Word: moral
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ever to air on nationally broadcast television: a two-month series called Genesis: A Living Conversation, with Bill Moyers as host. Each of its 10 weekly episodes features a diverse panel grappling with the majestic, infuriating work, engaging both the stupendous acts of faith that inspired Fintel and the moral and ethical zig-zags that bedeviled Rabbi Visotzky. At the same time, a batch of new books, written, for the most part, by Living Conversation panelists, amounts to a modest but unmistakable Genesis revival in American culture. Says Robert Alter, whose masterly new translation of Genesis was published last month...
...their own life. Gradually they helped Visotzky develop his own satisfying, if unorthodox, understanding of the patriarchs. God intended them not as paragons but as a paradox: badly flawed yet nonetheless blessed. It was in the struggle to "mediate this dissonance," concluded Visotzky, that believers would achieve their own moral understanding. "It is not the narrative of Genesis that makes the work sacred," he later wrote. "Rather, it is in the process of studying Genesis that the transformation takes place...
...story claimed that it offered "the best conversations in New York City." One day a former Baptist preacher from Texas dropped by. Like Visotzky, Bill Moyers was not particularly nourished by the picture of the patriarchs he had encountered in Sunday school and seminary. "The figures were drawn for moral instruction and therefore had to be flawless individuals who ought to be in stained-glass windows," he says. Sometime after attending Visotzky's supper, Moyers found himself sitting in his apartment at 3 a.m., having just read Genesis straight through "as if I were discovering it for the first time...
...other Moyers panelists that collectively illustrate the rabbinic adage "Turn it, turn it, everything is in it." Two are new translations: Alter's (Norton) and a more selective and idiosyncratic effort by Buddhist Stephen Mitchell (HarperCollins). Visotzky, in his The Genesis of Ethics (Crown), not only honors the moral insights he gained through his conversations but displays a psychologist's (or novelist's) ability to see the patriarchal dramas through the eyes of each participant, seldom condemning and usually illuminating. Panelist Naomi Rosenblatt is a psychotherapist, and her Wrestling with Angels (Delta, with co-author Joshua Horwitz) features the subheadings...
...fact, for millions of Americans, many of the issues raised in Genesis: A Living Conversation will be no issues at all. Fundamentalists, Evangelicals and Orthodox Jews are well aware of the moral flaws of the book's human characters. But since they regard the entire book as the saga of God putting humanity on trial rather than the reverse, these imperfections will not challenge faith. Nor would they have perturbed the work's original audience, maintains Southern Baptist professor Kenneth Mathews, an Old Testament scholar at Alabama's Samford University who has just published his own commentary, Genesis...