Compassion that Doesn't Fail

Parashat Ki Tisa, Exodus 30:11–34:35

Rabbi David Friedman, Jerusalem

How incredible are the blessings and gifts of God! Every day I wake up is a new start; a chance to live life fully, to spend time with people I love, to study and apply our magnificent Torah, to enjoy living in Israel, and in the city of my great love. Yet, even after experiencing such incredible blessings, too often I quickly turn from God’s ways! That very phenomenon is a part of today’s reading portion.

Our people had just witnessed the ten plagues. They had been miraculously delivered out of slavery. The Red Sea split right before them. Pharaoh’s pursuing army was destroyed. The Torah was being given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and the people witnessed natural phenomena that attested to the heavenly origin of God’s instructions. Yet as we read this week’s parasha, we are nearly slapped in the face with the actions of our people. We encounter their actions and we wince. We read of Aaron’s actions and we cannot believe what we see!

Now the people saw that Moses took his time to come down the Mountain, so the people gathered against Aaron, then said to him: “Get up, make gods for us that will go before us, since that man Moses who brought us up from the land of Egypt . . . we don’t know what happened to him!” ​So Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold ear rings that are in the ears of your wives, your sons and your daughters; then bring (them) to me.” ​And all the people took apart the gold ear rings that were in their ears, and brought (them) to Aaron. Then he took (them) from their hands, and fashioned it with tools; and he made it (into) a calf-mask. Then they said: ​“These are your gods, Israel, that brought you up from the land of Egypt.” So Aaron witnessed this, and he then built an altar in front of them, and Aaron cried out, saying: “It is a holy day to Adonai tomorrow.” (Exod 32:1–5)

It is here that I catch my breath—​every year while reading this. I feel badly for Aaron: he’s confronted by faithless, unhappy elements of his own people. Their voices are loud to him; he feels cornered and outnumbered. Aaron knows that he is planning to take action that’s not kosher (making a calf-mask and creating a new “holy” day). But he does it ​anyway.​ Perhaps he thinks he has to do these things to save his life, or to keep the people from going back to Egypt, or to hold off a riot. In fact, we don’t know how Aaron can justify what he did, as the text here gives us no light on that question.

Aaron heard the people say, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt” (v. 4). How could he have stomached this?  It’s a good thing that God sent Moses back down the mountain to set things in order.

We are faced with a catastrophe that could undo the newly found liberation, that could damage the covenant relationship between God and his people beyond repair. As we read this passage, which of us does not feel betrayal, revulsion, and sorrow? Even 3300 years after this event took place, this description of what happened ignites such feelings in all of us. But we find out a remarkable thing: just how merciful and forgiving the God of Israel truly is.

This situation could have had any number of outcomes. God does ​not pull punches. He tells Moses, “Your nation . . . has corrupted itself” (v. 7), and then:

Adonai said to Moses: “I have seen this people, and look, they are stiff necked. And now, leave me, so my fuming anger will be against them, and annihilate them. Then I will make a great nation from you.” (32:9–10)

We don’t read: “Oh, well, I guess your kinsmen felt leaderless and insecure because you, Moses, were gone for a few weeks. So we have to understand their feelings and not judge them.” No! It is amazing just how ​honest and straightforward the Torah is in its historical recollections. The bottom line is that God is provoked, and Moses is not happy either: “Then Moses got angry, and threw the tablets down, breaking them, underneath the Mountain” (32:19). Yet, Moses’ amazing plea to God turns things around:

Remember Abraham, Isaac and Israel, your servants, to whom you gave an oath in which you said to them, “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and all of this land, that I said I will grant to your descendants so that they will inherit it forever.” Then Adonai was comforted concerning the harsh actions that he said he would do to his people. (​32:13–14)

Like his ancestor Abraham, Moses is bold in his intercession for his people. And somehow this touches God’s heart. As a result, the people avoid annihilation, moving instead toward teshuva (repentance), rectifying the crisis. We breathe a sigh of relief in knowing that two million people will not perish, even though they will go through consequences for their idolatry: “On that very day, about three thousand people from the nation fell” (32:28). Jews had to kill other Jews; this was the outcome, a sad and ​extremely serious one. A lethal plague also breaks out, and some of the people have to drink water made of the golden idol, crushed and ground up in the mix. The inevitable confrontation between Moses and Aaron occurs:

Then Moses said to Aaron: “What did this people do to you, in order to bring upon you such a huge missing of the mark?” Then Aaron replied: “Don’t get angry, sir! You know the people, that they are evil! And they said to me, ‘Make gods for us that will go before us, because that man Moses, who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we don’t know what happened to him!’” So I said to them, “Whoever has gold, take it apart and give it to me, so that I can throw it into fire; then this calf came out.”​ ​(32:21–24)

Aaron blames the people. Of course. I’m sure that I would have done so, too. It’s our common reaction when we do wrong.

So what can we learn from this horrendous incident? Here are some things I glean from our parasha:

1. God is compassionate, merciful, and forgiving.

2. ​Yet he does not compromise his righteousness.

3. ​It is a blessing to have a strong intercessor as a leader (like Moses).

4. ​The battle we face is the same one that Moses and Israel faced: the battle to choose to do what is right (according to the Torah) or what is wrong (contrary to the Torah).

5. ​Our insecurities and unwanted circumstances are not valid excuses for choosing to do wrong.

6. ​There are serious consequences for disobeying God’s instructions.

I listed “God is compassionate, merciful, and forgiving” as ​the prominent lesson. It is the bottom line of our portion, and probably of most Torah portions. In Exodus 33:14, we get a glimpse of the great mercy, forgiveness, and love that God had for his covenant people: “Then he (God) responded (to Moses): “My face will go (on the journey to Israel with the people), and I will lead you!”

God had been greatly hurt and angered by our ancestors’ behavior, but he opted for reconciliation. As King of our precious covenant, he could have trashed it all after the incident of idolatry. But he didn’t. In fact, he continued to lead our people. And what does that show us? That God​ indeed is merciful and forgiving. His heart toward Israel was one of compassion: “I will have womb mercies on whomever I will have womb mercies” (33:19). The Hebrew word for “mercy” reflects how a mother feels toward her unborn baby. Look at how God describes himself in our parasha:

So Adonai passed before him (Moses), crying: “Adonai, Adonai, Compassionate and Merciful God, longsuffering, and great in covenant love and truth! Locking up covenant love for thousands; carrying away Torah transgressions, crimes, and missings of the mark; but he will not totally sanitize the Torah transgressions, afflicting the Torah transgressions of fathers upon the children, and upon the children of the children, unto the third and fourth generations. (34:6–7)

So the incident of idolatry is to be remembered throughout all time, due to its inclusion in the scriptures. But our God, though he will not compromise with wrongdoing, so loves his covenant people! That does not change. And I love this emphasis in our portion. May it inspire us all!

All Scripture citations are the author’s translation.

Esther: A Story of Standing Together

Purim 5781

by Jared Eaton, Simchat Yisrael, West Haven, CT

As the festival of Purim approaches, Jews around the world gather to read the megillah of Esther, a story about a young Jewish girl who becomes the queen of the Persian Empire and uses her position to save the Jewish people from destruction.

Esther has been an inspiring figure in Judaism for centuries. Children dress as her on the festival of Purim and it’s even become traditional to name baby girls born near Purim Esther after the heroine of the story.

But compared to other figures in the Bible, is Esther really a good Jewish role model?

Compare Esther to a similar figure in Jewish history, Daniel. The books of Esther and Daniel both concern how Jews are to live and act in exile, and have heroes who have to navigate through the intrigues and pressures of life in the court of a powerful gentile king.

But from there, the similarities end. Daniel has uncompromising faith and unwavering trust in God. He reacts to exile by holding fast to his values and his Jewish identity. He refuses to eat unclean foods; he refuses to bow down to idols; he refuses to change his prayer life or diminish his service to God. He always tells the truth and is fearless in the face of powerful kings. Daniel never compromises who he is.

Esther isn’t the same kind of role model. She hides her Jewish identity, embraces pagan customs, eats unclean foods, and marries a gentile. Daniel inspires the pagan kings to praise the name of the most-high God to all the people and nations of the earth. Esther is so irreligious that God’s name isn’t even mentioned in the whole book.

When Mordecai comes to her for help, Esther’s first response isn’t courage or faith, it’s self-preservation. She says “Everyone knows that anyone who appears before the king without being invited is doomed to die unless the king holds out his gold scepter. And the king has not called for me to come to him for thirty days” (Esth 4:11). It’s not a good look for someone who is supposed to be a hero and a role-model.

Martin Luther, the leader of the Protestant Reformation, hated the book of Esther so much that he wished for it to be expunged from the scriptures, because it was “filled with heathen unnaturalities.” Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the book of Esther is that when archeologists uncovered the Dead Sea Scrolls from the Qumran caves, they found fragments of every book in the Hebrew scriptures, except for Esther. The book of Esther was not included in the original Hebrew Bible.

So why do we place such emphasis on this book? Why do we read it year after year, telling the story of Esther, Haman, and Mordecai over and over again? Why is Esther such a hero to our people that we celebrate a holiday commemorating her story?

I think the answer lies in the same passage I quoted a moment ago. I believe that Esther found her greatest strength at her moment of greatest weakness.

Filled with rage and envy against the Jews, Haman had convinced the king to issue an edict calling for the death of every Jew in the empire. It was a moment of unprecedented devastation in our nation’s history.

The Jewish people responded by turning to God in hopes of being saved. Throughout the Kingdom, there was great mourning amongst the people. They took to the streets, fasting, weeping, and wailing. Everybody lay in sackcloth and ashes. Everybody that is, except for Esther.

Esther is completely oblivious to everything that is going on around her. She doesn’t even know about the death sentence looming over her people’s heads. She’s sitting pretty inside the palace, insulated from the cares of the world, decked out in royal garments, being pampered by maidens who attend to her every need.

No wonder then that Esther hesitates when Mordecai asks her to put herself on the line. She has everything to lose. A few months ago, Esther was a poor Jewish orphan, from an ostracized minority, with no parents, little education, and few prospects. By extraordinary circumstances, she found herself elevated to an exalted position as queen of all of Persia. She was able to leave the old, impoverished Jewish life behind and embrace her new abundant life as a Persian.

But now her past has caught up to her. She can’t escape the person she used to be, and now she is being asked to own the identity that she worked so hard to escape, knowing that if she does, she could lose everything she has, even her own life.

Esther has a decision to make. She can stay where she is and let the storm pass her by. No one knows that she’s Jewish; she would be safe inside the palace. She could keep living her new, comfortable life.

But instead, Esther responds to the call. With a little help from Mordecai, Esther realizes that her fate is bound to the Jewish people. Whatever her circumstances may be, wherever she lives or whatever she practices, she will always be a Jew, and she cannot abandon her people when they need her the most.

She tells Mordecai to go and gather all of the Jewish people. You have been fasting and praying up until now, well, I am going to fast and pray with you. I won’t remain separate from my people anymore. If I am going to be lost, then let me be lost. But let it be for the right reasons . . . let it be with my people, and for my people, not separate from them.

This is the greatness of Esther. She didn’t have to do what she did. Esther could have remained hidden and safe from harm, but at the most critical moment, she recognized that all Jews are responsible for one another, that we are all deeply connected, and she rejoins her people and changes the destiny of the Jewish people forever.

There’s a powerful lesson for Messianic Jews in this story. Like Esther, sometimes it’s easy for us to become isolated from our people. It’s easy to get caught up in our own insular little community and lose sight of what’s going on in the wider Jewish world. Sometimes we even find it easier to relate to gentiles than to Jews, find that our faith in Messiah Yeshua gives us more in common with the church than with Israel.

But the Hamans of the world have not gone away. The Jewish people still live under the threat of bigotry and antisemitism. Hate speech against the Jews has been on a steady rise.

We, like Esther, have choice to make. We can shut ourselves up in our palace and hope that the storm passes us by. Or we can recognize that we are a part of the Jewish people, that God has called us to bear one another’s burdens, and that we need to stand with our people in good times and bad.

Purim is a celebration of our Jewish identity in a world that continues to hate and fear Jews. In the darkest times in our history, the Jewish people have celebrated Purim to remember how God has never abandoned us and how deeply connected we are to one another.

And no, I don’t think Esther is a poor role model. Martin Luther, raging antisemite that he was, may not have been a big fan of the book, but Moses Maimonides, one of the greatest Jewish minds of all time, said that outside of the five books of the Torah, Esther is the most important book in the Bible. He believed that more than any other text, Esther would instruct the Jewish people how to survive in exile away from the Holy Land.

Esther may not have been included in the original versions of the Hebrew Bible, but from the medieval period on there have been more scrolls of Esther discovered than any other book of the Bible, save the Torah. During the tortured history of European Jewry, this book took on a special meaning to the Jewish people. The book of Esther teaches us that even in the most hopeless situations, God will always deliver.

Wherever the Jews would survive plagues, or floods or famines, they would celebrate Purim to remind them of God’s deliverance. When Judaism was outlawed in Spain during the Inquisition, Jews would secretly celebrate Purim in basements and cellars.

When we read the book of Esther, we join ourselves to a long tradition. A tradition of finding hope and joy in dark times. A tradition of taking a stand against hatred and bigotry. And a tradition of standing together, hand in hand, as one with our people.

Chag Sameach Purim!

The Holy Ark: Pointing The Way

Parashat T’rumah, Exodus 25:1–27:19   

by Ben Volman, Kehillat Eytz Chaim, Toronto

One of the most intriguing places my wife and I have experienced in Israel is David Ben Gurion’s home in Tel Aviv. The square brick building is not only plain outside; its first floor has sparse, basic furnishings with few touches of color. It almost disdains luxury. But then you reach the second floor and feel you’ve entered the great man’s inner sanctum, his desk, his papers. You sense his presence as he edited Israel’s Declaration of Independence and hosted world leaders. All around you are his books, a vast collection to enrich the mind and heart. All that you knew of this figure, whose indomitable vision led Israel to nationhood, is transformed. 

I’ve had a similar change of heart over the years studying the Mishkan—Israel’s desert tabernacle. At first, all the details seemed ponderously boring. But in time, I became fascinated, especially by the centerpiece, its inner sanctum—the Ark of the Covenant. (Mind you, my studies started a few years before Indiana Jones’s daring pursuit of the Ark in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”)  Still, no other artifact from Israel’s past has exerted such a hold on our spiritual imagination. This remarkable locus of power and mystery embodies the very heart of God’s purpose in the Mishkan: “that I may dwell among them” (Exod 25:8).

By size, it was not meant to impress: the acacia wood aron (literally a box or chest) covered with gold, was originally built to hold the edut (the “testimony,” the tablets of the law). It was only about three to four feet in length and perhaps two feet high. But the ancients would have definitely understood the significance of its magnificent cover: the elaborate lid of solid gold with the intriguing facing figures of angels (k’ruvim / cherubim) with outspread wings and bowed heads. Despite its otherworldly quality (Moshe “was shown” a vision of the model beforehand, Exod 25:9)—the Ark was very much a creation of its time by skilled artisans trained in Egypt.

The thrones of kings were frequently decorated with pairs of winged angelic beings of a composite nature (animal torsos with wings and sometimes human faces) as supernatural guardians. The aron became known as “the Ark for the covenant of Adonai-Tzva’ot, who is present above the k’ruvim” (1 Sam 4:4; Psa 80:2; 99:1). As God’s throne, it required those who approached it to bow as before a king at his “footstool” (1 Chron 28:2; Psa 132:7).  

It was common practice in this era for kings to place treaties and pacts in the temples of their gods, under their feet. The god both acted as guardian of the pact and oversaw its supervision. (Note how Shmu’el “places before the Lord,” at the foot of the Ark, the ordinances of Israel’s new kingdom in 1 Sam 10:25.)

The word Mishkan shares the same root as Shekhinah, the presence of God. In this sense, Israel’s Mishkan with the Ark was likened to a portable Mt. Sinai that they carried with them. Today, the aron kodesh (holy ark) in our schuls reflects this same pattern—at the heart of our sanctuary is God’s law, the Torah scroll, symbolizing God’s presence and our access to him.  

The Ark as it went before them and then later traveled in their midst was also a symbol of Adonai Tzeva’ot as a warrior: “When the Ark was to set out, Moses would say, ‘Advance, O Lord! May your enemies be scattered’” (Num 10:35, JPS). This song is now integrated into our Torah liturgy but the words hint at the Ark’s hidden power. As it led Israel into battles for the Holy Land, the Ark was seen as God’s chariot. (With a  mysterious power that would strike Uzzah dead when he inadvertently put out a hand to steady the aron on a cart as David led the Ark up to Jerusalem; 2 Sam 6:3–8). 

At the height of its significance, the Ark was where God actively exercised sovereignty through his servant, Moshe. Afterwards, the connection almost seemed lost until the revived spiritual authority of Shmu’el and the eventual rise of King David. It was David’s vision to build a Temple for the Ark at the center of his new capital in Jerusalem. During a visit to Shiloh just a few years ago, our group shared an uncanny sense of God’s presence, commonly felt by people who go there, as if the lingering power of the Ark were still resonant in the surrounding valleys.

Today, the Ark’s continuing place in the living memory of Israel is its role as the “mercy seat,” where all sins were cleansed by the sprinkling of blood on Yom Kippur. It was so central to the rituals of atonement that even when it was gone and the Temple rebuilt, the ritual in the Holy of Holies continued as if it were there. But by the time of Jeremiah, the significance of the Ark as a symbol of God’s protective power over his people had become a problem. Israel’s disobedience to the Torah would bring heavy consequences on the nation in 586 BCE as the people and their blinded king were led to Babylonian exile with the burning city in ruins. 

Israeli archeologist Leen Ritmeyer is convinced that four indented points on the rock (“al-Sakhra”) under the Dome of the Rock are the last remaining signs of the exact setting where the Ark was placed in Solomon’s Temple.  So, what happened to the Ark? Lucas and Spielberg closed their story with a mystery, but the missing Ark still compels believers to hope that it will be seen again. That hope is written into Revelation 11:19, where the Temple of heaven opens and the Ark (or perhaps the model) is revealed. The Scriptural record of the fall of Jerusalem says nothing about the Ark. Jeremiah hid it, according to 2 Maccabees, in the cave where Moshe is buried. Rabbinic traditions say that Josiah had it hidden, but I have read numerous “inside” revelations—that it’s secreted away in hidden passages under the Temple or in Ethiopia.

We take all this with a grain of salt, yet we can never be sure how the Ark will rise again in significance. In 638 CE, after the Caliph Abd al-Malik captured Jerusalem, he demanded to see the “Holy Temple.” The Byzantine patriarch took him to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but the Caliph wasn’t satisfied. Finally, he was taken to the Temple Mount, which had become the city dump. “Here it is,” said his host, “the abomination of desolation.” The Byzantines had presumed this was the end of the story. They were wrong. The story of the Ark is imprinted on the heart of Israel, like the promise of Messiah, an essential reminder of God’s continuing presence on our spiritual journey between exile and nationhood. The Ark pointed the way. All we know is that God in the living reality of Yeshua, alive in the temple of our hearts, will continue to lead us from here.  

Us and . . . Us

Parashat Mishpatim, Exodus 21:1-24:18

By Dave Nichol, Ruach Israel, Needham, MA

Parashat Mishpatim starts with the pedestrian (“when you acquire a Hebrew slave, he shall serve you six years”) and ends with the transcendent (“Now the Presence of the Lord appeared in the sight of the Israelites as a consuming fire on the top of the mountain”). It consists of a series of commandments and ordinances Moses is to set before the people of Israel. At first glance the commandments seem arbitrary and random. Treatment of slaves, violent crime, giving of loans, and how to eat animals all warrant mention in our parasha. Even rogue oxen have their fifteen minutes of fame.

The commentator R. Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089-1164) manages to find an order to this string of commandments (and adds, “Whenever we cannot find one, we shall blame the deficiency on ourselves”). He writes:

The essential principle is that no one shall compel by violence one who is less powerful than he. The rules begin with the violence exerted on the body by enslavement, and continue with various rules that stem from this subject.

This interpretation of Torah is consonant with values broadly espoused in today’s world. It is widely agreed that the rich should not get special treatment, that the powerful must be prevented from taking advantage of the poor, and that even animals deserve better than cruelty. That justice is so universally valued (if not always achieved) is a beautiful thing about the current zeitgeist in the world. Maybe Torah is finally infusing our world? Of course, the distance between intention and achievement can feel insurmountable for an individual; how much more for a civilization?

But there is another subtle message in our parasha that is less comprehensible to modern ears, which our world nevertheless needs to hear. The first hint is where the text discusses a “Hebrew slave” (21:2), leaving open the question of slaves that are not Hebrews. Later God forbids the charging of interest, but not universally: “If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, do not act toward them as a creditor; exact no interest from them” (22:24; see Deut 23:21, which allows charging interest to foreigners, for contrast). 

And, further on, we come across this unexpected phrasing: “You shall not subvert the rights of your needy in their disputes” (23:6). Why “your needy''? Does this not apply to anyone who is needy?

These wordings hint at something that was likely assumed by the original readers of the text, but that is quite passé, even heretical, in our times: the idea that your ethical obligations to your tribe or people differ from—even exceed—your obligations to outsiders.

Writing on the commandment, “and you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18), Rabbi Carl Kinbar argues that our “neighbor” refers to a fellow Israelite, as opposed to, say whoever lives next door:

When “neighbor” is defined as “[whoever happens to be] our neighbor,” or “all humanity,” we fail to account for the reciprocity that exists between members of the Jewish people. In the Torah, love is a responsibility, a benefit, and in a sense the glue that binds the community together. Love, as envisioned by the Torah, functions fully only within a community of mutual obligation.  (“First Steps in Messianic Jewish Ethics: Understanding ethics through our obligation to love,” Hashivenu Forum 2013)

Rav Kinbar goes on to examine Yeshua’s teaching on this commandment, and the frequent commands to “love one another” throughout the apostolic writings, and makes a compelling case that in a sound Messianic Jewish ethics, we are first and foremost responsible for other members of the covenant community. 

Practically speaking, most of us understand that it’s natural to care more for your own children than for other peoples’ children, for example. But this concept of a hierarchy of ethical obligation has been lost to the contemporary politico-moral discourse, so that some people truly don’t believe they have the right to show favoritism in their charitable donations, or (to use a more politically charged example) the right to favor citizens of their country over non-citizens for various benefits. In our own communities, we have sometimes forgotten that our primary obligations are to fellow Jews.

To this point, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks zt”l wrote eloquently on the importance of particularism, against a platonic ideal of universality, in his book The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. He points out that the Bible sees the beginning of God’s work of redemption in his relationship with one flesh-and-blood family, that of Abraham:

The universality of moral concern is not something we learn by being universal but by being particular. Because we know what it is to be a parent, loving our children, not children in general, we understand what it is for someone else, somewhere else, to be a parent, loving his or her children, not ours. There is no road to human solidarity that does not begin with moral particularity—by coming to know what it means to be a child, a parent, a neighbor, a friend. We learn to love humanity by loving specific human beings. There is no short-cut.

That certainly does not mean that we have no moral obligation to outsiders. Far from it! Rabbi Sacks continues by quoting our parasha: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of the stranger—you yourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt'' (23:9). The Torah goes even further elsewhere (Lev. 19:34, Deut. 10:19), commanding us to love the stranger! But in the end, mitzvot, commandments, or any ethical obligations, need a community to function properly, and they in turn hold that community together. Hence the word mitzvah is said to be related to the word tsavta, meaning bond or connection.

Though our contemporary society might have a passion for ethics, without an understanding of the social dimension of human life—that we are not simply individuals, but that our families, communities, and nation make up part of our core identities—we have lost a key ingredient for making ethics comprehensible. This has led to deep pathologies in our ability to have political conversations. It has also, in my opinion, caused widespread feelings both of impotence and guilt among well-intentioned people (one example here) who feel unable to navigate the web of competing ethical demands.

Another way to put this might be: our well-intentioned desire to eliminate differences is destined to fail because it goes against the grain of human life. 

What our world needs to hear from Parashat Mishpatim is not just what it says—important as those things are for building a just society—but what it assumes. That is, that the society we are building is made up of people mutually obligated to each other. If that is not the case, the rest may be for naught.

Rabbi Sacks, in his more recent book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, summed it up:

Tip O’Neill used to say, “All politics is local.” Morality is likewise. That, at any rate, is where it begins, among families and friends and neighbors. Morality places a limit on individualism. . . . Morality, at its core, is about strengthening the bonds between us, helping others, engaging in reciprocal altruism, and understanding the demands of group loyalty, which are the price of group belonging.

May this be an encouragement to us to redouble our efforts toward building strong communities of mutual love and commitment. You can’t make stew without a pot! Our primary ethical obligations— those communal and local— must be observed before we are prepared to offer anything to the stranger and outsider. Only by loving our neighbor can we fulfill the commandment in our parasha that sums up all the others: “You shall be a holy people to me” (22:30).

Quote from Ibn Ezra is from The Commentator’s Bible (JPS). Translations from Tanakh are JPS. 

Steadfast or Merely Informed?

Parashat Yitro, Exodus 18:1–20:23
Chaim Dauermann, Simchat Yisrael, West Haven, CT
 

I remember the first time I saw a smartphone. Naively, I thought I was looking at an instrument of peace and enlightenment. With the Internet in everyone’s pocket, I thought that having more and better information would inspire us all to make better choices and to treat one another better.

Clearly, I was mistaken. Why didn’t we improve? What were we missing?

This week’s parasha, Yitro, contains one of the most seismic events in the entire Torah narrative: the giving of the Ten Commandments. Before Moses famously bore them down from Sinai on tablets of stone (the first time and the second time) God delivered the Ten Commandments orally, while all of Israel was assembled in attendance near the foot of the mountain. 

Exodus 20 recounts that the sound of God’s voice so terrified the people that they said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, or we will die” (Exod 20:19). The people moved away from the mountain, but Moses drew closer to hear more from God, who instructed him to tell the people, “You yourselves have seen that I have spoken to you from heaven” (Exod 20:22b). We see that the children of Israel had irrefutable experiences of God’s power, including, as God himself pointed out, hearing his voice from above, yet as the biblical narrative unfolds from there, we see Israel go through cycles of idolatry, disbelief, and rebellion, often doubting that Moses (and God) can lead them to the land that was promised. They had concrete information about God, but they were lacking in faith.

In modern discourse, the idea of “taking something on faith” is generally taken to mean believing something unreasonably, perhaps even despite what appears to be invalidating evidence. Ask a modern secular person to give you examples of “faith,” and they might point to “blind belief” in the Bible’s various truth claims as an example. You would be right to dispute their characterization of such beliefs as “blind.” But also disputable is the notion that belief in these claims constitutes “faith” in the biblical sense. It’s easy to find one’s self on the losing side of an argument when the other side’s misconceptions have been permitted to frame the debate. 

The author of Hebrews called faith “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (11:1). While some might conclude that this means “believing without evidence,” a closer reading of the verse, and the rest of the chapter, shows that this is not so. One would be right to point out that one doesn’t typically experience “assurance” and “conviction” without compelling evidence, but such evidence is not the point. The point is the assurance and conviction themselves, and what they are oriented towards: things “hoped for” and “not seen.” It follows that faith is a conviction that has an orientation toward something in the future, something we cannot yet grasp. The author then soon puts a finer point on this faith definition: “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb 11:6 ESV). Here, we see faith understood as something that involves an action, in the form of “seeking” and “drawing near” to God, as well as an expectation in the form of believing that God rewards us for our seeking. Faith, in this sense, is an active form of trusting in God.

Mark’s Gospel recounts Yeshua’s encounter with a blind beggar named Bartimaeus (10:46–52). Being familiar with Yeshua’s reputation, Bartimaeus called out, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” and asked him to heal his blindness. Yeshua replied, “Go; your faith has made you well.” This faith to which Yeshua referred was not energized by Bartimaeus’s foreknowledge of Yeshua’s deeds, but by his belief that he could heal him.

The Greek word most frequently translated as “faith” in the New Testament (and in both of the above passages) is pistis. In the Septuagint, pistis usually corresponds with the Hebrew word emunah, a word that doesn't describe belief, so much as a quality of steadfastness, reliability, and sturdiness. (“Thus, his hands were emunah until the sun set,” Exod 17:12c.) In this sense, faith is not what we know intellectually, but is rather how this information informs what we do, and how it influences the orientation of our hearts.

So now we see, it is possible to simultaneously lack faith yet also believe that God exists and that he has acted in the past. In modern terminology, there is a word used to describe a belief in God that strips him of all agency in our world today: Deism. The deist movement proliferated chiefly among English writers and thinkers in the 16th through 18th centuries, later to become common in the American Colonies and helping form some of the philosophical underpinnings of the American Revolution. More broadly, however, deism describes a system of religious thought that limits knowledge of God to objectively observable data about the universe, while rejecting the idea that any such knowledge can be passed down through religious institutions or by direct revelation. In essence, it is a vision of the world which holds that God set the wheels in motion for everything, and then stepped back and ceased to be involved in his creation. Someone adhering to this way of viewing the world could, at times, very well sound like a person with a true faith, if judged on the basis of some of their statements. British-American deist philosopher Thomas Paine wrote in his work The Age of Reason, “I believe in one God, and no more: and I hope for happiness beyond this life.” At first glance, this would appear to be a statement of faith, affirming God’s oneness and, in him, a future hope. What follows on from there, however, is the remainder of Paine’s treatise, itself a polemic against religious institutions, the Bible, and the very notion of God exhibiting any agency in human affairs. 

Paine’s words call to mind the words of a much earlier man: Yeshua’s brother, James. In his epistle, James lends much time to discussing the nature of faith, and the integral role that action plays in expressing it. Writing in the first century, James could have just as easily have been writing to Thomas Paine when he stated, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!” (James 2:19 ESV).

When we say we have faith, to what sort of faith are we referring? Does our orientation towards God more resemble Thomas Paine’s, or that of Bartimaeus? If we were at Sinai and heard God’s voice, what would we do next?

One challenge before us is that our faith community today is one very much rooted in story, in tradition, in what we understand as our history. When immersing ourselves in all of this information, it’s sometimes easy to get bogged down in the details. In the wilderness, the children of Israel were tested regularly, and their faith—or lack thereof—was readily exposed by those challenges. In our lives and community today, how often are we similarly tested?

Do we simply have information, or do we have emunah?

Scripture references are from the NASB unless otherwise noted. 

Let's Learn Wood

Parashat B’shelach, Exodus 13:17–17:16

David Friedman, UMJC rabbi, Jerusalem

Some years back in a closed study session, I was happy to study four verses from today’s parasha with my close friend, lecturer and author Ariel Berkowitz, and Eldon Clem, a scholar, rabbi, and world-class Aramaic expert. All three of us had been curious as to the meaning of four verses in our parasha. We read them every year in the parasha cycle, but it was never clear to us what these verses meant.

So with a holy drive, we sat down, rolled up our sleeves, brought out our Torahs, our Septuagints, our Targums, and our commentaries, and sat down, hungry to solve the mystery. Here are the verses:

Then Moshe brought Israel from the Red Sea, and they went to the Wilderness of Shur; so they went three days into that wilderness, and they found no water. Then, they traveled toward Marah, and they weren’t all to drink water from Marah, because they were bitter. So they named the place “bitterness.” Then the people complained about Moshe, saying, “What will we drink?” Then he cried to Adonai, and Adonai taught him wood, which he tossed in the water, and the waters were sweetened there. So there he gave them statutes and judgments. (Exodus 15:22–25)

The text reads strangely in the original Hebrew, and is a bit awkward in English as well. It literally states, “Adonai taught him (Moshe) wood.” Are we being told that Adonai taught Moshe about wood, making this a biology lesson? Perhaps he was teaching him which tree branches or leaves, when put into stagnant or polluted waters, purify the water, like a Steripen or chlorine? One Aramaic translation reads this phrase as, “Adonai trained Moshe wood.” Another Aramaic translation words it, “So he prayed before Adonai and Adonai taught him a tree.” But we have the same issue: what does that mean?

Rashi explains that verse 25 means that the Torah was involved in this incident at Marah. I like Rashi’s insight here: the contents of the Torah were somehow part of making the dead, stagnant, polluted water come to life. In the Garden of Eden, there was a tree called the Tree of Life, Etz Hayim in Hebrew. “In the middle of the garden, were the Tree of Life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:9).

Again in Revelation 2:2, it is written, “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life; on each side of the river stood the Tree of Life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

And again, in Proverbs 3:16–18: “Long life is in her right hand, in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are pleasant ways and all her paths are peace. She is a Tree of Life to those who embrace her; those who lay hold of her will be blessed.”

What is being talked about here? Wisdom, in this context. And where is Adonai’s wisdom found for us? Where do we learn about it, and study about it? In the Torah, in the Scriptures. The words and instructions of God are his wisdom. They are the Tree of Life that sweetens poisoned waters. They are life-giving words in the midst of human existence.

After an entire day of study, my two friends and I reached the conclusion that “teaching wood” was an idiom in ancient Hebrew, meaning “teaching the Torah.” The people of Israel in the book of Exodus would have been familiar with the image of the Tree of Life, the Etz Hayim. By teaching Torah to the people (as in 15:26), Moshe was truly presenting them with life and with real drinking water (as our holy Messiah himself stated, “He who comes to me shall have fresh water flowing from his belly,” John 7:38). Similarly, the wood cast into the water symbolizes how learning and applying the Torah to our lives leads to blessing, to life, to the Messiah, and to goodness. After all, fresh water was a necessary and life-giving item in the ancient Middle East then, and still is today.

If Exodus 15:22–25 means that Adonai was teaching them principles of the Torah, we might ask, which ones? Verse 26 already begins to answer: “If you will listen carefully to the voice of Adonai your God, and do what is right in his eyes; if you pay attention to his commands, and keep all his judgments . . .” So, listening to God and obeying him are the bottom lines to this lesson. And how do we know how to obey him? It is written for us in the Torah. It’s not a hidden mystery. What are God’s instructions and judgments? They are all found in the Torah.

In Exodus 15:25, the symbolic tossing of the wood or Tree of Life into the stagnant water was done to teach a truth to the people: If they will obey God’s instructions to them, they will have life. God’s instructions, when obeyed, produce life! Exodus15:26 summarizes that truth:

If you listen carefully to the voice of Adonai your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am Adonai, who heals you.

And then comes Exodus 15.27: “They came to Eilim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and camped there by the water.” God led them to quite the oasis. Twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees. There was a lot of shade and water. I spent time in the Sinai Peninsula, that same place where Moshe led the people at this point in our verses. The elements there, the sun, the sand, the wind, and the darkness at night, are all very present. At night, we could feel the darkness, almost as if you could reach out and touch it. I can imagine that to people used to living in Goshen, being in the Sinai would throw them for a loop. It was scary and uncomfortable. So God spoke right into this situation, and taught them “wood.” That is, he taught them that if they would obey his instructions, his Torah, this would produce life, even in a wilderness that was full of difficult and fear-producing natural elements.

This incident of 15:22–26 is one where God showed his way to the entire people. The wood being thrown into the water was a symbolic act that summarized everything that God was teaching them, the bottom line, the crucial lesson that they had to learn to do well on their journey. He taught them “wood,” an idiom for, “He taught them the bottom line of the Torah”—hear and obey. It is the same lesson that we find in Deuteronomy 6:4: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheynu Adonai Echad. Hear and act upon what you hear, Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is One.

Now, the text does indeed say that when the wood hit the water, it transformed the stagnant water into drinking water. But this miracle has its meaning, to me, in that a larger lesson was learned.

And what relevance do these verses have for us?

Quite a bit, I would think. The prophet Malachi wrote: “I am Adonai; I do not change. And so you, Jacob’s sons, you are not destroyed” (3:6). If, 3400 years ago, God emphasized that the people needed to learn the Torah and to keep it, he would have the same message today to you and to me. Let’s remember that it is written: “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide, we might have hope” (Rom 15:4).

Scripture citations are translated by the author.

The Price of Hesed

Parashat Bo, Exodus 10:1-13:16

Rabbi Paul L. Saal, Congregation Shuvah Yisrael, West Hartford, CT

Every year the gift-giving season comes earlier and earlier, to the point that some desperate merchandisers try to lure us into their stores with X-mas in August promotional ads. This year in reaction to the societal retreat due to Covid and the ensuing economic concerns, retailers have been even more aggressive with online marketing. “Black Friday” internet specials arrive in October as warm-ups to the real event and seem to have lingered through the month of November. But as we read Parashat Bo we should be taken with the concept of Passover in January, a reversal of materialism as Hashem offers us the priceless gift of personal and communal redemption.

Among Messianic Jews much has been said concerning the parallels between the sacrifices of the paschal lamb and that of Yeshua. After all, the paschal lamb was the Korban Pesach, the essential sacrifice which God commanded the children of Israel to make before liberating them from bondage to Pharaoh and bringing them to Sinai where they would enter into a covenant of service to him. The blood of this lamb, placed upon the lintel and posts of the doors of Israel’s abodes in Goshen, stood as the sign by which the destroyer would pass over them, averting the plague of death of the first-born that befell the households of Egypt. Similarly the blood of Yeshua, whom Yochanan the Immerser referred to as the “Lamb of God,” spiritually holds the curse of sin and death in abeyance, and brings both Israel and the nations into a renewed covenant with God. Yeshua himself used the symbols that surround the Seder meal and the Passover lamb to ritualize and point forward to his own efficacious sacrifice.

Both Passover lambs provide material and spiritual redemption for the community of Israel, and they also create a community of redemption out of the people of Israel. This is accomplished through the dialectic of hesed and gevurah. According to Jewish mystical thought, the Holy One in the creation of the world employed these two movements. Hesed is the move outward toward distant horizons. For the individual this means expanding oneself and reaching out to others. Gevurah on the other hand is an act of inward recoil, withdrawing into the protective recess of one’s own inner self. Through hesed souls touch each other and loving community is created; by virtue of gevurah self-awareness occurs and souls are also developed. Since all people are created in the image of the divine, much can be learned about God in the hesed community as well as the loneliness of gevurah.

By examining Torah’s account of the paschal lamb (Exod 12:3-8), we can see the cyclical pattern of hesed and gevurah. First, Moses is commanded to speak to the entire assembly of Israel, instructing them to each select a solitary unblemished male lamb from the flocks, for the individual households. The lamb is brought into the humble homes for a five-day period of inspection. As it is observed within the privacy of each household for that period, the particularity of the lamb increases. First it is referred to as a lamb (12:3), with no definite article employed. Then it becomes the lamb (12:4) and eventually we are told, “it shall be yours” (12:5). Here the taking of the lamb represents a recession inward to the individual home, a ceding of communal attachment for the sake of increased personal awareness. In a move toward gevurah the lamb becomes more sentient to the observing family, and the attachments to it become more sentimental. No doubt its death will seem more brutal and become more efficacious as the awareness of its innocence becomes more acute.

The same can be said of Yeshua. From a distance he is a prophet among many, and a messiah among many candidates. Brilliant scholars have sought to place him within the great expanse of history, only to lose the power of his personality, the magnetism of his presence, and the dynamism of his spirit. But when you draw closer to him, examine his life, and imbibe of his spirit, he goes from being a messiah, to the Messiah, and eventually your Messiah. Only in the closeness of such examination can we better know the love and nearness of God, and the depths of our own need.

It is this awareness of our neediness that propels us out into the community and compels us to seek others. Torah tells us that around the paschal lamb a new hesed community forms. We read, “If the household is too small for a lamb, let him and his neighbor next to his house take it according to the number of people” (Exod 12:4). Living together, sharing needs, provision, and protection is made possible through the sacrifice of the Passover lamb.

How natural, then, for all Jews to begin the Seder with the strange declaration, “This is the bread of poverty,” followed by the seemingly contrary, yet open, invitation for “all who are hungry to come and eat.” It is not the physical act of eating that draws us together; rather, it is the great sense of solidarity and empathy that we each crave. It is only in our deepest awareness of poverty, suffering, and brokenness that we are drawn out of our self-protective cocoons into the loving embrace of community. This year we are given the opportunity of concretizing this declaration by giving selflessly to meet the needs of others. Food insecurity is rampant, and we are compelled to heed the aspirations of Torah that declare “However, may there be no destitute among you” (Deut 15:4 Stone edition).

Hesed also allows us to enter the emotional space of others through the gift of empathy. This past Tuesday evening, with my wife and daughter, I watched the brief but emotional memorial service at the mall in the nation’s capital for the 400,000 souls stolen by a plague of epic proportion. I could tell how deeply saddened my family was, but I was truly shaken by my own sense of self protectionism. How could I cry about lost recreation and human contact, when so many would never see their loved ones again? Hesed comes with a price, and empathy and compassion can leave scars. It is no wonder that before placing himself upon the altar of redemption, Yeshua retreated to Gethsemane to share his suffering with his Father and to be strengthened.

When we embrace his sacrifice in the poverty attained through the introspection of gevurah, we can truly enter the hesed of the community. After Yeshua partook of his final Seder with his disciples he prayed this prayer,

Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:21-23)

This year as we read Bo and consider the Passover lamb and God’s gift of redemption, may this prayer of Yeshua become manifest in our lives and our redemptive communities.

A Way Forward for Pharaoh

Parashat Va’era, Exodus 6:2–9:35

Rabbi Russ Resnik

Fear makes for bad politics. Just ask the folks who lived through Pharaoh’s reign in the days of the Exodus. 

As our story opened in last week’s parasha, Pharaoh was stoking fears about a peaceful minority group thriving among the Egyptians: “Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land” (Exod 1:9–10). The way he handled this clear threat from the Israelite population was to conscript them into an oppressive system of forced labor—which didn’t work. The Israelites continued to thrive and the Egyptians became even more unsettled (Exod 1:12), until Pharaoh instituted a policy that may have been unthinkable until then, even in tyrannical Egypt: murder every male child born to the Hebrews. 

At this point, our narrative introduces another kind of fear. The Hebrew midwives were ordered to carry out this policy, “But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live” (Exod 1:17). Midwives occupied a humble place in ancient society and would normally be left unnamed. But in Shemot, the Book of Names as Exodus is called in Hebrew, the names of these brave midwives are recorded forever: Shifrah and Puah. They feared God more than they feared Pharaoh, and that points the way out of the system of oppression that gripped not only the people of Israel, but the whole land of Egypt. Other Hebrews, especially the mother and sister of Moses, will join them in choosing the fear of God over fear of Pharaoh.

Pharaoh, of course, cannot abide the notion that there’s anyone or any power to be feared more than he. He ramps up the pressure on the Israelites and their cries rise up to the One even greater than Pharaoh: “And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew” (Exod 2:24–25).

The stage is set for a mighty confrontation between God and Pharaoh, which intensifies throughout this week’s parasha. Hashem sends Moses to deliver the Israelites and (in last week’s parasha) gives him a preview of the struggle: “When you go back to Egypt, see that you do before Pharaoh all the miracles that I have put in your power. But I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go” (Exod 4:21). The notion of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart so that he can resist God’s power is a tough one. Why not just soften Pharaoh’s heart so that he relents and releases Israel? In addition to a multitude of insights from sages and commentators, I’ll add this: perhaps Hashem wants to point us beyond the regime of domination that Pharaoh embodies. Hashem can overpower and out-oppress Pharaoh; he can terrorize Pharaoh as Pharaoh has terrorized Israel and his own people as well. But he’s seeking a non-coerced response. He’s strengthening Pharaoh’s heart, which is already set against God, so that Pharaoh isn’t crushed but remains free to turn away from evil of his volition. 

This brings us back to the second kind of fear, the fear displayed by Shifrah and Puah: fear of God. Pharaoh utilizes fear to weaken, crush, and dominate others. The fear of God points the way toward freedom from the fear of man. Yes, Hashem will put the pressure on Pharaoh big-time, but he will strengthen Pharaoh’s heart so that he can still freely embrace the fear of God. In Exodus 4:21, the Hebrew says literally, “I will strengthen his heart, ahazek et-libo.” You might recognize in that phrase the word we repeated a couple of weeks ago at the conclusion of our reading of Genesis: Hazak, hazak, v’nit’chazek, “Be strong, be strong, and let us be strengthened.” 

And so, throughout the succession of plagues in this week’s parasha, Hashem is seeking a genuine change of heart in Pharaoh and in his people. Pharaoh uses fear to dominate and manipulate his people; Hashem uses fear to correct and restore. “The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe” (Prov 29:25). Today we are living in a moment of intense fear of man, with powerful people ready to mobilize that fear to their own ends. Trusting in the Lord leads us to safety. 

The succession of plagues in this week’s reading leaves off at Plague Number 7, an appropriate moment to pause and assess the situation. This plague consists of hail, “hail and fire flashing continually in the midst of the hail, very heavy hail, such as had never been in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation” (Exod 9:24). Pharaoh finally appears to repent: “This time I have sinned; the Lord is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong. Plead with the Lord, for there has been enough of God’s thunder and hail. I will let you go, and you shall stay no longer.” But Moses knows that this is only a coerced submission. He’ll call off the plague. “But as for you and your servants, I know that you do not yet fear the Lord God” (Exod 9:30). And sure enough, “When Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned yet again and hardened his heart, he and his servants” (Exod 9:34). Here the word isn’t strengthened, but hardened or made heavy—vayakh’bed libo—and Pharaoh did it himself. 

The fear of man or the fear of God. Being manipulated by fear-mongering people in power or liberated by fear of God. The choice is ours, and the choice is even Pharaoh’s to make. Fear of God is the way forward for Pharaoh, but will he take it? Stay tuned for next week’s parasha. 

Scripture references are from ESV (English Standard Version).

The Power of Small Choices

Parashat Shemot, Exodus 1:1–6:1

By Dave Nichol, Ruach Israel, Needham, MA

In his recent commentary on Parashat B’reisheet (Covenant and Conversation Bereishit 5781), Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l identified a pivotal moment in Moses’ life portrayed in this week’s reading:

There is a fascinating phrase in the story of Moses’ early years. He grows up, goes out to his people, the Israelites, and sees them suffering, doing slave labour. He witnesses an Egyptian officer beating one of them. The text then says: ‘He looked this way and that and saw no one’ (vayar ki ein ish, or more literally, ‘he saw that there was no man’, Ex. 2:12).

It is difficult to read this literally. A building site is not a closed location. There must have been many people present. A mere two verses later we discover that there were Israelites who knew exactly what had happened. Therefore, the phrase almost certainly means, ‘He looked this way and that and saw that there was no one else willing to intervene.’

Rabbi Sacks finds here an instance of the “bystander effect,” a psychological phenomenon wherein multiple people observe a crime but none do anything to intervene, possibly because they assume someone else will do so. This is why first aid training teaches someone responding to an injury to identify one person and assign them directly to call an ambulance, instead of just yelling out “call 911” to a whole group of bystanders—because often none of them will! 

Rabban Gamliel may well have been thinking of Moses when he said, “In a place where there are no men (anashim, plural of ish), try to be a man (ish)” (Avot 2:5). This word “ish,” sometimes understood as “leader” or “human being,” is the same word that describes what Moses looked for, but did not see, before taking action. Moses shows himself to be uniquely immune to the bystander effect, a person who fills Rabban Gamliel’s criterion for being a leader. 

We see the same pattern when Moses arrives, alone, at a well in Midian. He observes an injustice, shepherds “driving off” Jethro’s daughters so they could water their flocks first, and his behavior is consistent: seeing injustice, he steps in and comes to the defense of the daughters (Exod 2:17). 

In fact this seems to be Moses’ calling card. When the Israelites regress to idolatry and God announces his intention to destroy them and replace them with Moses’ descendants, there is no one else to stand between God’s wrath and his people. Who stands between God and what he intends to do? Well, Moses does. He steps up, interceding on their behalf (Exod 32:11–14; also Num 16:20–22). Who prefigures Yeshua’s role as intercessor, advocate, and mediator better than Moses?

How to be like Moses . . . or Pharaoh

But how does Moses come to be this way? How does he manage to consistently display this essential trait of leadership, stepping up in situations where there is a need? 

One way to understand how Moses so consistently displays this middah (character trait) is to look at his antagonist, Pharaoh. The king of Egypt is similarly consistent in his refusal to allow the Israelites to leave. 

When God commissions Moses from the burning bush, he says a strange thing: not only will he not influence Pharaoh to let the people go easily, he will do the exact opposite! God will harden Pharaoh’s heart (Exod 4:21) so that he will not let the people go. This raises all kinds of questions. For one, why was poor Pharaoh set up to fail?

If we look closely at the language the Torah uses to describe his stubbornness, however, we see during the earlier plagues that Pharaoh’s heart “becomes strengthened/stiffened” (e.g. vayechezak lev Par’oh in Exod 7:13, 22). Sometimes Pharaoh is clearly the active party, as in Exodus 8:29 where it could be translated “Pharaoh made his heart heavy” (yakhbed Par’oh et libo). But as we continue to the later plagues, the dominant language becomes “Adonai stiffened Pharaoh’s heart” (vaychazek Adonai et lev Par’oh). The commentator Ramban, commenting on Exodus 7:3, notices this pattern as well:

When God says already before the plagues, “I, however, will stiffen his heart so that he will not let the people go,” He is informing Moses of what He is going to do in the last five plagues. God, after all, already knows that Pharaoh will refuse to let them go until he is forced. And indeed, in the last five plagues, and also at the splitting of the sea, it says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. “Like channeled water is the mind of the king in the LORD’s hand; He directs it to whatever He wishes” (Prov. 21:1).

Ramban implies that once Pharaoh chooses a trajectory, God, in a sense, holds him to it. The reference to “channeled water” is apt: as a stream flows, it cuts a channel in the earth. What starts as a stream over flat ground, given time, can cut through rock, becoming unchangeable, a permanent feature of the landscape. 

So it is with our actions. While you might think that our character determines our actions, the converse is also true: our actions imprint themselves on our character. 

If you think about it, it’s almost obvious: patterns of behavior become harder to change over time. This implies that those first actions, even if small, have outsized importance to one’s character. Maybe when Moses first noticed the Egyptian taskmaster beating an Israelite slave, the future hung in the balance as he decided what to do . . . but the next time at the well, it was a little easier to make that decision.

For Pharaoh, the first plague was his best shot to choose the right way. As each plague went by, and he repeatedly chose fear over faith, pride over humility, his ability to choose—his free will—slipped out of his grasp.

Faithful in small things

On one hand, this is scary: we may have less free will than we thought! Of course psychologists and neuroscientists have suspected this for some time. But on the other hand, it’s empowering to learn that small choices can add up to significant changes. 

This is not only true if we want to emulate this middah of responsiveness and leadership that Moses demonstrates—it applies to any middah that we want to cultivate. To grow as humans we should start by finding small actions that grease the wheels for larger actions. This helps us to understand Yeshua’s teaching that those who are faithful in small things will be entrusted with greater things (Matt 25:14–30; Luke 16:10). 

For example, the mussar teacher Alan Morinis passes on a teaching by Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler applying this approach to the middah of generosity: 

By obligating ourselves to give according to rules and formula, we expose our hearts to repetitive acts of giving that leave their trace on our inner lives. The very act of giving itself ultimately makes us more charitable, merciful, and loving. “Love flows in the direction of giving,” was Rabbi Dessler’s teaching. (Everyday Holiness: the Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar, 157–58)

This pattern in the life of Moses reveals not only why he was chosen to lead our people, but also what allowed him to succeed as a leader. Be encouraged! Every choice you make can be an inflection point in your life, no matter how small. Take hold of it!

Leave Behind Your Best

Parashat Vayechi, Genesis 47:28–50:26

By Rabbi Stuart Dauermann

Children don’t miss a beat. They observe things about us we don’t see in ourselves, in the process being imprinted with both the good and the bad. This is unavoidable. And yes, this can be troubling.

This week’s parasha reminds us all is not lost. Not only do children observe us in all our messy glory, we ourselves may choose to impress upon them the best we have learned in life. We can leave to friends and family the best we know, our purest gold.

Ya’akov does this, while bestowing a blessing on his grandsons, Efraim and Manasseh. David H. Stern beautifully paraphrases the intent of Torah’s words in B’reisheet/Genesis 48:16, where Ya’akov says of his grandsons, “May they remember who I am and what I stand for, and likewise my fathers Avraham and Yitz'chak, who they were and what they stood for.”

In Jewish terms, what Ya’akov is doing here is leaving a tzava’ah, commonly termed “an ethical will.” In such a statement, whether in person, in writing, on video, or digitally, one records for one’s family and friends a record of what we have learned about life with God, and our weightiest values, admonishing them to remember in their living the best lessons from our life.

It is one thing to leave a will that specifies who gets the jewelry after we are gone. But in a tzva’ah one passes on treasures more lasting and precious than these.

The tzva’ah is a penetrating form of intergenerational mentoring, where we function as elders in our social system. In From Age-ing to Sage-ing, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller highlight this towering intergenerational role in which “elders come to terms with their mortality, harvest the wisdom of their years, and transmit a legacy to future generations. Serving as mentors, they pass on the distilled essence of their life experience to others. The joy of passing on wisdom to younger people not only seeds the future, but crowns an elder’s life with worth and nobility.”

Although the task may sound morbid to some, crafting a tzava’ah is an excellent way of shaping a personal vision statement. It is a way of reminding yourself of what your life is about when you are at your best. The process is good for you, and even better for others. So have at it! Here are some bases to be covered:

1. Shalom Bayit and Shalom Mishpacha (peace within the family). Many of us know how ugly things can get when a loved one passes on. Often this involves fights over property, but it may also involve long-simmering issues that come to the surface under the stress of losing a peace-keeping loved one. In making a tzava’ah, it is wise to anticipate such tensions, to circumvent needless competition, and to admonish loved ones to walk in peace with each other. This is a time to use one’s personal gravitas to hold family members accountable for respecting your wishes and to enhance the honor of the family.

2. Final Arrangements. This includes everything pertaining to your passing, whether you want a Do Not Resuscitate order, the disposition of your remains, whether you wish to donate your organs, who you want officiating at your funeral and burial, the people you especially want there, what you may wish to be said at your funeral and burial, the how and where of the disposition of your body, the nature and location of the meal after your funeral, instructions about shiva and shloshim (how you wish your family to observe the week and the month after your passing), what you want on your tombstone, and any arrangements pertaining to your passing from this world to the next. These kinds of arrangements are not only for your satisfaction; they also relieve your loved ones of the task of making all these decisions themselves, at a time when they are not at their best.

3. Emotional and Interpersonal Matters. Some people and some relational issues may warrant being directly addressed. This is especially true of people with whom you sense or know you have unfinished business, or unresolved relational matters. In crafting a tzava’ah you may wish to address these matters in a publicly read document, or, more likely, in private communications, whether videos, recordings, or written materials. Here is where you can do so much good and remove overshadowing clouds from the people and generations that succeed you.

4. Your values and your faith. Here you will want to speak about your relationship with God in a manner that will comfort, instruct, encourage, and perhaps gently challenge those who survive you. What have you learned from and about God that you would want to stress and pass on to those you love? And what of your values? What have you learned is most important in life? What is worth remembering and serving, worthy of sacrifice? And what is not worth living for? What have you learned from others past and present that you want to highlight and see perpetuated?

As with Ya’akov blessing his grandsons, take time so that people might remember who you were and what you stood for, and what you learned from others that should not pass from human life and memory.

This is what Paul did with Timothy, as recorded in 2 Timothy chapter 4, part of Paul’s tzva’ah:

I solemnly charge you before God and the Messiah Yeshua, who will judge the living and the dead when he appears and establishes his Kingdom: proclaim the Word! Be on hand with it whether the time seems right or not. Convict, censure and exhort with unfailing patience and with teaching.

For the time is coming when people will not have patience for sound teaching, but will cater to their passions and gather around themselves teachers who say whatever their ears itch to hear. Yes, they will stop listening to the truth, but will turn aside to follow myths.

But you, remain steady in every situation, endure suffering, do the work that a proclaimer of the Good News should, and do everything your service to God requires.

For as for me, I am already being poured out on the altar; yes, the time for my departure has arrived. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. All that awaits me now is the crown of righteousness which the Lord, “the Righteous Judge,” will award to me on that Day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for him to appear.

That was Paul’s tzava’ah to Timothy. What is yours to those you love?