A Review of Exodus: Gods and Kings and Why You Should Watch

So I finally had a chance to see the Exodus: Gods and Kings movie starring Christian Bale. While I know the story was wrecked in the media and Hebrew bible scholars no less had a field day pointing out all the inaccuracies contained within the movie, I found it fresh and enjoyable.

If you’ve read my blog for any time, you’ll know I am not a classic liberal, who demands historical continuity at the expense of the miraculous, or an orthodox thinker, who demands faithful renderings to a biblical script that upon closer inspection is often not faithful to itself.

[Spoilers from this point on]

What I liked:

The reviews I have read all noted the unique way in which God was featured. I very much admired the way the story depicted God as a child, the innocence of whom was constantly undermined by his own unapologetic demand for Egyptian blood. There was one dialogue in which Moses and the child god go at it. Moses argues that it is insensible to seek revenge on the Egyptians and cruel (a point Rameses makes later when all the firstborn of the Egyptians are murdered). God argues that justice must be served and reminds Moses that 400 years of oppression the backdrop to his violent answer to the Egyptians who care for no one but themselves.

Exodus definitely goes beyond the biblical narrative, and this was the part I very much enjoyed. When one reads the story of Moses there are questions we all want answered but are hard to come by.

Exodus attempts to answer questions such as: How could Moses so seamlessly turn on his own people (the Egyptians) to take up the cause of his true people (the Israelites). The story does a great job holding these two aspects in tension. Moses was not easily convinced he was doing the right thing, so much that even with God, he argues about it. His loyalty towards Rameses and his family is constantly wracking his every decision, even in the final episode during the Red Sea passage where he tries his hardest to save him.

I liked the exchange between Moses and his wife Siphra. At one point, he tells her he is going to free the Israelites and like Rameses later, she questions what kind of God would take a husband away from his family? It’s interesting because it brought me back to my readings in Hegel, who also critically questioned the fidelity of Abraham as a loner who would leave his fatherland to drag his family into alien lands. Hegel was critical in the context of the German Zeitgeist which celebrated nationalism. Siphra’s question might seem more banal, but it was a thought I found important.

Perhaps what I liked the most was the way Moses was portrayed when having conversations with God. At one point he is seen having a one-way conversation. He appears quite mad, and rightfully so. But it appropriately blurs the line between madman and prophet. Any time we are asked to follow the vision presented to us of the divine by another, we are suspicious in our modern age of science. For all the lunatics who claimed to hear from God, are there some in the group who are more worthy to listen to than others? That’s the question Exodus teases. And I think it does it quite effectively.

As a post-conservative, I especially liked the way the plagues were handled. Would it be supernaturally fantastic, I wondered? And of course, they were not. The Nile turning to blood, for example, was not an entire river, just what was central to the civilization. Even those instances where the downplaying of a miracle was impossible was done mysteriously and without too much fanfare, for example, during the killing of all the firstborn. At the end of it all, you did not necessarily find a God worthy of worship and love, but perhaps fear and obedience.

The creating of the Ten Commandments was great. There was no Charlton Heston standing clenched while a lightning bolt carved in the words of the Decalogue. There was simply a madman once again who fled to a mountaintop where he painstakingly chiseled out words to a stone tablet.

 

What I disliked:

In some instances, while the story is conscious of transitioning too fast from the Egyptian Moses to the Jewish patriot Moses, there is only so much a 2.5 hour movie can do. At times, the dialogue between Moses and Rameses is wooden. You don’t believe Moses really cares about the Israelites (and in fact there is this important part towards the end of the movie where, after declaiming them to God, admits they are his people). So when Moses is speaking with Rameses, you still get the sense he is fighting blindly and without purposes for a people he doesn’t believe in. That’s not the biblical Moses, but  it is this human element that does a much better job.

After Rameses permits the Hebrew exodus, he had a change of heart. This is done without any kind of reflection and felt a bit forced. One moment we see him looking towards the ground. The next he is mounting chariots to chase the Israelites to the sea.

Some of the cast of characters surrounding Rameses were just odd and felt more like Greco-Roman advisors out of time then Egyptians.

Finally, the Israelites themselves were simply just a backdrop. This story was really about Moses’ break with his Egyptian relations and roots. Because of this you never felt any empathy towards the Israelites even though you should have. You never really got to feel the pain of slavery, say like I did in watching the movie Twelve Years a Slave. This is because the people being depicted were largely a rabble with no purpose. Even Ben Kingsley, who is an excellent actor, was diminished to a poorly cast Hebrew rebel leader with whom you could not sympathize or care about.

Some Final Thoughts

A lot of people criticized this movie because of the casting in general, saying that the roles were primarily taken up by white Westerners. From a purely technical point-of-view, I agree this is problematic. Sigourney Weaver was horribly out of place. But on the other hand, Rameses played by Joel Edgerton, at least in my opinion, pulled it off.  On a side note, it puzzles me a bit that Michele Rodriguez (an Hispanic actress known for her role in the Fast and Furious series) comes under fire last month for suggesting that minorities create their own comic book mythologies instead of taking the roles of characters not their own, but when Caucasians are cast in roles as in Exodus not their own, they draw fiery criticism. Double standard? Sure. But I didn’t find it made the movie any less unwatchable than seeing the way Marvel has developed the Nick Fury character in the Avengers movies, changing him from a white male in the comic books for many, many years to an African-American played by  Samuel L. Jackson.

And then there was the problem of taking liberties in the story. The dogmatists came out of the woodwork on this one. One such example, the one that was supposed to get Moses in trouble in the first place was when he killed an Egyptian slave master beating on a Hebrew. This never happens in the movie. Instead, Moses is mistaken for a slave after meeting with a hidden enclave of Hebrews who tell him he is really a Hebrew himself. He responds by murdering two of his Egyptian accusers. But there is no context, except perhaps for Moses to feel what it might be like to suffer discrimination. Yet, the episode does not really effective advance Moses’ transformation as a character.

Nevertheless, speaking as a student of Jewish studies, I find that the transformative re-telling of the Exodus is very much in keeping with the spirit of Rabbinical Judaism. The Rabbis constantly transformed well-known stories in an attempt to draw out the human element. The questions left unanswered such as “what was Moses early life like” all have constitutive answers in the Rabbinic literature. Even in Christianity, the unspoken years of Jesus’ early life are addressed and given shape in some non-canonical works. Still, much more in Judaism than Christianity, the idea of canon is much more malleable. And so reading this from a Jewish perspective, not a Judeo-Christian one, I didn’t have much of a problem with the recreation of the text to answer those existential questions that we’ve all asked when reading and contemplating the Exodus account.

So did I like the movie better than the book? There’s an old Rabbinic statement that says there are 70 faces to Torah. The way I approach the canonical text is different than someone else. One who approaches the movie needs merely to see that this is one director’s interpretation a text that has many interpretations throughout history. And unlike Christianity, I feel there is a call from deep within Judaism to experiment texts. Mission accomplished? Maybe.

March updates

Star Date March 11, 2015….The snow fell hard in Maryland on March 5, Thursday, and as a result, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Meeting of the American Academy of Religion had to consolidate its normally two-day event into a one day event. So on March 6, I presented both of my scheduled papers, rather than over the course of two-days. Attendance was smaller due to the snow, and in one of the sessions the moderator failed to show and didn’t notify anyone, so I had the opportunity to stand in.

The first paper I presented was an argument for a positive and affirming theology in support of homosexual unions using the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I presented a similar paper at last year’s session where I looked at important passages specific on the topic of marriage that Bonhoeffer addressed and then examined the use of his concept of responsible marriage while in conversation with Bernd Wannenwelsch. This new paper focused primarily on three conceptual themes that also support a broader and affirming position on homosexual unions. These were:   the use of de-genderized language in Bonhoeffer’s theological writing, the use and misuse of procreation as an apology for marriage, and the ontological argument for sin as opposed to a deontological one.

My second paper was presented on a shift in the ethical language used to determine candidacy at Yad Vashem’s Gentile Holocaust Memorial. I looked at Dietrich Bonhoeffer once more, whose petition was denied on multiple occasions, to understand what reasons may have been motivating such decisions. It was my argument that this change in ethical language is largely to blame since the principle of pekuach nefesh (saving a life) – in this case a Jewish life was a guiding principle that replaced the ethical groundwork upon which the concept of the ger toshav was built. A second examination looked at how the Germans became the embodiment of evil immediately following Nuremberg, and that any association with them had to be challenged. I ended up moderating this session as well, and the papers were as diverse as they were engaging.

This coming month includes a lot of writing as well, including a very long paper on theodicy in Jewish theology for my independent studies class. More reading and writing for my Hindu Studies class.  And finally, this week I had my thesis proposal accepted. So the next phase of my writing journey begins. I promise to get to my Bonhoeffer manuscript soon as well.

Why is Kelly Gissendaner’s Spiritual Conversion so Important in Her Upcoming Execution and What it Means for the Church

As I sit here waiting to hear news on the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that could spare the life of Kelly Gissendaner, I am thinking about some of the words spoken in the last attempts made by her supporters and lawyers to save her life. Usually, this hinges on the lack of evidence or the credibility of a witness. But this case is different because this person’s life hangs in the balance because of a deep theological issue, one that, though recognized by the court, is hardly the place of the court.

As Ms. Gissendaner waits to be executed, her life depended just hours ago upon whether her lawyers could have convinced the court whether she had a conversion experience or not. It’s quite unique because I don’t recall ever following similar cases where spiritual issues were used as a point of contention in a stay of execution appeal.

I’m also interested in an issue that perhaps no one will think or care about: the efficacy of theology and the reality of doctrine. While prosecutors at this point will focus on justice and supporters of clemency will use theological languages of love and forgiveness, both have already seemed to not pick up on what is already in the rearview mirror: the spiritual lifeblood of the church seems to have already been judged.

No one would doubt that theology is a bizarre and strange place to build an appeal. But perhaps no more bizarre than a system that while based on Judeo-Christian ethics ignores the broader brushstrokes of the theological background out of which those ethics come. So in one article, we hear through Ms. Gissendaner’s bishop  that Kelly was a transformed person, her actions, her receipt of a theological degree, and her genuine attempts to change herself all tell the story of a converted Christian. Somehow this diligence also shows her experience to be more authentic than others of her inmates who made similar attempts, perhaps with less success, and therefore in the defense of her lawyers were not of the same kind as Ms. Gissendaner’s experience.

Yet in her defense’s defense, there is theological precedent for such a claim. After all, Jesus says “by their fruits you know them”, and Kelly’s fruits, at least insofar as all who knew her following her crime, blossomed voluminously in the testimonies of the people she touched. I do not doubt this. The practical spirituality preached by Jesus accords well with the empirical evidence required of courts to make difficult decisions.

On the other hand, we have a different story; this one comes from the prosecution, who rightly I might add, points to Ms. Gissendaner’s baptism in 1996, a year before the commission of the heinous crime. You can listen to that interview here:

http://www.11alive.com/story/news/local/2015/02/27/episcopal-priest-gissenbaner-murder-death-row/24159959/

So as a student of theology, we might ask what is conversion and what is baptism? According to the church and Ms. Gissendaner’s tradition, conversion is baptism. It is a transformative experience one in which the individual receives grace that both purifies and sanctifies. One is supposed to move out of darkness and into light, from ontological wrongness to rightness. The Catholic Catechism declares:

Through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers in her mission: "Baptism is the sacrament of regeneration through water in the word.

Likewise, the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (Gissendaner’s tradition) describes baptism as “the full initiation by Water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body.”

So those who are asking why Ms. Gissendaner’s conversion is efficient now but was not in 1996 are working under a valid assumption and exposing some of the ways in which we excuse the logic of the doctrine because quite frankly not many of us live up to the expectations that are said to occur in baptism. And that’s the real theological issue here. If the doctrine initiates us into the body of Christ, if we are brought from death to life, and regenerated, then it is not at all unreasonable that one’s life would accord with such a decision.

In 1996, Kelly Gissendaner was an adult who made a decision that was consistent with her conscience at the time.  She was baptized. In 1997, Kelly Gissendaner as an adult made a decision that was consistent with her conscience at the time. She had her husband murdered. While the public at large instinctively recognizes that baptism is only as meaningful as the person who makes it, this is not the position of the Episcopal, Protestant, and Catholic Churches. The issue here really is theological, and more than an indictment of Gissendaner, it is an indictment of theology.