Entry #6: Radioactive Moses
“The rabbis lied to us. They put themselves and their cleverness above YHWH.”
The tale of Two Pigeons continues. Start with Entry #1.
Been busy working the phones and trying to set up meetings with people Misha knew. Most who I talk to seem as mystified about the whole thing as Leah and his parents. Misha left his family? It can’t be. That just doesn’t sound right. That’s what they all say.
Rad alarms have been shrieking all weekend…a big dust storm has been blowing in from the north. So I’ve been hanging around the apartment, popping Misha’s pills and reading Misha’s Hebrew Bible. I’m glad I’ve been able to spend some time with the book because there’s some wild stuff in there…wild in a good way…educational. I already mentioned that the book is marked up. But I don’t think I gave you a sense of just how marked up it is. His handwriting takes up most of the free margin space. His scribbles are everywhere. There are post-it notes and little scraps of paper wedged in between the pages with commentary, too. The handwriting is barely legible most of the time but the stuff I’ve been able to decipher so far has been…well…not sure how to describe it. All I can say is that it looks like Misha’s a Torah scholar now…a highly devout one.
I read the Torah before. Not in any systematic way. But I’ve leafed my way through Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus...and all those books. Like most people I liked the early stuff, the foundational founding father stories of the men wandering around in the desert with their flocks, talking to God, taking multiple wives… One thing that always surprised me was the blustering nature of Jewish God. Doesn’t come off as wise or particularly intelligent. More than anything he’s a braggart and a bully…a cross between a real estate agent and a mob boss on coke. He’s always tapping on some poor schmuck’s shoulder with another big scheme, “Hey! If you go with me I’ll make you the richest shepherd around with the largest gang of hot wives these Canaanite shit kickers have ever seen! And you’ll have the best land, do you hear me! The most fantastic land, your watermelons will grow to be five miles long! Just as long as you don’t cross me. You never cross me. Oh and you have to sacrifice your son to me. Just kidding! Lol! You really were gonna do it? Hahahahhahaha.” There’s just something very debased and amoral about this Hebrew God. In the liberal reform synagogue in SF that took us in after we came from Leningrad we constantly heard about Jewish universal values and the kindness built into the Jewish faith…this whole notion of tikkun olam…of it being God’s work for us to repair the world…to make it good or whatever. I’m not sure where they were getting that message because that’s not what I got from the text when I finally got around to reading it. To me it seemed like a lot of it was about justifying power…by equating it with holiness. It was all about whether God was with you or not. You were holy if God had chosen you. It wasn’t about your deeds or your inner character. As long as the deity…the ultimate power…had your back, you were golden. You could be a cheat, a liar, a manipulator and would be rewarded with wealth and progeny. That was the moral of the story Jacob and Esau for me. I guess there’s something very common sense about it, right? How else can you explain the seeming randomness of why some people win and others lose? God is on their side, that’s why. They’re anointed and the losers aren’t. It makes sense to see the world that way but it never appealed to me as a religious creed. It felt debased to worship a God like this. I mean…we all know how the human world works. The most successful and prosperous are frequently the most cruel, the most exploitative, the most ruthless, ready to betray those closest to them. So the Jewish God is with these types, then. He’s with the wicked. This kind of God does have an ancientness to it, a pre-Christian quality, like the gods of the Greeks or something.
I’m not sure what inspiration Misha finds in Judaism. Haven’t been able to decipher it from his comments. But he is into it. That’s for sure. He believes the Torah to be some sort of divine revelation. It’s just that he seems to not always trust the translation…thinks it had been altered somehow…its meaning subtly twisted. Why? I don’t know. But on the title page of the book he wrote this: “THE RABBIS LIED TO US. They put themselves and their cleverness above YHWH.” A lot of his scribbles are technical in nature, nit-picking the details. I was taken in by the commentary he has on Exodus 34, the chapter where Moses goes up to Mt. Sini to talk to God and get all the rules on how to be a proper Israelite.
I’ll first quote the text first:
And YHWH said to Moses: Write down these commandments, for in accordance with these commandments I make a covenant with you and with Israel.
And he was there with YHWH forty days and forty nights. He ate no bread and drank no water. And he wrote down on the tablets the terms of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.
Then Moses came down from Mount Sinai. And as Moses came down from the mountain bearing the two tablets of the Pact, Moses was not aware that the skin of his face was radiant, since he had spoken with God.
Aaron and all the Israelites saw that the skin of Moses’ face was radiant; and they shrank from coming near him.
But Moses called to them, and Aaron and all the chieftains in the assembly returned to him, and Moses spoke to them.
Afterward all the Israelites came near, and he instructed them concerning all that YHWH had imparted to him on Mount Sinai.
And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face.
Whenever Moses went in before YHWH to converse, he would remove the veil until he came out. And when he came out and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, the Israelites would see how radiant the skin of Moses’ face was. Moses would then put the veil back over his face until he’d leave again to go speak with God.
There are scribbles relating to the Ten Commandments in the margins that I can’t make out at all. And he’s got “the Pact” underlined. Not sure why. Anyway that’s not what I want to focus on. I want to highlight his comments re Moses’ face. Misha has all parts talking about Moses’ “radiant” face underlined — three in all. In the margins he writes this: “RADIANT? Obvs a distorted translation. The orig Hebrew word here not about light/radiance but denotes a skin condition like rough scarring. Horned skin. Moses was disfigured by his contact with YHWH.” He then had the parts about the veil underlined twice. “Why he had to wear a veil. Not bcs of radiance but disfigurement. He scared ppl.” And then at the bottom of the page, he added another thought: “What kind of radiation did YHWH release? Is it rad? Or maybe just heat? Doesn’t seem to cause any maladies, other than deformed face.”
Moses burned by God’s radiation? Sounded like Misha was into some ancient aliens conspiracy theories. But no. I looked it up and got sucked into rabbit hole that took up most of the day. It was actually nice to return to my journalistic roots, where I’d do this constantly: load up on opiates and some speed pills and spend days immersing myself in an obscure little corner of the known universe…tracking down some little piece of information…making connections…following the money. I liked that part of that life. Gave me a sense of superiority…like I was always pursuing hidden sublime truths, discovering the nature of reality. Later on I realized that my investigative journalist had a religious quality…that’s what drove me. I was finding out THE HOLY TRUTH while everyone else was under the spell of powerful demonic forces leading them astray.
Anyway I learned that Misha’s comments are not as strange as I originally thought. A big debate among Torah scholars has raged over this stuff for a long time. The root of the debate, as far as I can tell, is overt the the original Hebrew word that the Torah uses — qaran — to describe what’s happening to Moses’ face when he came into contact with the deity. This word’s exact meaning has been lost to time and the word itself might have been distorted through the various translations and alphabet transliterations that the Torah came through…so its meaning is open to debate. The consensus view, among rabbis and scholars, is that the word describes some kind of shining. That is, Moses came down from talking to God for more than a month and he took on a holy radiance…a radiance so powerful and overwhelming that he needed to cover his face with a veil. But some, well, very few, have come to believe the term has long been misinterpreted…and that qaran describes Moses not exuding rays of light but developing a skin condition of some kind, possibly boils or welts or a toughness of the skin. The idea is that after being exposed to God, Moses suffered physically, became marked, his face fucked up by his proximity to so much awesome power for so long. That’s why he needed the veil when he talked to his people…to cover his hideous visage. So some sort of burns from divine radiation aren’t out of the question.
Most of the debate around this is comically acrimonious and ridiculously niche…and the radiation hypothesis seems to be one of the more fringe academic interpretations. But the guy pushing it, a real respected historian out in San Diego, seems to think he’s right and everyone else is wrong.