Paul’s Reviews > The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions > Status Update

Today I think: without rage, love is helpless. We are not yet
angry enough. Not yet bitter enough. I look at the paper with
its headlines as black as vultures and its old bad news. The
disappeared, like ghosts of the shine on their rulers’ boots. My
bread tastes like sand. I finish my coffee and try to forget
what I know. The woman of whom we are portions has not yet
demanded justice.

Freedom confuses us; absence of freedom destroys us.
Violence in the hand, stupidity in the mind.
Hatred of others is a knife at your own heart.
Tolerance of others is dinner with your mother once a week.
Love of others is the jackpot, the quarter in the slot, the bank
balances pouring over your hands.
Join the army, travel to exotic places, meet interesting new
people and kill them.
Is it right to kill people? No,

It is written that he was meek,
That he was a great teacher,
Moshe rabbenu. Lies. A brutal joke.
Crazy as a bedbug
Would be more like it.
He never saw God.
He hallucinated that screaming zero,
That noisy hole, it lived nowhere, it was a
Mass hallucination. Not
Even the first item did
He understand of what
People need: law and order,
Rules and regulations, something
To touch, something solid, a
Little bit of peace

With a rule of law composed by God instead of a king. A nation without a king. With stress on social justice; commandments of generosity to
the poor; periodic release of debts and slaves; periodic release
of the land, which it is understood belongs to God, not to
human beings, so that all “private property” is temporary.

Child of compassion, child of wrath. Moses is Egyptian, he is
Hebrew, he is both/neither, he is insider/outsider, he is compressed/torn. Child of the mothers in the world of the fathers. He is the locus of gain/loss, he is where another division begins. Between the God of the universe and the God of a tribe, between inclusion and exclusion, between the imperative of liberty and the imperative of law, explodes Moses.

Joseph rises like a cork—from foreign slave to headman in three easy lessons. Nothing succeeds like success. But the secret of his success is that Joseph brings with him a piece of dream-time. Which is the world of biological life, the processes of nature, and the purposes of God. To
interpret a dream is to read a sequence of hieroglyphs in the book of nature.