Research Proposal on "Exodus Walzer, Michael. Exodus and Revolution"

Research Proposal 5 pages (1813 words) Sources: 0 Style: MLA

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Exodus

Walzer, Michael. Exodus and Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land. Tell ol' Pharaoh to let my people go." The words of the old African-American spiritual come irresistibly to mind when reading Princeton University Professor Michael Walzer's book Exodus and Revolution. Despite the title and focus of his work, Walzer is not a professor of Biblical criticism or theology, rather he is a social historian who is intent upon examining the ways the Biblical narrative of escape and rebellion had been used and reused throughout the ages to create meaningful narratives about the oppression and liberation of different groups of people. The fact that the most famous American song about the Exodus is an African-American spiritual speaks volumes as to the power of the Exodus story. Walzer devotes the majority of his book to understanding different interpretations of Exodus in a fairly balanced fashion, contrasting secular and social-democratic models of understanding the Exodus with messianic ones. Ultimately he emerges with a strong bias that supports his overall philosophy of seeing the Exodus model through the lens of social democracy as superior. Good politics rather than good theology or even good history is his purpose in writing his text.

Walzer states in his introduction that he desires "to retell the story of the Exodus as it figures in political history, to read the text in the light of its interpretations, to discover its meaning in what it has meant" in various political contexts (Walzer 7). Walzer suggests that the meaning of Exodus can fluid, and depends upon the emotional and historical needs of the individuals who are retelling the tale in a specific historical context, even while it seems to have the same meaning, for all time, to those who are 'living' a history of collective oppression. The Biblical storyline of a people's oppression, the liberation from the oppressor, their forging of a meaningful social contract between themselves, political struggles and fights for power, cumulating with a new and more cohesive society has proved attractive to both democrats and non-democrats alike as a metaphor. Walzer sees the story's greatest value in its ability to suggest a society based upon an equitable contract between ruled and ruler, rather than a narrative of 'chosenness.'

For example, one of the most fascinating examples of the plasticity of the Exodus tale provided by Walzer is how the New England Puritans took it as a potent justification to create their famed shining city on a hill, their New Jerusalem in the wilds of America. Although separated by a chasm of years and culture from the Israelites who penned the Exodus narrative, the Puritans saw what they viewed as Catholic and Anglican idolatry, or so-called worship of saints and ostentatious churches as idolatry, like the sin of the Golden calf. The English Puritans believed that as God purged idolaters from his ranks, so the High Church worshippers would be purged, and it was they, the elect, forced to wander for a homeland that were the true children of Israel.

Exodus also provides a model for understanding the nature of leadership of a chosen or oppressed people. The only British Puritan ever to serve as the English head of state, the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, even went so far as drawn a parallel between his own prophetic positions to the status of Moses, using it as evidence of his humility even while he ruled as an autocrat, as a Moses speaking with the voice of God. But while Moses understood that "the march through the wilderness does not lie beyond history...[that] the leader [himself] was only a man -- and a limited man at that," Cromwell like so many leaders afterwards often confused his own view of his people as Israelites as a justification for his own autocratic rule (Walzer 17). He rationalized: "Hadn't the Israelites provoked and enraged the God who elected them...through unbelief, murmuring, repining, and other temptations and sins" and it was Moses who must bring them to righteousness, acting as an instrument of God (Walzer 64).

In other words, Cromwell saw both the hope and promise of the Exodus, but also could find within its narrative a justification for his own sense of superiority against those whom he led, even though he came to power as an advocate of a representative Parliament. Both democracy and autocracy can be justified within the Exodus story. Another fascinating example of how the flexible Exodus narrative can be reconfigured to suit the purpose of whomever is telling the tale is found in the radical book, Moses in Red, which suggested that the ideal society prophesized in the books of Moses actually prefigured a communist society as the New (albeit secular) Jerusalem. In it, the Exodus story is "a complete vindication of Leninist politics that is, of dictatorship and terror... [Repeating] Augustine's distinction between Moses' and Pharaoh's use of the sword in appropriately modern language" to justify the Leninism (Walzer 65).

This highlights the greatest danger of the Exodus text, namely its tendency to encourage militancy and an 'us vs. them' mentality. Although the sense of obligation and covenant-based bond to God and to a society may be life-sustaining, a sense of chosenness and exclusivity can also have its dangers, as seen in the era of nationalism of the 20th century, and even today after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the ethnic and national border wars that continue to embroil its residents. The fact that those seeking to justify highly controlling states, whether in Puritan England or in communist Russia (although Steffens was a pro-Soviet American) are a sobering reminder of the dangers as well as the positive aspects of the narrative of the Exodus. Of course, Walzer feels that such interpretations fundamentally do not acknowledge one of the most important facets of the narrative, the need for those seeking the Promised Land and a new world "to take responsibility for their own actions" and to remember that the Israelites "did accept a common standard: hence the Sinai covenant," even while they often "resented the standard and feared the responsibility it entailed" (Walzer 53).

Walzer ends his book examining the reinterpretations of the Exodus story within the contemporary Middle East, reviewing how within Israel advocates of Exodus Zionism renounce the idea that the End of Days is coming wish to create a secular and socialist vision of a covenantal community and clash with religious, Messianic Zionist's interpretation of the Pentateuch's view of Israel as a unique and special place. Messianic Zionists see contemporary history is a place from which "escape" is desirable, rather than a place where the individual owes responsibility to the community (Walzer 137-138). Walzer's own background in social justice and his characterization of these two strains make it clear of which side he approves.

Walzer's deconstruction of what has become a cherished cultural myth of so many societies is gripping, and also eye-opening, but it may upset some Biblical scholars, and people like Messianic Zionists who look to the Exodus as a religious narrative of liberation of a particular people, and not all of humanity. Although Walzer's book is on a religious story, and concludes with an analysis of a religious state, he begins with a note that within the "sacred history of the Exodus... [is] a vivid and realistic secular history," which is his primary fascination, while he does not mean to "disparage the sacred" (Walzer x). As soon as the Exodus narrative became co-opted and translated into history, it cannot be rediscovered in its original theological form, says Walzer, a statement that may upset some Jewish readers who are striving to reclaim the Exodus narrative as unique to their own cultural and religious tradition every year on Passover. The story's religious meaning has been denuded of its original context in so many arenas, even while it remains vitally important to understanding the Middle East. Walzer's text suggests that its cultural and ideological power has eclipsed its original meaning.

Walzer, after his balanced historical analysis clearly has his own views of the Exodus story, approving of its liberationist bent and sense of obligation, eventually suggesting that his interpretation is 'correct' despite his attempt at objectivity. As a social historian, he also tries to dispassionately show how Puritans, communists, rabbinic scholars in their Latin American liberation theologians have all taken their own reading of the narrative and are affected by their context before advancing his point-of-view. But it is difficult to see whom this book will appeal to -- it is not in-depth enough for a full portrayal of the conflicts of the Middle East and other nations and it suffers in comparison to texts that attempt a full exegesis and examination of the historical struggle of the Israelites and subsequent Jewish interpretations of the Torah. His associations between eras and ideologies are fascinating, but he can only give each period cursory attention, which might likewise frustrate scholars.

It could be argued that Walzer is fundamentally… READ MORE

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