When Rabbi Maurice Harris wrote “Moses: A Stranger Among Us” in 2012, the book sold well enough to land him speaking engagements at about a dozen synagogues and churches.
Twelve years later, the book got him a spot on the Netflix docuseries “Testament: The Story of Moses.” The series got more than 13 million views in its first week.
Harris, the associate director of thriving communities for Reconstructing Judaism in Wyncote, started getting messages from friends and colleagues. His book also began selling again.
Harris, who lives in Glenside and attends Or Hadash: A Reconstructionist Congregation, talked about what the experience was like.
What originally sent you down the rabbit hole of Moses’ life?
I was in my first year working as a congregational rabbi in 2003 at Temple Beth Israel in Eugene, Oregon. I had been prepping my High Holiday sermon, and I was thinking about this large congregation that I had just come to serve that had a lot of interfaith families with active non-Jewish members and a lot of same-sex couples.
I was appreciating all the different ways in which there were lots of different people in the community who had an insider-outsider status with Judaism. And something clicked. I started thinking about all the ways that the story of Moses in the Torah presents the figure who is in all kinds of ways a real insider-outsider of the Jewish people.
I came up with a tongue-in-cheek approach to this sermon. I said I was going to be talking about a member of the Jewish community who has led an unconventional life but has had a lot of impact. He had his early childhood family disrupted. He was adopted by a family of high status. He had anger issues. He committed a violent crime as a young man and fled his jurisdiction.
When I got to the part of him working as a shepherd, I said he fled to a country he didn’t have permission to enter and worked as an undocumented immigrant. I could see more and more people getting it.
I defamiliarized the familiar figure of Moses, letting Moses be a role model for people who maybe feel insecurity about their marginal or perhaps partial sense of belonging in the organized Jewish community.
For the next eight years, working as a congregational rabbi and giving lots of divrei Torah, I kept doing deep dives into very specific aspects of Moses and the Moses story that I found surprising and often poorly known.
What did you learn about him during that process?
His Hebrew parents hid him for three months before they cast him out on the Nile (River). The name we know him by was given to him by an Egyptian princess in the language. But he must have had a Hebrew name.
To us, the name Moses just seems like the most Jewish of all possible names. But here’s this guy whose name sounds like the name of the oppressors.
There’s a lot going on that makes Moses an in-and-out figure. Putting those things together over eight years, I started thinking I might have the makings of a book.
How did you become a prominent enough Moses expert to be contacted by Netflix for this series?
I had not attained any prominence as a Moses expert as a result of the book. I think what happened is the producers of the docudrama told me their angle was to be able to explore the inner struggle of Moses.
They said we discovered your book, read it and liked it. It connected with the angle. There actually aren’t a lot of books out there on this subject.
What was it like to participate in a docuseries for the world’s largest entertainment distributor?
It was fun. It was also very uncertain for a while.
They had two people contact me in 2020. They said they were waiting for Netflix to greenlight their project, and then I didn’t hear anything for over two years. And I kind of figured, “OK, it didn’t happen.” Then two different people got in touch with me. “We’ve been greenlit. If you’re comfortable with the shape of the project and its values, we can interview you.”
This was the summer of 2022. I thought it would air in the fall of 2023, but I didn’t hear from them. I kind of let it go again.
And then a few days before it aired in March, they contacted everyone and said it’s airing … next week.
How did you feel when you saw it get more than 13 million views in the first week?
That totally surprised me.
I feel pretty good about the bits they included.