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The Latest Book from Bruce
Moses and the American Story
In this groundbreaking book, New York Times bestselling author Bruce Feiler reveals how Moses became America’s true founding father. Traveling through touchstones in American history, Feiler traces the biblical prophet’s influence from the Mayflower through today. Feiler visits the island where the pilgrims spent their first Sabbath, climbs the bell tower where the Liberty Bell was inscribed with a quote from Moses, retraces the Underground Railroad where “Go Down, Moses” was the national anthem of slaves, and dons the robe Charlton Heston wore in The Ten Commandments. READ MORE
My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me
When bestselling author Bruce Feiler was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in his leg, he could only imagine all the walks he might not take with his daughters, the ballet recitals he would miss, the art projects left undone, and the aisles he might not walk down. Though his daughters would have plenty of resources in their lives, they wouldn’t have their Dad. He decided to write to six men who had been with him throughout his life- men who could become his voice and his daughters’ Council of Dads. READ MORE
Read Bruce’s cancer diary.
Bruce's latest news
Listen to my 1-hour interview about Moses on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show.
The Atlanta History Center has posted a video of my talk about AMERICA’S PROPHET. It lasts about an hour.
Posts Tagged ‘White House’
My Moses Talk: Now Online!
Monday, December 7th, 2009
The Atlanta History Center has posted a video of my talk about AMERICA’S PROPHET. It lasts about an hour.
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, American History, Barack Obama, Bruce Feiler, George Washington, Jesus, Moses, Pilgrims, Thanksgiving, the Bible, White House
Posted in Books, This Week in Moses | 3 Comments »
Do the Ten Commandments Support Gays in the Military?
Monday, September 14th, 2009
THIS WEEK IN MOSES: Gays in the military.
In Ted Kennedy’s new memoir, being published today, the Senator describes his first meeting with Bill Clinton in the White House. The new president had stumbled into a firestorm about gays in the military and invited the Democratic members of the Armed Services Committee to a meeting. All of the senators went around the room giving their opinions, so much so that the meeting lasted a whopping two hours, costing Kennedy a seat at the ballet that night. Kennedy spoke in favor of lifting the ban; Robert Byrd spoke against. Finally, the president spoke up. Here is Kennedy’s telling:
President Clinton stood up. His response was short and sweet. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Moses went up to the mountain, and he came back with the tablets and there were ten commandments on those tablets. I’ve read those commandments. I know what they say, just like I know you do. And nowhere in those ten commandments will you find anything about homosexuality. Thank y’all for coming.’ He ended the meeting and walked out of the room.”
Clinton was technically correct. The Ten Commandments do not mention homosexuality. But the Five Books of Moses do, in ways that have plagued homosexuals for centuries. Leviticus 18:22 says, “Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman.” Leviticus 20:13 says this “abomination” is punishable by death. Conservative Jews and Christians have long cited these two verses in their condemnation of homosexuality, though more liberal-minded believers have claimed these verses occur in the context of idol-worship or other passages that render them irrelevant to current conventions. In any event, many offenses for which the Bible calls for the death penalty have not been punished in that way for millennia, if ever.
Clinton’s quoting Moses to support his softening of the ban of gays in the military recalls another use of the Hebrew prophet. In 1948, Harry Truman issued an executive order integrating the U.S. military. Noting that polls showed 82 percent of American were against the policy, Truman wrote in his diary: “How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt?”
From the pilgrims to the founding fathers, the civil war to the civil rights movement, American leaders have used Moses in the face of staunch opposition to advance the cause of justice. Obama, though, might have a trouble quoting Moses to support his policy toward gays in the military. Just last month he cited Moses in support of his health care plan.
Tags: Barack Obama, Bible, Bill Clinton, gays in the military, Moses, Ted Kennedy, Ten Commandments, White House
Posted in Books, This Week in Moses | No Comments »
Which Kennedy Was Moses? John or Ted?
Monday, August 31st, 2009
THIS WEEK IN MOSES: The Kennedys and the Promised Land.
In The Making of the President 1964, Theodore White compared the death of John F. Kennedy to the death of Moses on Mount Nebo. Moses had led the Israelites out of slavery into freedom, put up with their kvetching and complaining for 40 years, only to be stopped short of the Promised Land, following a cryptic incident in which he drew water from a stone. With Kennedy stopped short of his dream, Johnson would be his Joshua.
“It was as if Kennedy, a younger Moses, had led an elder Joshua to the heights of Mount Nebo and there shown him the promised land which he himself would never enter but which Joshua would make his own.”
This week a similar analogy was tossed about following the death of John’s younger brother. Ted Kennedy was called the Moses of Health Care.
“Sen. Ted Kennedy and Moses had a shared destiny,” wrote the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Like the flawed patriarch who led his people to the Promised Land but never set foot inside it, Mr. Kennedy died last week having led the nation toward universal health-care coverage that he would not live to see.”
The Kennedys were not alone. This analogy with Moses was used frequently on the death of George Washington in 1799, in which two-thirds of the eulogies compared the “first conductor of the Jewish nation” to the “leader and father of the American nation.” It was the single-most commonly cited comparison on the death of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. As Henry Ward Beecher said, “Again a great leader of the people has passed through toil, sorrow, battle, and war, and come near to the promised land of peace, into which he might not pass over.”
And of course Martin Luther King, Jr., quoted the same passage in his speech the night before he was assassinated. “I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I’ve looked over. I’ve seen the promised land. And I may not get there with you, but I want you to know that we as a people will get to the promised land.”
For Barack Obama, who has compared himself to Joshua, the consistency of this analogy from Washington to Bush, is a stark reminder that he picks up the fight that Ted Kennedy pioneered that failure is, indeed, an option. Even the greatest leaders often fall short of their dreams.
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, Exodus, George Washington, Moses, White House
Posted in Books, This Week in Moses | No Comments »
Moses vs. the Death Panels. Obama Quotes the Ninth Commandment
Monday, August 24th, 2009
THIS WEEK IN MOSES: Harry and Louise meet Moses.
In a conversation with religious leaders last week, Barack Obama hit back against some of the more outlandish attacks against his health care proposals. Responding to rumors of “death panels” that would “decide whether elderly people would live or die,” he referred to the “Great Words of Sinai,” the Ten Commandments. “There are some folks out there who are frankly bearing false witness,” he said.
The dictate against “bearing false witness” first appears in Exodus 20:16, when Moses climbs to the top of Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments after leading the Israelites across the Red Sea. The line reads: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
Obama deftly didn’t mention which of the Ten Commandments this is, as different traditions count the commandments differently. In the Jewish, Protestant, and Orthodox tradition, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor” is commandment number nine. In the Catholic and Lutheran traditions, it’s number eight.
Despite harsh criticism that Obama is injecting religion where it doesn’t belong, “bearing false witness” has a long presence in American jurisprudence, as do most of the Ten Commandments. A Connecticut law from 1642 promised death “if any man rise by false witness.” Similar laws appeared in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. As recently as 1988, the Supreme Court of Mississippi cited the Ninth Commandment in reproaching prosecutorial misconduct:
When the State or any party states or suggests the existence of certain damaging facts and offers no proof whatever to substantiate the allegations, a golden opportunity is afforded the opposing counsel in closing argument to appeal to the Ninth Commandment. “Thou shalt not bear false witness . . . ”
More striking: Obama’s use of the Ninth Commandment echoes Kay Hagan’s use of the same line to hit back against claims by Liddy Dole in last year’s Senate campaign in North Carolina. That Democrats are now using the Ten Commandments as a weapon against Republicans continues a longstanding tradition that has been appalling absent in recent years: The Bible can be used by used by both sides in the culture wars.
Specifically, Moses, wielded by presidents from Washington to Reagan, Lincoln to Obama, may be the one figure in American history who transcends Red and Blue. The question of the moment is whether he’s strong enough to take on the forces that include Blue Cross & Blue Shield.
Tags: Barack Obama, Health Care, Insurance, Moses, Mount Sinai, Republicans, Ten Commandments, White House
Posted in Books, This Week in Moses | 2 Comments »
Bible Story: “Moses” Wins Presidential Medal of Freedom
Thursday, August 13th, 2009
Moses has finally made it to the White House.
On August 15, 1620 – nearly 400 years ago this week – the Pilgrims set sail on the Mayflower from Southhampton with 102 passengers on board. Their leader, John Robinson, described them as the chosen people, casting off the yoke of their pharaoh, King James. William Bradford, their first governor, proclaimed their mission to be as vital as that of “Moses and the Israelites when they went out of Egypt.”
“The leader of a people in a wilderness had need be a Moses,” Cotton Mather said. “And if a Moses had not led the people of Plymouth Colony,” he wrote of Bradford, then the colony would not have survived.
Yesterday, August 12, 2009, Barack Obama stood up in the East Room of the White House and awarded Presidential Medals of Freedom to a group of diverse leaders that included Harvey Milk, who was called the “Moses of his people.”
Obama made the connection to the Bible’s greatest story explicit in awarding the nation’s highest honor to civil rights pioneer Joseph Lowery. “Preaching in his blood,” Obama said, “the Reverend Joseph Lowery is a giant of the Moses generation of civil rights leaders.” The president went on to quote the Rev. Lowery in words that would have made Moses proud: “There’s good crazy and there’s bad crazy — and sometimes you need a little bit of that good crazy to make the world a better place.”
All the Moseses in American life – from William Bradford to Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King, Jr. – had a bit of that good crazy. Including most of the occupants of the White House.
Obama is not the first president to make the connection between the American spirit and the story of Moses. George Washington compared the American Revolution to the Exodus; Thomas Jefferson quoted Moses in his second inaugural. Jefferson, along with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, proposed that Moses be on the seal of the United States.
Two-thirds of the sermons on Washington’s death compared him to Moses, as did the same number for Lincoln. Wilson was compared to Moses for his leadership during World War I, as was FDR during World War II. Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush all invoked the biblical leader. And, of course, Barack Obama claimed to be part of the “Joshua Generation” that would take the work of the “Moses Generation” and finally lead his people to the Promised Land.
This week, 400 years after those pilgrims first invoked the Exodus to inspire their quest for freedom, Americans were reminded once more why the Exodus story is America’s story and why Moses is our real founding father.
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This entry is part of a series, “This Week in Moses,” chronicling the 400-year relationship between the United States and its true founding fathe. For more information, and to read the entire series, visit www.brucefeiler.com, or sign up at twitter.com/brucefeiler. America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story, by the New York Times bestselling author of Walking the Bible and Abraham, tells the little-known story of America’s connection to the Exodus and shows how Moses continues to inspire Americans today. It goes on sale October 6.
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, Bible, Bill Clinton, Exodus, Franklin Roosevelt, George W. Bush, George Washington, Martin Luther King, Moses, Pilgrims, Ronald Reagan, White House
Posted in Books | No Comments »