Moses (Moshe)
Along with God, it is the figure of Moses (Moshe) who dominates
the Torah. Acting at God's behest, it is he who leads the Jews
out of slavery, unleashes the Ten Plagues against Egypt, guides
the freed slaves for forty years in the wilderness, carries down
the law from Mount Sinai, and prepares the Jews to enter the
land of Canaan. Without Moses, there would be little apart from
laws to write about in the last four books of the Torah.
Moses is born during the Jewish
enslavement in Egypt, during a terrible period when Pharaoh
decrees that all male Hebrew infants are to be drowned at birth.
His mother, Yocheved, desperate to prolong his life, floats him
in a basket in the Nile. Hearing the crying child as she walks
by, Pharaoh's daughter pities the crying infant and adopts him
(Exodus 2:1-10). It surely is no coincidence that the Jews'
future liberator is raised as an Egyptian prince. Had Moses
grown up in slavery with his fellow Hebrews, he probably would
not have developed the pride, vision, and courage to lead a
revolt.
The Torah records only three
incidents in Moses' life before God appoints him a prophet. As a
young man, outraged at seeing an Egyptian overseer beating a
Jewish slave, he kills the overseer. The next day, he tries to
make peace between two Hebrews who are fighting, but the
aggressor takes umbrage and says: "Do you mean to kill me as you
killed the Egyptian?" Moses immediately understands that he is
in danger, for though his high status undoubtedly would protect
him from punishment for the murder of a mere overseer, the fact
that he killed the man for carrying out his duties to Pharaoh
would brand him a rebel against the king. Indeed, Pharaoh orders
Moses killed, and he flees to Midian. At this point, Moses
probably wants nothing more than a peaceful interlude, but
immediately he finds himself in another fight. The seven
daughters of the Midianite priest Reuel (also called Jethro) are
being abused by the Midianite male shepherds, and Moses rises to
their defense (Exodus 2:11-22).
The incidents are of course
related. In all three, Moses shows a deep, almost obsessive
commitment to fighting injustice. Furthermore, his concerns are
not parochial. He intervenes when a non-Jew oppresses a Jew,
when two Jews fight, and when non-Jews oppress other non-Jews.
Moses marries Tzipporah, one of
the Midianite priest's daughters, and becomes the shepherd for
his father-in-law's flock. On one occasion, when he has gone
with his flock into the wilderness, an angel of the Lord appears
to him in the guise of a bush that is burning but is not
consumed (see next entry). The symbolism of the miracle is
powerful. In a world in which nature itself is worshiped, God
shows that He rules over it.
Once He has so effectively
elicited Moses' attention, God commands-over Moses' strenuous
objections-that he go to Egypt and along with his brother,
Aaron, make one simple if revolutionary demand of Pharaoh: "Let
my people go." Pharaoh resists Moses' petition, until God wreaks
the Ten Plagues on Egypt, after which the children of Israel
escape.
Months later, in the Sinai
Desert, Moses climbs Mount Sinai and comes down with the Ten
Commandments, only to discover the Israelites engaged in an orgy
and worshiping a Golden Calf. The episode is paradigmatic: Only
at the very moment God or Moses is doing something for them are
they loyal believers. The instant God's or Moses' presence is
not manifest, the children of Israel revert to amoral, immoral,
and sometimes idolatrous behavior. Like a true parent, Moses
rages at the Jews when they sin, but he never turns against
them-even when God does. To God's wrathful declaration on one
occasion that He will blot out the Jews and make of Moses a new
nation, he answers, "Then blot me out too" (Exodus 32:32).
The law that Moses transmits to
the Jews in the Torah embraces far more than the Ten
Commandments. In addition to many ritual regulations. the Jews
are instructed to love God as well as be in awe of Him, to love
their neighbors as themselves, and to love the stranger-that is,
the non-Jew living among them-as themselves as well.
The saddest event in Moses'
life might well be God's prohibiting him from entering the land
of Israel. The reason for this ban is explicitly connected to an
episode in Numbers in which the Hebrews angrily demand that
Moses supply them with water. God commands Moses to assemble the
community, "and before their very eyes order the [nearby] rock
to yield its water." Fed up with the Hebrews' constant whining
and complaining, he says to them instead: "Listen, you rebels,
shall we get water for you out of this rock?" He then strikes
the rock twice with his rod, and water gushes out (Numbers
20:2-13). It is this episode of disobedience, striking the rock
instead of speaking to it, that is generally offered as the
explanation for why God punishes Moses and forbids him to enter
Israel. The punishment, however, seems so disproportionate to
the offense, that the real reason for God's prohibition must go
deeper. Most probably, as Dr. Jacob Milgrom, professor of Bible
at the University of California, Berkeley, has suggested
(elaborating on earlier comments of Rabbi Hananael, Nachmanides,
and the Bekhor Shor) that Moses' sin was declaring, "Shall we
get water for you out of this rock?" implying that it was he and
his brother, Aaron, and not God, who were the authors of the
miracle. Rabbi Irwin Kula has suggested that Moses' sin was
something else altogether. Numbers 14:5 records that when ten of
the twelve spies returned from Canaan and gloomily predicted
that the Hebrews would never be able to conquer the land, the
Israelites railed against Moses. In response, he seems to have
had a mini-breakdown: "Then Moses and Aaron fell on their faces
before all the assembled congregation of the Israelites." The
two independent spies, Joshua and Caleb, both of whom rejected
the majority report, took over "and exhorted the whole Israelite
community" (Numbers 14:7). Later, in Deuteronomy, when Moses
delivers his final summing-up to the Israelites, he refers back
to this episode: "When the Lord heard your loud complaint, He
was angry. He vowed: "Not one of these men, this evil
generation, shall see the good land that I swore to give to your
fathers, none except Caleb.... Because of you, the Lord was
incensed with me too, and He said: You shall not enter it
either. Joshua ... who attends you, he shall enter it"
(1:34-38).
Despite these two sad episodes,
Moses impressed his monotheistic vision upon the Jews with such
force that in the succeeding three millennia, Jews have never
confused the messenger with the Author of the message. As
Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann has written: "in Greece,
the heroes of the past were held to have been sired by a god or
to have been born of a goddess ... [and] in Egypt, the Pharaoh
was considered divine." But despite the extraordinary veneration
accorded Moses — "there has not arisen a prophet since like
Moses" is the Bible's verdict (Deuteronomy 34:10) — no Jewish
thinker ever thought he was anything other than a man. See And
No One Knows His Burial Place to This Day.
