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Outside my Rabbi’s office at The Temple on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia there hung a large photograph of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses. Pure white Carrera marble, grandly and majestically scaled, sitting on some sort of throne or other, with a beard luxurious enough to enfold the entire known world….Moses…with two cunning horns sticking out of his head. Yes, horns..

But My Vision of the Thing? What else would be hanging outside a Rabbi’s Office but a representation of GOD HIMSELF? YAHWEH…THE ONE AND ONLY GOD….GOD THE FATHER…and so , when I would sit outside that office, usually before some informal visit with Rabbi Jacob Rothschild , to do with assisting at the Purim Carnival or something like that, I’d sit very quietly, respectfully and stare at the photo of that great work of art hanging in front of and above me.

It’s being hung above my eye level added to my belief that I was in the presence of God, who, after all, lived up there somewhere.

He was handsome, sexually muscular (even little girls feel something along those lines when confronted with a naked male body) and ,well, magnetically white with its glorious stone work on full , detailed display. I do believe it was during those silent “meetings ” with that large photograph that I began to fall in love with Italian Renaissance sculpture, though in my innocence i knew of neither the Renaissance nor its sculpture.

AS far as I was concerned, I was sitting in front of God…….
In my family’s Jewish Temple on Peachtree Street , that a few years later would be bombed by members of the local Klan. On a Saturday morning. Making it impossible on that particular Saturday to go to my religious school classes in the adjoining school building. It was a reformed Jewish synagogue, yet my Momma, who taught in the religious school (they never called it Sunday School, since that was for Christians…ours met meticulously on Saturdays) insisted that my brother and I get a thorough Jewish education and get confirmed – not bar or bat’mitzva’ed – at turning 13 . I remember the white gown I wore, some of my Jewish education, that photo of God/ Moses, and little else.

And how Rabbi Rothschild’s office smelled of old leather and books. So many books.

It wasn’t until years later, perhaps on my first trip to Rome as a honeymooning adult, when I learned that that incomparable sculpture was not of God at all…but rather, of Moses, which made a lot of sense since Moses was actually far more central to my Jewish upbringing than God was: All those great stories about Moses, the parting of the Red Sea, Charlton Heston in a Technicolor movie, the spirituals of Lily Pearl, the black woman who raised me, and all that. Moses loomed large in the story telling.

I’d been sitting in front of one of the world’s great works of art all those years, and it was Moses, not God.

I didn’t feel any particular emotion on learning that bit of clarifying news, except maybe a thrill at realizing that I actually knew enough about art history as an adult to love Michelangelo deep within my soul. His “Piéta” in the Vatican had brought me to tears several times by then, and his “David” in Florence cemented my adoration forever. I still cannot think of that Mother and Child miracle In ST.Peter’s without almost tasting its glory with my teeth and tongue. It makes me salivate to think of.

But, as for the “Moses”…..well, there is no question that my childhood belief that it was God not Moses up on that wall set within me forever the immoveable certainty that God is some magnificent old man, with a great set of abs and buff arms, up in Heaven, with a beard, long, white and wavy, that sways in the wind, thus creating the Fate of Mankind.

AS for the horns slyly protruding from his handsome hairy head?
In my Art History classes I learned that in ancient Middle-Eastern iconography horns were a common way of portraying strength and the power of a god or king. In the case of Moses and his horns, they are there to represent the close connection between Moses and the actual Big Guy Himself, like two small bridges between earth and heaven.

AS a kid, I actual;y had never even noticed the horns at all.
If I had, maybe I would have thought he was something Other.
That bit of mythological costuming, horns and all, i reserved strictly for Satan himself.