In Defense of Charisma

Vincent W. Lloyd

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231545204
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Martin Luther King, Jr., has charisma—as does Adolf Hitler. So do Brad Pitt, Mother Teresa, and many a high school teacher. Charisma marks, or masks, power; it legitimates but also attracts suspicion. Sociologists often view charisma as an irrational, unstable source of authority, superseded by the rational, bureaucratic legitimacy of modernity. Yet charisma endures in the modern world; perhaps it is reinvigorated in the postmodern, as the notoriety of celebrities, politicians, and New Age gurus attests. Is charisma a tool of oppression, or can it help the fight against oppression? Can reexamining the concept of charisma teach us anything useful about contemporary movements for social justice? In Defense of Charisma develops an account of moral charisma that weaves insights from politics, ethics, and religion together with reflections on contemporary culture. Vincent W. Lloyd distinguishes between authoritarian charisma, which furthers the interests of the powerful, naturalizing racism, patriarchy, and elitism, and democratic charisma, which prompts observers to ask new questions and discover new possibilities. At its best, charisma can challenge the way we see ourselves and our world, priming us to struggle for justice. Exploring the biblical Moses alongside Charlton Heston's performance in The Ten Commandments, the image of Martin Luther King, Jr., together with tweets from the Black Lives Matter movement, and the novels of Harper Lee and Sherman Alexie juxtaposed with the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, In Defense of Charisma challenges readers to turn away from the blinding charisma of celebrities toward the humbler moral charisma of the neighbor, colleague, or relative.

1

THE UNCIRCUMCISED LIPS OF MOSES

Who could offer a better image of charisma than Moses? Standing strong and tall, living righteously, speaking to God, leading a people who respect his extraordinary gifts—this is what charisma is supposed to look like. Of course, this is not Moses but Charlton Heston playing Moses in the extravagant film The Ten Commandments, released in 1956. Filmed in Egypt and directed by Cecil B. DeMille, lasting three and a half hours, an astronomical financial success, The Ten Commandments is quintessential Hollywood, and quintessential charisma. It makes charisma into Hollywood charisma, and into American charisma. It is shown annually on American television at Easter, and it continues to offer the model for cinematic depictions of Moses, including, most recently, the DreamWorks animated Prince of Egypt (1998) and the Ridley Scott–directed Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), featuring Christian Bale as Moses. Both closely follow the filmic vocabulary developed by DeMille. In each, Moses is a classic Hollywood hero, projecting masculinity, power, and eloquence. As a baby, his Jewish mother must send him away so that he is not killed by Pharaoh’s orders. He is adopted into Pharaoh’s household, his identity a secret, and he pleases Pharaoh greatly, even more than Pharaoh’s biological son, Rameses. Eventually, Moses learns of his adoptive origins. He grows frustrated with the Egyptians’ oppression of the Jews, kills an Egyptian taskmaster, and flees or is exiled. Eventually, he returns, rallies the Jewish people with the help of miracles performed by God, and leads the Jews out of Egypt. Then, he receives God’s law and gives it to the Jewish people.

The Ten Commandments opens with an announcement (quite literally: the director steps out onto a stage to read it) that the film depicts the contrast between unjust, worldly law and a new law, God’s law. The film is strikingly Christian: the Jewish people are hoping for a savior to release them from the shackles imposed by the old law, Pharaoh’s law. Moses is this savior, proclaiming that the old law no longer needs to be followed and that a new law comes directly from God. The film is also strikingly American. In addition to the instantly recognizable Hollywood conventions and American accents, Exodus is framed as a story of nation-building, a story of a people leaving oppression and moving to a new land where they would be free, where there would be justice. Exodus is the American Revolution, Moses is the Founding Father, and the Ten Commandments are the Constitution. America is Judeo-Christian, nation and religion are one and the same. It takes a great man with great faith and great gifts to lead the new nation; Americans should be proud of their great men, should model themselves on great men, or on the followers of great men.

While the Exodus story has greatly appealed to black Americans and became a key community-building text for them, it is whites who suffer injustice in the cinematic depictions of Exodus. Yet The Ten Commandments, released during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, must certainly have primed American media for a depiction of the civil rights movement, and particularly Martin Luther King, Jr., as mobilizing a religiously motivated, oppressed community seeking freedom. King himself would embrace this identification. In his last speech, the night before his assassination, he cites Moses’s final scene in the Bible. King, like Moses, has seen the promised land from afar, he is confident his people are moving toward it, but he doubts he himself will reach the land of milk and honey. The tendency to read the civil rights movement through the Exodus narrative was felt particularly by black Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Bob Moses, whose name, and likely his own charisma, led to such unrealistic expectations from the communities in which he worked that for a time Moses would use his mother’s maiden name, becoming Robert Parris. It is tempting to read the more than two centuries of black American appropriation of the Exodus narrative through the lens of The Ten Commandments, and to worry that a troublingly masculine, American, and authoritarian style of leadership has always dominated the black political imagination. In other words, it is tempting to imagine Moses as Charlton Heston instead of engaging with the biblical text itself. It is tempting to reduce Exodus to a great (white) man freeing the slaves.

Charlton Heston’s Moses fulfills the desires of the Israelites, desires constituted by their time in bondage. They long for a leader with the strength and power of Pharaoh, and Heston’s Moses is precisely that—indeed, he nearly was Pharaoh. Heston’s Moses is self-assured: he was a confident Egyptian leader and then, as soon as he discovered his Israelite origins, he became a confident Israelite leader, standing up to Egyptian oppression as he disguises himself as a Jewish slave. Heston’s Moses is a powerful presence, speaking directly to his people and directly to God. In contrast, the biblical Moses does not give the Israelites what they want. He leaves them supremely frustrated as they impatiently wait for liberation to finally come, for the journey to the Promised Land to finally conclude. The biblical Moses hesitates and doubts and is unsure of his identity; he never comfortably occupies the role of national leader. The most striking and significant difference between Heston’s Moses and the Moses of the Book of Exodus is that the latter never communicates directly—not with God and not with the Israelites. Moses is said to be ineloquent and to have “uncircumcised lips,” often understood as a speech impediment, perhaps a stutter. Mediation is essential to the Exodus story: God speaks to Moses, who speaks to Aaron, who speaks to the Israelite elders, who speak to the Israelite people—and this is all recorded in a text, Exodus, layered with commentary and interpretation, projected onto the movie screen, and eventually reaches us. In other words, mediation is essential to Moses’s charisma, but mediation must not overdetermine Moses’s charisma—we must not conflate Moses and Heston. Reflection on the biblical narrative, and particularly the evocative image of Moses’s “uncircumcised lips,” so different from Heston’s muscular build and manly voice, offers a way to understand this relationship between charisma and mediation. When mediation is ignored, Heston becomes Moses (and America becomes Israel); when mediation is engaged with, we begin to see the democratic potential of charisma, always precarious but never absent.

In the biblical narrative, Moses’s identity is essentially split. He is both Egyptian and Jewish, in a sense too Egyptian to be Jewish and too Jewish to be Egyptian. He is always a “foreigner in a foreign land,” but this does not mean that he is free of any worldly attachments. Rather, it means that he is constantly aware that who he is exceeds how the world sees him, exceeds even how he can see himself. Every worldly description of him will fall short. Unlike the cinematic depictions, Exodus does not suggest that Moses’s Israelite identity was ever concealed from him during his youth at Pharaoh’s court. The narrative’s silence suggests that Moses knew he was both of and not of Pharaoh’s world from the start. There is no hint that the identity of Moses’s mother was concealed from him: she was invited by Pharaoh’s daughter to nurse and raise the young boy. This distance from Pharaoh is also significant. Whereas Hollywood makes Moses Pharaoh’s adoptive son and potential heir, the relationship in the biblical narrative is more distant, and mediated through a woman, Pharaoh’s daughter. Indeed, questions of lineage are essential to the biblical narrative. The book of Exodus itself begins with a list of the names of the Israelites who originally went to Egypt. Time passes, the Israelites multiply, and Pharaoh worries. He orders that their number be reduced, eventually resorting to condemning all Hebrew boys to death in the Nile. There is a threat that the lineage of the Israelites will be broken: tradition that passes from generation to generation, from father to son, will be halted with the death of the sons. Moses escapes this fate when his mother secrets him away, into Pharaoh’s daughter’s care. Moses thus represents a singular hope for the future of the Jewish people. It is a hope that is closely related to God’s covenant with the people of Israel: God habitually identifies himself as “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” naming the proximate father, then the first father, his son, and his grandson, the lineage of generations constitutive of the Israelite people. This centrality of generations is echoed in the final, decisive plague that God brings to the Egyptians. God kills all of the firstborn Egyptians while saving all of the firstborn Israelites who follow his orders to protect their homes. God is not just turning the tables on the Egyptians, doing to them what they did to the Israelites. He is challenging the symbol of their tradition, their peoplehood: the possibility for generational continuity, for a culture to pass down from father to (firstborn) son.

That Moses’s identity is uncertain (and it is uncertain in the secondary literature as well, most famously in Freud’s claim that Moses was not an Israelite at all) opens him to appreciating what is most essential in him, what is most human—which is also what is most divine. When God charges Moses with approaching Pharaoh, Moses demurs, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” God responds, “I will be with you” (3:11–12). God does not name any attributes of Moses, does not say that he is strong or handsome or eloquent. God simply states that what qualifies Moses is that God will accompany him. This is, essentially, a reminder of what is obvious in the tradition: humans are created in the image of God. What makes a human being human is her likeness to God; if God is understood in the negative, as indescribable, then what makes the human being human is that which exceeds description or representation.

Moses hesitates often, but he ultimately obeys. He did not know who he was, but he discovers that rather than being what the world sees him as—an Egyptian at Pharaoh’s court, an Israelite, or a member of his wife’s community of Midianites—he should be content with being a follower of God. What does this mean, precisely? That is what Moses wants to know when he asks God for God’s name. God responds with what is usually interpreted as an archaic form of the verb to be, stating, “I am who I am” (3:14). Who is God? That which exceeds any worldly representation, that which exceeds language, that which exceeds any list of descriptions, and that which has the effect of inviting others to ask who they are beyond the way the world describes them. When Moses later asks God, “Show me your ways, so I may know you and find favor in your sight” (33:13), God responds by offering to give Moses his Presence. There is no more to God than this, Presence without attributes, and it is by remembering this that Moses will be able to act in Godly ways. God invites the Israelites to see themselves as more than slaves. God tells Moses to tell the Israelites, “I am has sent me to you,” evocatively equivocating between the irreducible name of God, “I am,” and Moses’s own identity, who Moses is beyond worldly descriptions (3:14). Here is the contagion of charisma: those who witness charisma and seek to respond do so by demonstrating, performing, their existence beyond worldly descriptions. The Israelites want a god who can be explained in their language, in their way of seeing the world. The God who appears to Moses can only be seen through failures of representation, through attempts to access God that are indirect and that inevitably, in the narrative, lead to confusion.

Moses appreciates the difficulties involved, and he resists God’s charge. How can Moses accurately represent “I am”? “I have never been eloquent,” “I am slow of speech and slow of tongue,” he demurs (4:10). God will assist him, Moses is told. Moses imagines that charisma requires a thundering, persuasive voice that can appeal to the masses, telling the Israelites what they want to hear, and in a way that they want to hear it. Moses doubts again: “I am a poor speaker” in the English translation; “I am uncircumcised of lips” in the Hebrew (6:30). What this could mean remains unclear, with various interpretations put forward by scholars of the Hebrew Bible. It could be a lisp or a stutter. It could be that Moses, away from Egypt for many years, has forgotten the Egyptian language. The phrase certainly seems to suggest something quite different from conventional masculine strength. Instead of a powerful, persuasive tongue, Moses has lips that are unable to command. Circumcision, after all, makes a Jewish man. The very first miracle that God teaches Moses to perform is transforming his shepherd’s staff into a snake. Moses runs to hide when he sees the snake; God coaxes him to pick it up by the tail and so turn it again into a staff. Moses’s struggle to handle this snake, this masculine potency, like his uncircumcised lips, distances his authority from the authority automatically conveyed by patriarchy, the authority received from a father and passed down to a son. Moses is the recipient of a patrimony, part of a covenant made by God with his father and his father’s father and generations before, but Moses is also outside of that lineage, raised by Egyptians and living among Midianites. His authority comes from God, not the world. God tells Moses to tell Pharaoh that “Israel is my firstborn son” (4:22)—it is God who takes the place of worldly authorities, who takes the place of all fathers, who challenges social hierarchies encrusted by tradition.

Moses’s ability to turn his staff into a snake, mediated by Aaron (who performs the miracle), is ultimately not persuasive to Pharaoh. The Egyptian leader simply summons his own magicians and demonstrates that they, too, can turn a staff into a snake. This is the first of several moments where the Exodus narrative teaches us to perceive the difference between charisma and its simulacra. Pharaoh’s magicians (the text includes with magicians “wise men,” suggesting collective wisdom, the wisdom of tradition) might look in some ways precisely like Moses and Aaron as they work miracles, but Pharaoh’s magicians use their seemingly extraordinary gifts to secure the powers that be, to maintain social hierarchy—to exult Pharaoh. Later in the narrative, famously, the Israelites grow restless as Moses is on Mount Sinai for forty days communing with God. The people have been told to worship their God, but mediation is absent and God is distant. They go astray. With Aaron’s blessing, the people collect gold jewelry and melt it into a golden calf, which they worship—a deity that they can access directly, without mediation. In this case, the powers that be are more crudely material: gold, wealth, capital become the object of worship in place of God. The worship of the golden calf does resemble in many ways the worship of God, with rituals and sacrifices and songs, but it is decisively different. The golden calf—significantly, an object, not a person—does have a type of charisma, drawing the Israelites in, fulfilling their desire with its shine. The golden calf and Pharaoh’s magicians represent authoritarian charisma, opposed to Moses’s democratic charisma. They give viewers what the viewers want to see instead of inviting viewers to interrogate their own desires. Authoritarian charisma does not invite its audience to see themselves and their worlds in new ways. It awes, but at the end of the day it does not change: the rich and powerful become richer and more powerful.

Ridding the world of authoritarian charisma is a painful and bloody process. When Moses returns from Mount Sinai and sees that a festival is being celebrated in honor of the golden calf, he gathers the Israelites who remain loyal to him. He tells them, “Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.” To be rid of idols does not simply mean breaking them or tossing them into the sea. If the hold of an idol, if the hold of authoritarian charisma, is strong enough, it may be necessary for a community to be purged. This is less tragic than it may seem for the human has already been all but stamped out in those who worship an idol. They have entirely forgotten who they are, entirely embraced the description of what they are offered by those around them and the superficial desires that come along.

The first time God communicates with Moses, when he is in Midian, God appears not directly but through the intermediary of an angel, and that angel through the intermediary of a burning bush. It is essential that distance be maintained: “Come no closer,” Moses is told, and Moses hides his face (3:5). When Moses protests that he cannot speak well, God suggests Aaron as an intermediary: “He indeed shall speak for you to the people; he shall serve as a mouth for you, and you shall serve as God for him” (4:16). But it is actually not the people to whom Aaron speaks. He speaks to the elders, and it is only they who pass on the message that God told to Moses to the people. Further, it is not just words that are mediated. While Hollywood depicts Moses as a miracle worker, impressing Pharaoh and the Jews, it is actually Aaron who performs miracles in public, using what he has been taught by Moses, who was in turn instructed by God. Even in earlier generations, God did not make Godself “fully known” to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Who God is exceeds that, exceeds the God who is represented by tradition. When God finally decides to appear to the Israelites as they wander through the desert, God’s appearance is enormously mediated. God orders (Moses to order the elders to order the people) that the Israelites are to stay away from Mount Sinai, on punishment of death. In addition to not climbing the mountain, they are to abstain from sexual relations, leaving God alone in the phallic position. There is thunder and lightning. There is smoke on the mountain, signaling the fire where God will appear—but the fire itself is not visible from the bottom of the mountain where the Israelites are. When God finally appears to Moses, God warns Moses that no one can see God’s face; God covers Moses’s eyes with God’s hand. It is only after God has passed, as God is leaving, that Moses is able to see God’s back. After this experience, a bit of the divine passes from God to Moses. The Israelite leader’s face becomes radiant, so bright that it blinds those who see him, so bright that Moses needs to wear a veil if he is to be seen by others. Charisma, represented by radiance, is contagious: it passes, indirectly, from God to Moses and from Moses to the Israelites close to him: Aaron, Joshua, and others.

First among the laws that God decrees, the First Commandment, would seem to be a rejection of mediation. To condemn the worship of idols would seem to be an assertion of the direct relationship with God, unmediated by God’s representatives. But in fact God at the same time presents a whole raft of intermediaries, of ways that God should be worshiped in God’s absence (tabernacle specifications, proper vestments, and so on). God is concerned with proper mediation, not with pure presence. Idols of silver and gold represent faulty mediation, mediation that captures the gaze and superficially sates desire, not mediation that allows for critical examination of self and world. Similarly, God specifically warns against worshiping the gods of other people among whom the Israelites might live, such as the Egyptians. This might sound like jealousy, and it is sometimes represented as jealousy, but when God is understood negatively, as exceeding representation, the worship of foreign gods would simply mean the worship of gods that can be named, gods that can be described. These gods will tempt when the majority of a community embraces them. “You shall not follow a majority in wrongdoing,” God decrees (23:2). Faith in God means a commitment that may run counter to the ways of the world. God’s justice treats the individual, who they are, not what they are, not based on their social location. It is not the will of the majority. It is treatment of the other as one who images God. To Moses, God decrees, “You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in their lawsuits,” but God also decrees that the Israelites not “be partial to the poor in a lawsuit” (23:6; 23:3). Before God’s law, each has equal dignity.

As the newly freed Israelites wander through the desert, Moses serves as their judge, resolving disputes by interpreting God’s will. Moses’s father-in-law, Jethro, a Medianite rather than an Israelite, visits and suggests that Moses should delegate to reduce his growing workload. Moses takes Jethro’s advice exactly, choosing “able men” as officials who will resolve disputes over subcommunities of Israelites. If any dispute is too difficult, it will be referred to Moses. In other words, Moses establishes the beginnings of a legal system and appoints bureaucrats to enforce it—notably without divine inspiration, with the inspiration of a foreigner. Law is secular at first, but not for long. Shortly after Jethro’s visit, the God of the Israelites codifies law for the community, handing it down to Moses on Mount Sinai. Yet the Exodus narrative makes it clear that Moses did not bring the law to a lawless community. Before Egypt, while ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Uncircumcised Lips of Moses
• 2. The Virtue of Charisma
• 3. Charisma and Goodness
• 4. Charisma and Truth
• 5. Charisma and Beauty
• Conclusion: The Justice of Charisma
• Afterword: Studying Charisma
• Index