiesel (1928–2016). The Center strives to bring outstanding speakers to campus to address themes related to the work of Elie Wiesel, whose writings ranged from the Bible to modern Jewish thought and literature, the Holocaust and human rights. Echoing the annual “Encounters with Elie Wiesel” – a long-standing tradition at BU and the greater Boston area – these events provide opportunities to encounter the voices of authentic witnesses and great minds of our own times.
The fall 2020 lectures on Finding Moses engaged with one of the great figures of the biblical tradition, a perennial theme of Professor Wiesel’s writing. Hundreds attended online via Zoom for live presentations and Q&A sessions to learn about the many faces and facets of the great biblical prophet and lawgiver, Moses.
Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike revere Moses as a prophet or messenger of God. The Torah of Moses is the foundation of Judaism. The Ten Commandments are a widely acknowledged foundation of western civilization. No other prophet is mentioned more frequently in the Qur’an. And yet, Moses has remained an elusive figure. This elusiveness allowed our traditions to portray Moses in a great variety of ways, reflecting both his greatness and his all-too-human flaws. It is this vexing image of a man who was denied entry to the Promised Land, who died by a kiss of God, and whose tomb was never found that inspires our title: Finding Moses.
Guiding us on this search for Moses were three distinguished speakers, experts in their respective fields. Avivah Zornberg, a widely published author and educator, joined us from Israel to speak on Moses in Midrash. Shari Lowin, a Stonehill College Professor of Religion and Early Islam, asked the audience to consider Moses in the Muslim tradition. Herbert Marbury, a Vanderbilt University Professor of Biblical Studies, spoke about finding Moses in the African American tradition.
The Sense of an Ending: Finding Moses in Midrashic Literature
Avivah Zornberg
October 14, 2020
A Moses who knows that his end is near and that he will be denied entry to the Promised Land was the subject of Dr. Avivah Zornberg’s lecture. She introduced the Moses of the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Deuteronomy, reading the Hebrew text closely and viewing it through a lens sharpened by rabbinic midrash and modern literary scholarship. She offered a psychologically compelling and hermeneutically sophisticated reading of a crucial turning point in the life of Moses, when a man of “uncircumcised lips” speaks to God and the Israelites with eloquence and urgency, knowing that his own life’s trajectory will fall short of his hopes and aspirations. As in all her work, Zornberg took us on a journey of psychological depth and literary subtlety. Ultimately, Zornberg found this Moses as someone who hopes against hope that he may yet “cross over.”
Moses in the Qur’an and the early Muslim Israiliyyaat
Shari Lowin
November 2, 2020
Professor Shari Lowin introduced us to some of the ways the greatest prophet of the Jewish tradition appears in the Qu’ran and hadith (stories about the prophet and his companions). She compared stories about the birth of Moses and the role of his divinely inspired mother with stories about the birth of Prophet Muhammad and his divinely inspired parents, showing that the hadith casts Muhammad as a new Moses. Moses and Muhammad even meet during the famous “Night Journey” to the “distant sanctuary” (see sura 17), that culminates with the Prophet Muhammad’s ascent to the divine abode.
To understand why Moses matters so much to the early Muslims one needs to know that 7th-century Arabia was a world of trade and exchange, not just of goods but of stories and ideas. It connected the three ancient continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, and was alive with debates between Jews, orthodox and heterodox Christians, Gnostics, Zoroastrians, and others. The choices made by the early Muslims and the messages of Prophet Muhammad himself reflect the outsized role of Moses in the political and religious imagination of its time. Professor Lowin’s lecture reminded us of the significance of intercultural exegetical practices in this region during late antiquity.
Moses in the African American Tradition
Herbert Marbury
November 16, 2020
In his talk, Professor Herbert Marbury looked at Moses as a transforming and transformative symbol in African American religious imagination. From the Antebellum period through the era of the Black Power Movement, Black communities summoned the Moses figure both from the Hebrew Bible and from alternative traditions—some older and some newer than the biblical Moses—to point to freedom’s next horizon. This lecture discussed the changing ways that African Americans ascribe meaning to the exodus story as a counter-narrative over successive eras of repression.
Focusing on figures such as Absalom Jones, David Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Frances E. W. Harper, Adam Clayton Powell, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Albert Cleage, Marbury asks, what meanings has the exodus story held for successive African American communities in the U.S. from the Antebellum period through the era of the Black Power Movement? Marbury gave us an American Moses, one divided between White and Black readers of the Bible, and an Exodus story refracted and reshaped by the Harlem Renaissance projection of Black humanity in its full sense.