Jeremy Rosen
Was Freud Right About Moses?
Summary
Jeremy Rosen discusses the impact of Sigmund Freud and Moses on the world, despite their differences in time, background, and goals. He discusses Freud’s groundbreaking ideas about the mind and human behavior, and how Moses is credited with shaping societal values through the Torah and his multicultural background.
Jeremy Rosen
Manchester-born Jeremy Rosen was educated at Cambridge University England and Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He has practiced as an orthodox rabbi, as principal of Carmel College in the UK, and as professor at the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Antwerp, Belgium. He has written and lectured extensively in the UK and the US, where he now resides and was the rabbi of the Persian-Jewish community in Manhattan.
Yes, I think so. And I think that’s the answer of today’s atheists, that it is a repressive form of control, to which my answer is any form of control you can say is repressive. Moses wanted to give people a way to live and enable them to choose how much to keep, how little to keep, how much to believe, how little to believe.
They can, and I think they should. The genius of Moses was because he did have a secular education. Therefore the need to create balance is one of the messages he gives. I think we need to have an eye on the past, I think that’s what Judaism does, it looks back to Sinai, it looks back to Moses, but at the same time it looks forward to the future in a messianic sense of trying to produce a better world.