Greg Hurwitz
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Greg Hurwitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Mr. Hurwitz. Well, I'm honored to be here. My name's Greg Hurwitz. I'm a novelist and screenwriter. In Exodus, I felt a lot like I was at a table with chess grandmasters, which was really cool to see everybody's engagement and finding these jewels that had different interpretations and everybody, you know, except for Pajot, who never says anything fascinating.
And I'd like to say that, you know, a shallow gaze might indicate that there's a lot of similarity among us. And one of the things that I thought was really compelling during Exodus was there's an enormous amount of differences, and that the text was really a welcome into the best of inquiry and hospitality. I thought it was incredibly productive.
Part of why I'm here is that I think that intellect alone can't grasp the speed and complexity of the change that is upon us now. And unconscious projection. And I think that we're seeing the world burn down in some ways to fundamentals. You know, is man smarter than machine with AI? We have wars breaking out at the birthplace of original sin.
We're trying to redefine what it means to be a man, male versus female. And I think when we have that level of definitional collapse, we need to go back to forms of thinking and forms of meaning that are different, whether that is sacred, symbolic, spiritual, mythological, or religious. And going back to the source means we started with Exodus.
You know, a lot of us have been going back to or come from Plato and understanding of Plato. And all sources, all stories are not necessarily equal. And the Bible, this text to me, is a story, and the Gospels in particular, they're like a story with maximal truth. pressure applied. It's like, you know, carbon turned to a diamond, where it is fractal and pure.
The amount of pressure generationally, historically, and spiritually on the story has condensed it into something that is impossible. And in some ways, the Gospels are, I think, well, in many ways, in many different ways, a perfect narrative. It's a hero story. It's structurally incredibly sound. It's shaped in extraordinary fashion, and it sets the conditions in a
thriving and freedom of differences of nearly any other story. And so why I'm here in some ways is I think what we, in the spirit that we're all here, is this is an invitation of sorts to what is a sacred text, to those who might be intellectually reluctant or even have intellectual shame about engaging with a story in a book like this.
And a lot of people might be familiar with this sort of light shown through Shakespeare or blasting in the Ode to Joy or in the words of MLK, these sort of safer reflections for the Enlightenment or secular mind. And this, of course, is the rock on which Western civilization is built.
And I think we're here not just to take it seriously, but to apply our serious attention, which means radical openness and also radical judgment in holding this up as a story against which other stories should be compared if we're borrowing back to what a foundational narrative should be.
I think it dovetails too within space and time. It's very interesting, Douglas, you said that in the word for beginning is God, right? And so this goes into, John, you know, the discussion of, well, what is a cup, right? A cup is, it's designed for a certain purpose. It is also the purpose and the end of it is also what it's intended to be.
And so there's a circularity too in God was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. that temporally this is that same fractal thing that's also being expanded across time and space, that the meaning is embedded in the object as it exists, what its use is and what its end is are all simultaneous. I think that's a connection back to some of your thinking.
Well, we see also this unconscious porting over of nature worship that nature is elevated. It's the Rousseauian ideal where nature is elevated above man, right? So it gets out of place if you don't have that separation necessarily.
And it's almost this porting over of a notion of original sin that elevates it that we have in some way that makes us inferior to the thing to be worshipped if it's not differentiated from God, then we worship nature and hold it higher than us.
It's almost like the association with conscience. The conscience is what has to lead the way first to prepare the people to receive Jesus. Because if he just arrives without there being... So first of all, in a dramatic sense, every introduction for dramatic effect, and I know that we're talking about this on different levels, but for the theatrical, the introduction of a character is always key.
I mean, you think about in... Casablanca, the number of times that Rick is mentioned before his back is turned in a chair and you see the cigarette smoke and he turns around. Dramatically, and I'm not implying this is merely dramatically, you want to set the stage for the arrival of a major character. And I think you have a culture in which the stage must be set before his arrival.
Yeah, and we do this all the time dramatically. You have an opening act for a concert. You have somebody... An overture. Yeah, you have an overture. You have, if there's a late night show, they'll have somebody warm up the crowd as a comedian, right? You have to set the stage.
And the precursor to Elijah in certain regards is Enoch right before the flood. The other thing I was thinking is that there's these different sides that we're discussing of what Jesus is, and he also is a man, because if he's not a man, then the story doesn't make sense. And so it comes along to say, Why is Jesus baptized? That's a very unusual question.
But if there's not a human being who predates him with some moral authority who represents the voice of conscience, then he can't be baptized as a man. He just comes down with the full glory and righteousness and fear of God.
And the movement to the desert, to the River Jordan, is a movement from the strictures of law and architecture and ritual, right? It's all a movement out to take it out.
Oh, I mean from the conventional ones in the temple. Why is he not in the temple? Why is he in the desert? Why is he committing baptism? His movement is out from the convention. Like you were asking, why isn't he in the temple given his background? So he's moving out into nature and into... Is it a radical archaism?
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