"Prophet-Making Moses"
No denying his destiny: Born to resisting unjust authority, redeeming unjust suffering, prophetically founding story shaping a people; echoed in Matthew's birth story: warning of parents, disobeying by magi, sneaking of baby past Herod to Egypt; everything else about us mere addition, comment, interpretation, to liberating, Exodusing, becoming archetypally a people; not yet, and never, quite, a nation, though at times we die trying, and even kill?
Are we sure we can handle being most feared? Within the nation, among the nations, we are trying to be and become?
Longtime covenanting one-by-one, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, sometimes their spouses; now all bound in Moses, Moses in all, assuming stiff-necked insistence, liberation's intentional discontent: Make us nation like any nation! Fraught tautly, with kings, with edicts, with armies, with war upon war!
Working-Class Origins, born into Slavery, only amusement making more love than war, even than bricks, belabored, belaboring, producing, reproducing, oppression breeding to proliferation, proliferation leading to infanticide: "hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor," contextualizing Mosaic beginnings; Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah, Puah, rebelling, refusing Pharaoh's commands, begetting us in disobedience, Hebrew mothers without spoiling, more than ready: "vigorous, giving birth before midwife comes to them."
My parents at first-birth time riffing on ease of Sacagawea, Birdwoman, Lewis and Clark Expedition, allegedly birthing so quickly, almost off-handedly, on open trail; my mother's doctor perplexed, her first words after unspeedy delivery: "To hell with the Birdwoman!"
Pharaoh breaks bodies, God of Moses makes souls? Subversiveness proving contagious? Sacraments of Sisterhood, Solidarity, transcending every conceivable difference; Moses' mother hiding him three months, trusting this god and this river, placing in basket to float amid very same reeds in time parting with first of walked-upon waters; conspiring, godlike example: Moses' sister strategically distanced to watch, to await, very daughter of Pharaoh, acutely surrounded, bathing alertly, spotting basket, summoning it, opening, seeing, embracing wholeheartedly; palace-based princess positioning status, attending, receiving, accepting advice of field-based slave; Moses' sister naming their mother his nurse for another mother, of whom there are never enough?
Raising Moses by cadre, revolutionary women, vesting in one here and now well-being of every child everywhere, hastening day, hosts of co-conspiring nurses and nurturers, refusing to order any one set of children off to harm any other, cooperating, communicating, crossing borders for saving a life, while their men and kings, even gods, play out vicious cycles of vengeance and grief.
"God" learning well from these women? I Will Be Who I Will Be adopting whole Children of Israel? Parenting through Moses, "the one who draws out,"
specializing in organized obstinacy, in whom divine fission, position, action betraying class interests, in spite of First World rank and privilege -- Do we not wonder whatever befalls this renegade daughter of Pharaoh, raising own child to be enemy leader, remaining protected, or extending self-risk? Possibly, "even though she drew child from the water, she could not draw connection between her life of safety and luxury, and his life of poverty and danger?" Probably, with support of her base, seeing in sisterly subterfuge new way of life, "critical moment in her long defection from courts of Pharaoh and Egyptian empire," defections we have yet to make? This "oldest record of civil disobedience in world literature," how does it end? How do we end it?
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