In Western and Middle-Eastern thought, undergirded by three monotheistic faiths, the Moses story carries overarching significance. It tells of liberation from bondage and the struggle of living with that freedom. It tells of the temptations to lapse into prior, seeming comforts of slavery. It tells how freedom, best exercised, consists of communing with a transcendent yet imminent God. This story is taught to children regularly in synagogues, churches, and mosques the world over.
For those who are not familiar with her writings, Zora Neale Hurston is a storyteller par excellance. Her area of experience and expertise lies in African-American culture. Liberation Theology, particularly in the more recent works of James Cone, shows how the Exodus story – that is, Moses’ story with Israel – centrally defines the identity of African Americans. For centuries, they lived their lives in bondage to American whites with only faith to inspire that someday, somehow, some might have freedom. They were freed only to be pushed back socially into the bondage of Jim Crow. Even after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, white backlash in systemic racism can keep people down.
Zora, as she is affectionately known, speaks to this experience even though she wrote in the 1930s, well before the protests of Martin Luther King. She brings this Moses story to life. If this world had any justice, this book would be used universally in religious centers to convey this story’s depths to young schoolchildren. While being generally faithful to the religious texts, it does so in an African American dialect of English with rich idioms that only Zora can convey.
In a post-George Floyd era where the struggle regularly shows on news shows, this story is more relevant than ever. It can teach us all – no matter what skin color or ideological disposition – to find our way out of self-made prisons. It speaks about the strife and struggle to living freely. It speaks about eschewing the trappings of material comfort or of petty jealousies. Zora’s narrative brings all these, already present in the Exodus narrative, to richer life through amazing prose. I wish more people would know and revel in her beautiful writing and in this beautiful story. It’s extraordinarily well done.
Moses, Man of the Mountain: A Novel
By Zora Neale Hurston
Copyright (c) 1939, 1967
Harper Perennial
ISBN13 9780061695146
Page Count: 310
Genre: Fiction/Stories, Religion
www.amazon.com