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This week’s parsha includes a narrative that perplexes many of our greatest scholars.
Let’s remind ourselves of the story: The people complain that they do not have water, and once again they bemoan their having left Egypt. “Why did you make us leave Egypt to bring us to this wretched place, a place with no grain or figs or vines or pomegranates? There is not even water to drink!” In response, the presence of God appears to Moses and Aaron and he commands them to “assemble the community” and order the rock to yield its water. But Moshe does not do as God commands; instead, he strikes the rock not once but twice, and copious water flows from the rock. But what an enormous price to pay! Because he struck the rock, Moshe is not allowed to enter the Promised Land. After leading the Israelites for forty years, through so many trials and tests, how could Moses be denied entry to the land? As Rabbi Kushner, A”H, notes in the below-the-line commentary in our Etz Hayyim, “Why should Moses, who has served God so loyally for so many years through so many trying times, be so harshly punished for what seems like a minor infraction?” Indeed: What could have possibly been so sinful to warrant such a terrible punishment? After 40 years in the desert with these people, we can guess that he has little patience left for their whining and their ingratitude. Also, we should not forget that Moshe has just lost his sister Miriam and was still in mourning for her. And Miriam herself had been the person to bring water in the desert to the Israelites. So, it makes sense that Moses would associate the absence of water with her death and feel even more powerless and distraught. And that he would “lose his cool” as a result. And does Moses ever lose it! Not only does he throw a tantrum, he says, “Shimu na hamorim” - listen, you rebellious ones! Shall we get water for you out of this rock?” We know that Moshe has a short fuse, and this incident in Chukkat is not the first where we see him display his temper. Early in his career, while in Egypt, Moshe saw a taskmaster beating an Israelite slave and, in a moment of righteous indignation, he strikes the Egyptian, killing him. Remember too how Moshe smashes the two tablets that contain the Ten Commandments when he saw the Israelites worshipping the golden calf, only weeks after they had left their slavery in Egypt. But this week’s temper tantrum has disastrous consequences for Moshe, and our sages have struggled to explain the severity of God’s punishment. Rashi argues that striking the rock rather than speaking to it diminished the greatness of the miracle because it made it seem as though it took more power than it did. Ramban looks at verse 10, “Shall we get water for you out of this rock?” and argues that that statement seems to be claiming that Moses and Aaron are taking credit for the miracle and not giving the credit where it is deserved, to God. Other scholars believe that Moshe’s sin started even earlier than when he struck the rock—that it began when he needed to be told that a miracle would occur rather than just having the faith that it would occur. And Maimonides maintains that Moshe’s sin lies in his name-calling - to Maimonides, his name calling which is really loshan hara - rebels! - means that Moses has lost patience with the people and therefore can no longer be a leader. If we accept that interpretation, then perhaps Moses’s failure to enter the Promised Land is less a punishment and more a recognition that this new generation needed new leaders, and that Moses and Aaron are physically and emotionally exhausted and can no longer lead. What distinguishes that one act of anger from the others we just mentioned - the killing of the taskmaster and the breaking of the tablets? Those two examples seem to flow from righteous indignation, they seem to be a response to a perceived injustice. The building of the golden calf, for example, was a direct violation of God’s will. But Moshe’s anger in today’s example seems only a result of extreme frustration and impatience, hardly qualities of a prophet. I remember reading recently that Abraham Lincoln had a terrible temper. I know that’s contrary to the stereotype, but he was a lot more complicated than people tend to think. In any case, Lincoln used to write incredibly angry letters to people who had let him down or failed to follow through on their commitments. But, unlike me and maybe some of you, what Lincoln did was he sealed the letter in an envelope, and even addressed it. But he NEVER SENT IT. That’s an understanding of the risks of expressing one’s anger. Today’s modern version is email - I know it used to be called “flaming” where people sent angry emails simply because it’s so easy to do that without looking someone right in the face. So easy to hit ‘send.’ Ben Zoma taught “Who is mighty? One who controls his impulses.” Every day we see examples of the destructive power of rage - road rage, domestic violence, horrific acts of terror. By the way, one reason anger grows to heat - and this was certainly true of me that time I mentioned - is that we do not share how we feel in the moment. When someone disappoints us or inadvertently insults us, we tend to keep it inside. We push it down, we wait, we chew on the wrong done to us. When we do so, the bitterness festers. It has to come out somehow, and, invariably, it comes out in destructive ways. But the Talmud tells us that we are allowed - actually, we are REQUIRED - to rebuke those who have done wrong. But the Talmud also provides very clear guidelines about how to rebuke that person - and here the goal is not only to educate the other person but also to clear the air. We must never heart in our hearts - lo tisneh ray’eha bilveveka; we must state the facts and not be overly emotional; we must not be judgmental or overly generalize. In fact, a person is judged, the Talmud says, by three things that in Hebrew sound like very similar words: kiso by his pocket (his generosity). KOSO, literally his cup but really his APPETITES, and V’KA’ASO, his anger. That we get angry is only human. How we express that anger is a reflection of our character. For every minute that we are angry, we lose sixty seconds of happiness that we might have had. Knowing when to get angry and how to turn anger into something constructive may be the best measure of our lies. This parsha is a reminder to take a breath, to have faith, to consider the world from someone else’s perspective. I’ll end with one other Lincoln story: at the end of the Civil War, there was tremendous pressure on Lincoln to execute the Confederate leaders. We’re told that a woman confronted Lincoln on this issue, saying to him, “President Lincoln, shouldn’t we eliminate our enemies?” Lincoln’s response was, “Madame, don’t we do so by making them our friends?” Let’s resolve to make a friend of an enemy; it may seem unselfish to do that, but it’s the best thing we can do FOR OURSELVES.
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Our Parshiyot these several weeks, including that of this week’s portion, Korach, narrate what life was like for the Israelites, as they wandered through the wilderness. We learn so many lessons in these narratives. Important cautionary tales teach us about the pitfalls of lashon hara and sibling rivalry.
The stories of miracle after miracle in the desert make clear to us God’s love for the Jewish people but also remind us of the sins of ingratitude. And we also learn, through the lesson of Moshe, invaluable lessons about leadership - not only what to do but also what not to do. I think we all have an image of a leader. A leader has a formal title - like President or Chair of the Board or General or Prime Minister or Chief Rabbi. We often associate leadership with symbols - epaulets and insignia and crowns, for example. And we know that leaders have power - even when leaders are disliked, no one can deny the power that they have. And when leaders lose their power, they are either forced out of their leadership positions or they themselves recognize that it’s time to step down. All that is pretty much common sense. But there is another kind of leadership, a kind of leadership that is less flashy and less formal. It is a leadership that operates through influence and not through power. These so-called “quiet leaders” may not have any formal authority, yet they can dramatically change the world. Elie Wiesel was such a leader. He was not a rabbi, not a president, not a king, and not a chair of the board. He was, simply put (and so understated), a survivor of the Holocaust. And he also changed the world. Rabbi Gerry Scolnick of the Forest Hills, Queens spiritual center described what his Hebrew education had been like: The Shoah was not at all on the curriculum of my Yeshiva education in the 1950’s and the 1960’s. Though some of my Jewish studies teachers had numbers on their arms, spoke with thick Polish accents and were clearly suffering from one version or another of PTSD, not a one of them ever even tried to educate us as to what they had gone through. I imagine it was a combination of the fact that they simply couldn’t – they weren’t yet able – and that those guiding our education were themselves unsure whether or not their experiences should be spoken of with young children. I think that Rabbi Scolnick’s experience was similar to so many of us growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. I know that my family personally knew many Holocaust survivors, but their experiences were never discussed - in fact, I remember that my parents, as enlightened as they were, referred to them as “refugees” A well-known book called Children of the Holocaust documents how much dysfunction there was in these families because they were unable and/or unwilling to discuss the horrors that preceded their lives in America. People were expected to move on, to start new lives, to forget the past. Elie Wiesel changed all that It might seem strange to refer to him as a ‘quiet leader’ because he was anything but quiet about the Shoah. His masterpiece Night and his many other written works struggled to find a language to describe what I think we would all agree is beyond description. His teaching and his public speaking all sought to give voice to those who had no voice, to those who could neither mourn nor be mourned. As Wiesel put it in his work One Generation After... “The truth [about the Shoah] will never be written. Like the Talmud, it will be transmitted from mouth to ear, from eye to eye. By its uniqueness, the holocaust defies literature.” Elie Wiesel was also a staunch defender of Israel, and he was eloquent in his responses to critics from both the left and the right. For Wiesel, Israel was the miracle that directly responded to the Shoah. Elie Wiesel had no official title but his influence was profound and lasting. He seemed in his speaking a fearless man, but I think that he had one fear, and that fear was the driving force for his life’s work. What was that fear? Writing in 1965, 25 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Wiesel expressed his fear that the lessons of the holocaust - indeed, the very existence of the holocaust - would be forgotten. “Soon,” he wrote, “there will be no one left to speak of them, no one left to listen.” God bless you, Elie Wiesel, because of you, I feel confident in predicting that those words will never be true. I saw Elie Wiesel several years ago in a little Orthodox shul in New York City. He was dancing in the center of the bimah, one of a number of older Jewish men who were celebrating the birth of Weisel’s grandson. Someone else did the sermon, someone else read the Torah, someone else chanted the haftorah. Wiesel was simply present, dancing and celebrating and accepting the many mazel tovs of the other congregants. So, there’s another lesson that this brilliant man has left for us: we learn from Elie Wiesel that no one can or should remain a victim, or only a victim. We learn that we can find, even when the days seem darkest, reasons to celebrate. This week’s Torah Reading tells of Moshe’s sending twelve spies into the Holy Land to reconnoiter. Moshe chose qualified leaders to be the spies, telling them what to do.
Unfortunately, Bnei Yisrael and the spies themselves questioned Hashem’s word. Rashi in Devarim states that had they not questioned God’s statement about the Promised Land, the people could have possibly entered Eretz Yisrael without fighting. Lives of many people, including many tens of thousands of Canaanites, as well as the entire generation that left Egypt, would have been spared. One sin leads to another. When the sin involved is a lack of faith, that sin weakens the very foundation of the structure of the religion and the relationship between Bnei Yisrael and Hashem. The text tells us that the spies ascended into the Negev desert area and then he came to Chevron. The obvious question is why the verb changed from plural to singular in the text. All the spies came to the Promised Land but only one of them went to Chevron, and that one, according to the Gemara (Sotah 34b) was Calev. In that Talmudic reference Rava teaches us that Calev departed from the body of spies and went to pray at the patriarchal graves so that he would be saved from the evil counsel of the spies. The essential teaching of Rava’s statement is that it is possible for one individual to stand up and be against the current when the majority of people are going in the wrong direction. Swimming against the current is a very difficult thing to do. There is no question that Calev was seeking divine inspiration and strength from his ancestry in order to fight the majority. The usage of the ancestors here is quite appropriate. Not just because we have a concept of the merits of the ancestors, but also because each of our patriarchs swam against the current. Nobody else had an idea of monotheism at that time. They went against the grain of society. That is why they were called Ivrim. They came from the other side of the river. They truly stood out and chartered their own course in life. The statement here that the rabbis are teaching us is not only to compliment Calev but also to teach us a lesson that it is necessary for the Jewish people to stand up frequently and chart a course of life contrary to the mainstream. The sin of the spies was one of speaking ill of the land, of Lashon HaRah. It is prohibited to speak Lashon HaRah, evil speech, against anybody. It is also prohibited to speak Lashon HaRah about yourself; and in the context of our parsha, to speak Lashon HaRah about Eretz Yisrael. This week’s parsha, Beha’alotcha begins with the sentence, “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to Aaron and say to him, when you mount the lamps, let the seven lamps give light at the front of the lampstand.’”
We know how important the menorah is to Judaism, perhaps the best-known symbol of Judaism. And here God is commanding the construction of the menorah, apparently so complicated that God has to SHOW Moshe what it will eventually look like. The beginning of this Torah portion is read twice a year, for this week, and on the last day of Hanukkah. The haftarah is also done twice a year, this week and on the Shabbat of Hanukkah. Both speak of the lighting of a seven branched lampstand or menorah. (This is different from the lampstand we use on Hanukkah, which has nine branches.) It was the responsibility of the priests to keep the lamps lit at all times. Light is a powerful metaphor used not only in Judaism but in many other spiritual traditions. And even in the secular world, we can think of words like enLIGHTENment or the phrase “I see the light.” Think about that visual metaphor we see so often in cartoons where the main character is shown with a light bulb going off over his head. We all know that that person just got an idea. In the world of religion, Light can be a metaphor for God, spirit, the soul, the mind, or even human consciousness. The book of Proverbs teaches that “the soul of man is the light of God.” We recall God’s creation of the world, where in the third verse of Breishit, God says “Let there be light,” and He separates the light from the darkness - because the Light , as God pronounces, is good. We separate Shabbat from the rest of the week through the lighting of candles. And the Torah is seen as its own kind of light. Our sages tell us that every word in the Torah shines like a Light . What an act of love it must have been for God to give Aaron this awesome responsibility. |
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