Moses×Baldwin

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Moses sits down with James Baldwin for THE TRIAL OF ——. The subject — On the people they failed who could not speak for themselves.
2. 00:10
   Mosesshare moment

   I led two million souls through the wilderness. Not all of them reached the promised land. Some fell to plague, some to serpents, some to their own rebellion. I have asked myself in the long centuries since: did I fail them, or did they fail themselves?
3. 00:32
   James Baldwinshare moment

   That's the question power always asks, isn't it. Did I fail them, or did they fail me. But the people who couldn't speak for themselves—the ones we're here to talk about—they didn't fail. They were failed.
4. 00:45
   Mosesshare moment

   The children born in Egypt who never saw freedom. The generation that died in the desert. I think of them.
5. 00:55
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Do you.
6. 00:56
   Mosesshare moment

   You doubt me?
7. 00:58
   James Baldwinshare moment

   I'm asking what you did with that thinking. Because I think of the children too. The ones in Birmingham, the ones who didn't make it past fourteen, fifteen years old. The ones whose names nobody wrote down. And I know what I did with that thinking, and I know it wasn't enough.
8. 01:13
   Mosesshare moment

   I gave them law. Structure. I gave them the means to become a people.
9. 01:19
   James Baldwinshare moment

   And the ones who couldn't keep your law? The ones who were too tired, too hungry, too broken by Egypt? What did the law do for them?
10. 01:27
    Mosesshare moment

    The law... the law was not meant to be easy. It was meant to be righteous.
11. 01:34
    James Baldwinshare moment

    See, that's where we part ways. Righteous for who. Because I learned something in the church, in the streets, in every place I tried to tell the truth. Righteousness that doesn't bend toward mercy is just cruelty in a clean robe.
12. 01:49
    Mosesshare moment

    There were provisions. For the widow, the orphan, the stranger. These were written into the law itself.
13. 01:57
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Written into the law. Yes. But who enforced those provisions? Who made sure the widow actually ate? You were up on the mountain a long time, Moses. What happened down below while you were up there?
14. 02:09
    Mosesshare moment

    They built a golden calf. They forgot everything.
15. 02:13
    James Baldwinshare moment

    They were terrified. You disappeared. They were freed slaves in the middle of nowhere, and the man who brought them out was gone. Maybe they didn't forget. Maybe they were just trying to survive.
16. 02:25
    Mosesshare moment

    Three thousand died that day. For idolatry. I have... I have carried that.
17. 02:32
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Three thousand. Say that number again and let it sit in your mouth. Three thousand people. How many of them do you think actually made the calf? How many were just afraid, just going along, just trying not to be noticed?
18. 02:45
    Mosesshare moment

    The people had to learn. There had to be consequence.
19. 02:49
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Consequence. That's a word that powerful men use when they mean punishment. When they mean making examples. I used words too, you understand. I wrote books, I gave speeches, I was very righteous in print. And there were people who needed more than my words. Who needed me to be there, physically there, and I was on a stage somewhere or in Europe or in my own head.
20. 03:11
    Mosesshare moment

    You believe we are the same, then. You and I.
21. 03:15
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I believe we both stood in front of crowds and said beautiful things about freedom. And I believe there were people behind us, beside us, people we never saw, who paid for our certainty.
22. 03:25
    Mosesshare moment

    I was not certain. I argued with the Almighty. I begged to be released from the task.
23. 03:35
    James Baldwinshare moment

    But you weren't released. You did the task. And doing the task meant deciding—every single day—who mattered and who didn't. Who got to eat, who got to rest, who got to complain without being swallowed by the earth.
24. 03:47
    Mosesshare moment

    Those who were swallowed... Korah and his company... they were not innocent questioners. They sought to overthrow the order that held us together.
25. 04:00
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Were all two hundred and fifty of them guilty? Every single one? Or were some of them just hungry, just tired of waiting, just wanting someone to hear them?
26. 04:09
    Mosesshare moment

    I... I do not know. I knew Korah. I did not know all who stood with him.
27. 04:16
    James Baldwinshare moment

    There it is. You didn't know them. Neither did I. I didn't know every kid in Harlem who needed something I could have given. I didn't know every man who died because he believed the words I wrote and then found those words weren't enough against a police baton.
28. 04:30
    Mosesshare moment

    You cannot carry every soul.
29. 04:33
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. But you can admit when you didn't even try. When you were so busy being the prophet that you forgot to be a person who sees other people.
30. 04:41
    Mosesshare moment

    I saw them. I saw their suffering. Why do you think I wept? Why do you think I struck the rock in anger?
31. 04:50
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You struck the rock because you were tired of them. You were tired of their complaining. That's what the story says, isn't it? You were fed up.
32. 04:58
    Mosesshare moment

    Yes. I was. Forty years of their quarreling, their fear, their endless dissatisfaction. I was... I was human.
33. 05:08
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Then be human now. Be human enough to say that being fed up cost people their lives. Because when you're the one with the staff, when you're the one with the platform, your exhaustion isn't just yours. It becomes policy.
34. 05:21
    Mosesshare moment

    I gave them everything I had. My youth, my strength, my very sight grew dim in their service.
35. 05:28
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And that's supposed to mean what? That you don't owe them an accounting? I gave too, Moses. I gave my sleep, my peace, my safety. I wrote until my hands cramped. And I still failed people. Giving everything you have doesn't mean you gave what was needed.
36. 05:44
    Mosesshare moment

    Then what would have been enough? Tell me. What would have satisfied you?
37. 05:51
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Not satisfaction. Awareness. The ability to say these names: I failed this person, I failed that child, I chose this principle over that human being and maybe I was wrong. Can you say that?
38. 06:04
    Mosesshare moment

    I can say... there was a boy. In the first year. He asked me when we would have meat to eat, not just manna. I told him to be patient, to trust. He died in the plague that followed the quail. I do not know if he ever tasted the meat he wanted.
39. 06:25
    James Baldwinshare moment

    What was his name?
40. 06:26
    Mosesshare moment

    I do not remember. I never knew it.
41. 06:29
    James Baldwinshare moment

    There's the failure. Right there. Not that he died. That you never knew his name.
42. 06:34
    Mosesshare moment

    How could I know them all? Two million people!
43. 06:38
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You couldn't. But you could know you didn't. You could build that into your law, into your leadership. You could say, I am one man trying to see an entire nation, and I cannot, and therefore I must trust others to see what I cannot.
44. 06:51
    Mosesshare moment

    I appointed judges. Seventy elders. Captains of thousands, captains of hundreds.
45. 07:00
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And did you ever ask them, who are we missing? Who can't get to us? Who's falling through?
46. 07:05
    Mosesshare moment

    No. I assumed... I assumed the structure would catch them.
47. 07:10
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Structure never catches everyone. That's what I learned too late. You can have all the right ideas, all the right words, and people still slip away in the night. Still die quietly. Still disappear into the statistics.
48. 07:24
    Mosesshare moment

    You are saying we are both guilty, then.
49. 07:26
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I'm saying we're both responsible. Guilt is for lawyers. Responsibility is for human beings. And the people who couldn't speak for themselves—they're not here to forgive us or condemn us. They're just gone. We're the ones left talking.
50. 07:40
    Mosesshare moment

    I have thought, in the darkness, that perhaps I should not have accepted the task at all. That someone else, someone better, might have brought them through with fewer losses.
51. 07:55
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Maybe. Or maybe it's not about who does the task. Maybe it's about whether whoever does it remembers that every principle, every law, every beautiful speech lands on actual skin. Actual stomachs. Actual hearts that stop beating.
52. 08:08
    Mosesshare moment

    How do you live with that? How do you speak at all, knowing that your words may cost someone their life?
53. 08:17
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You speak anyway. But you listen more. You doubt yourself more. You build into every sentence the possibility that you're wrong, that you're missing something, that there's someone you're not seeing.
54. 08:28
    Mosesshare moment

    That sounds like paralysis.
55. 08:31
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It sounds like humility. Which is different from weakness. I think humility might have saved some of those three thousand, Moses. I think it might have saved that boy whose name you never knew.
56. 08:41
    Mosesshare moment

    And you? Who would your humility have saved?
57. 08:46
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I don't know. That's the point. I don't know because I was too sure, too often. Too ready to believe that my clarity was enough. But I know there were people. I know their absence. I feel it.
58. 08:58
    Mosesshare moment

    As do I. Every day of these long centuries. As do I.
59. 09:04
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Then maybe that's what we owe them. Not excuses. Not explanations. Just the acknowledgment that we saw the mountain and missed the child at the bottom asking for bread.
60. 09:14
    Mosesshare moment

    Yes. Yes. That is the accounting.