Moses: A Human Life
with Dr. Avivah Zornberg
Sunday, May 23 | Live from Jerusalem
10am Pacific / 8pm Israel
cosponsored by Kehilla Synagogue, B’nai Tikvah, Beth Israel, Beyt Tikkun, Netivot Shalom, JCC-East Bay, Beth El, Coastside Jewish Community, Mendocino Coast Jewish Community
TICKETS
$10 – Chochmat Members
$10 – Members of Co-Sponsoring Organizations
$18 – General Public
Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life. – Franz Kafka
Moses’ fundamental sense of himself as ‘not a man of words’ comes to a poignant consummation in the long speeches he makes to the people before he dies. What does it mean to learn to speak?
This lecture is based on Dr. Zornberg’s book Moses: A Human Life, which is an unprecedented portrait of Moses’ inner world. No figure looms larger in Jewish culture than Moses, and few have stories more enigmatic.
Drawing on a broad range of sources—literary as well as psychoanalytic, a wealth of classical Jewish texts alongside George Eliot, W. G. Sebald, and Werner Herzog—Zornberg offers a vivid and original portrait of the biblical Moses. Moses’s vexing personality, his uncertain origins, and his turbulent relations with his own people are acutely explored by Zornberg, who sees this story, told and retold, as crucial not only to the biblical past but also to the future of Jewish history.
About Avivah Zornberg
An internationally celebrated Torah Scholar, Dr. Avivah Zornberg holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Cambridge University. For the past thirty years, she has taught Torah in Jerusalem at Matan, Yakar, Pardes, and the Jerusalem College for Adults. Dr. Zornberg also holds a Visiting Lectureship at the London School of Jewish Studies. She weaves together ideas from literature, secular philosophy, psychology, and the ancient teachers’ take on the texts. Her work is entirely engaging and built for the 21st century.
