c. 1996 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) By all accounts, it was a marvelous conversation.

Once a month, some two dozen biblical scholars, novelists, poets, theologians and others gathered in a private dining room at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York to discuss over a leisurely dinner the biblical Book of Genesis.

The conversations _ which ran from 1987 through 1992 _ were animated, informed, challenging and witty.”What goes on in this room is more exciting to me than anything that ever happened. It’s as if the text really mattered,”writer and participant Cynthia Ozick said at the time.

Among the participants was television journalist Bill Moyers, a self-described”spiritual seeker”and ordained Southern Baptist pastor. Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky, who organized the conversations, remembers Moyers as mostly remaining quiet,”wondering, no doubt, if he could translate this into TV.” Well, he has.”Genesis: A Living Conversation,”a ten-part series, is Moyers’ latest religion-oriented offering on PBS. It premieres nationally on Wednesday, Oct. 16 (check local listings). A companion book to the series,”Genesis: A Living Conversation”(Doubleday), has also been published and groups are being organized around the nation to hold discussions on Genesis in connection with the broadcasts.

In an interview, Moyers said he hoped the series _ each hour-long segment opens with a reading from Genesis by actors Mandy Patinkin and Alfre Woodward _ would”be a model of how people can talk about religion in a deep and understanding way without surrendering their beliefs, but also without denigrating the beliefs of others.” For television, Moyers assembled his own cast of 38, only some of whom had also participated in the conversations at the Jewish Theological Seminary, which trains rabbis for Judaism’s Conservative movement. But other than that and the ever-present cameras, the discussions staged during the summer of 1995 were little different from those conducted earlier at the seminary, said Visotzky, who is prominently featured in the Moyers series.

The Moyers group included Christians, Jews, Muslims and a couple of Buddhists and Hindus. Among them were men and women of great faith, and others of less certain belief. Some approached Genesis from a feminist or social justice perspective, while others were more interested in the psychology of the text’s leading characters.

Some were liberal rationalists. Some were evangelical Protestants. And some were storytellers interested primarily in the text’s dramatic construction.

But whatever their approach, they shared a deep respect for the text’s importance _ sacred as it is to the world’s three great monotheistic religions _ and a desire to relate its stories to the human and religious issues of today.”They understood,”said Moyers,”that these stories are the archetype stories for millions of people who are affected by them whether they practice a particular religion or not. They are part of our mental furniture.” For dramatic purposes, the series will open with”The First Murder,”the story of Cain and Abel. After that, the series will follow the text’s chronological sequence: God’s creation of the universe; the temptation of Adam and Eve and their exile from the Garden of Eden; Noah and the flood; God’s covenant with Abraham; the rivalry between Hagar and Sarah; and so on to the concluding story of Joseph’s exile in Egypt.

In each segment, seven individuals _ the cast keeps changing _ joined Moyers in an informal exchange that ranges from the deeply personal to the highly academic. Along the way, even the most learned were sometimes surprised by the way those from other religious traditions viewed the stories that comprise Genesis.

Take the segments on Abraham, particularly the one dealing with the”akedat Yitzhak,”the Hebrew term for the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his cherished son Isaac in accordance with the patriarch’s understanding of God’s commandment.

The incident is central to Christianity, Islam and Judaism _ yet each interprets the story in a dramatically different manner.

For Jews, the rejection of human sacrifice _ common among the Canaanite tribes to which Abraham belonged _ explicit in God’s last-minute providing of a ram as a substitute sacrifice is a lesson in God’s mercy and the importance of human life.

For Christians, the story is a precursor for the ultimate sacrifice, the crucifixion of Jesus.

For Muslims, it was Ishmael _ Abraham’s son by Sarah’s servant Hagar _ who was to be sacrificed, not Isaac.

In”The Test,”as the Moyers segment dealing with the sacrifice episode is called, the Jewish and Christian participants tended to dwell on the story’s complex moral dimensions. Rather than only seeing Abraham as the righteous father of ethical monotheism, they were critical of his decision to refer to his wife Sarah as his sister to spare himself trouble when King Abimelech lusted after her, and his willingness to kill his son.”When I look at Abraham, I see a man who lies because he is afraid that someone will take his wife away from him and he might lose his life,”said P.K. McCary, author of”Black Bible Chronicles: From Genesis to the Promised Land,”a reading of the Old Testament aimed at African-American youth.”… He is so detached from emotional involvement in other people’s feelings that he seems self-centered.” Francisco Garcia-Treto, a Presbyterian minister who teaches biblical studies at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, said of Abraham:”When we get to the point where we feel that God is calling us to give somebody else’s life up, we’re in bad trouble. There’s no such thing as a theological suspension of the ethical. This is at the root of the worst things that religions have done.” Rabbi Norman Cohen, provost of New York’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, said rather than responding to God’s commandment, Abraham was more likely following the needs of his own ego.”It’s Abraham’s ego that needs to prove his fidelity and his faith to himself and the world,”said Cohen.

Listening to his Jewish and Christian co-conversationalists, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University in Washington, said in a recent interview that he was”surprised by the extent to which the aura surrounding the prophet has been stripped away”in contemporary Western thinking.

Nasr, born in Iran, said”Islam’s sacred history has not been so destroyed or deconstructed,”allowing him and other Muslims to continue to view Abraham”in a more prophetic light and as strictly a hero of the faith.” To Moyers, whose last religion-oriented series on PBS was”The Wisdom of Faith With Huston Smith,”broadcast earlier this year, the differences of opinion over Abraham illustrated”how little we know about what other faiths think about the stories and characters that populate Genesis.” And the fact that these differing interpretations”didn’t resolve themselves,”added Moyers, are why the Book of Genesis is relevant still.”These discussions,”he said,”are endless.”

MJP END RIFKIN