What Happened to Moses?: Thoughts on Labor Day, Unions, and Theology

Yahwism, Post-Marxism, and the Status of Working Families

For the early church and for Judaism, the life of Moses was important. In fact so important, rather than writing really cool treatises on Paul’s letter to the Romans, they found the subject of Moses to be of utmost importance, even to the extent that they wrote books about of his life.

Philo of Alexandria: Life of Moses

Gregory of Nyssa: Life of Moses

Clement of Alexandria is also said to have written a Life of Moses, but it is unavailable to us.

Today, there are websites such as Beginning With Moses, dedicated to Christian biblical theology. I’ve still been meaning to get around to reading Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston. The insufficient attention that Christians give to the “Old” Testament means less critical and theological reflection God’s actions through Moses. Sure, neo-Calvinists are grateful for YHWH giving Moshe the Law and liberation theologians may have 7-10 pages in their initial constructive texts since the Exodus is seen as the supreme example of God’s liberating a people group from oppression.

But isn’t there more to Moses’ story then just the (very Western) paradox of liberty and law? What is it about this man that Philo gives him the title of Priest, Prophet, and King, just as John Calvin gave Christ the Triplex Munus? What was it about Moses that the enslaved Africans on American shores would add this Egyptian prince into their pantheon as a saint, with sorrow songs such as Go Down Moses:

Is this post going to be one that pleads at the very end that we must recover the spirituality of Moses for today? Maybe.

But can we ever fully recover the past? Or can we just re-ceive it, for the purpose of transforming tradition in order to change persons and the world? In his work, No Rising Tide, Joerg Rieger argues in part that we should re-imagine Moses as an “organizer of enslaved Hebrews” (128). Moses, like in most liberation theology texts, is given only the bare minimal mention. We tend to forget 2 things. First, Pharaoh, apart from his claims of being a god, is also a laborer, albeit, he is a worker in rebellion against the One, True God. This Pharaoh, who claims to achieve divinity by his own merit, who oppresses the groups of Hebrew families. Second, I would not say that Moses was a community organizer of industrial workers, for that would be anachronistic, but a gather and leader of the families of the descendents of Jacob. I think these are two crucial points to keep in mind as I continue this reflection.

Pharaoh the tyrant, who rejected his vocation according to God’s ordering, as a humble servant to the people should be compared in contrast to Moses, as a prince, as a man who accepted God’s calling and received his position as the most humble man on the planet (Numbers 12:3 NRSV). Now, what separates civil servants from ordinary day laborers (this includes producers and businesswomen as well) is that public officials at least understood in Scripture and Tradition, are not to be self-seeking. This brings me to the situation of today’s unions. I have said it before, but I would like to make it clear again. It is not organized workers in the private sectors that I worry about; in fact, I think there needs to be more unions. What I am concerned with is unions in the public sector. Once the workers that are supposed to govern us get organized, they become a special-interest, and therefore unfit to seek justice in the social order. This is why I sided with reasonable persons who wanted to limit the power of public sector unions in Wisconsin. Of course, there were many noble persons who argued that an attack against one union is an attack against all unions. Of course, this idea is misguided, as if all forms of work are the same. Also, the Christian tradition of acknowledging vocation (with a view of a Trinitarian difference between various vocations) is discounted at this point, for the vocation of public officials is of a different nature than say, a construction worker or a small business owner.

Unions have their history of progress, working for the working man as they say. But they also have an ugly history that no one gets to hear. According to Derrick Bell, in his Faces at the Bottom of the Well, informs us the racist history of organized labor, where blacks were not able to join strikes but take the heat for working as scabs for plant owners (Bell, 8). Or Post-Marxist literary critic Gayatri Spivak, in the essay “Feminism and Critical Theory” in her In Other Worlds, provides a story about the women workers in Seoul, Korea for Control Data in 1982. These women demanded higher wages, but what they received was a beating, and two of them suffered miscarriages (Spivak, 120). It was the Korean male workers who decided to attack these women that summer for “in a two-job family, the man saves face if the woman makes less, even for a comparable job” (Spivak, 121). This hidden story of oppression, promoted by bourgeois feminist in the First World at that time as progress (Spivak, 123), displays the economic realities of the multinational theater.

In these instances, the interests of the formal organized workers prevailed over the interests of working families of color and women. I don’t confuse supporting pro-union politicians with supporting politicians who will work for the uplift of working families. They just are not the same. Indeed, in a 1962 address to the AFL-CIO, even Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. confronted the labor movement for its bias. Of course, given MLK’s economic preferences, he saw the potential for the Negro vote to lead the way against the right-to-work states movement. I differ on this point, but all the same, African Americans “re-gained” the right to vote but still failed to make the prevention of the growth of right-to-work states. Currently, there are 22 right to work states. During MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign, was it not for the sake of impoverished families, looking for improved housing conditions and employment opportunities?

I think that King’s progressive politics, like many on the Far Left today, placed too much naive confidence in union politics, as if they were immune to self-absorbed politicking. What needs to happen is for us to be re-introduced to the spirituality of Moses (see, toldya so), in the search for a biblical realism, one that acknowledges the fallen nature of even the most innocent seeming of political stances and histories, and expose them as the scandal of Pharaoh. Let us not forget the labor of Moses’ sister Miriam or Yeshua the Messiah’s mother, Miriam the Theoktos, or of Rosa Parks and Zora Neale Hurston. Is it not curious that the largest population on college campuses is female, but those women over 25 still make 79% of what men do. Might I suggest that just as Miriam as a Prophet (Exods 15:20 NIV) goes under appreciated because of our devaluation of the spirituality of Moses, so does our blind spot towards women in the workforce, and their concerns continue to persist.

Perhaps we need to develop a spirituality of Miriam, after all.

RodtRDH

Formerly known as Rod of Alexandria, Rod the Rogue Demon Hunter Preacher of Hope | Black Scholar of Patristics | Writer for Nonviolent Politics. Destroyer of Trolls. It must be that angry puppy.

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