Moses’s personal struggles enable him to summon the strength despite his initial unwillingness.
By DAVID WOLPETHE PARTING of the Red Sea during the Jewish nation’s escape from Egypt, an illustration from a Bible card published 1907 by the Providence Lithograph Company(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
In his essay on Sophocles’s play Philoctetes, “The Wound and the Bow,” Edmund Wilson writes, “One feels in the Philoctetes a more general and fundamental idea: the conception of superior strength as inseparable from disability.”Thomas Mann attributes Dostoevsky’s creativity in large part to his epilepsy, Abraham Lincoln’s leadership has often been viewed as forged while battling depression, and the Midrash puts it very simply: “If a person uses broken vessels, it is an embarrassment, but God seeks out broken vessels for His use” (Lev. Raba 7:2). The hero is almost always one who has won battles inside himself or herself before struggling in the world.When we ask why God chose Moses to be the premier prophet of our tradition, one might point to early incidents in his life: saving an Israelite from an Egyptian taskmaster, intervening in quarrels between Israelites, defending the daughters of Jethro – an activism and vigor that presage his later actions.But deeper perhaps than his talent were his trials: a child born under the sign of death, taken away from the home in which he would have naturally been raised, and contending with a speech impediment; a man who, in fear of his life, had to run to another country. God chose a broken vessel.When God approaches Moses for the first time, God’s self-identification is “I am the God of your fathers.” We remember that Moses has grown up separated from his own father. This man, who will have to be father and mother to Israel, did not have the experience of being parented on his own. (Yes, mother as well: remember Numbers 11:12, when Moses says to God, “Did I conceive this people, did I bear them, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom as a wet nurse carries an infant?’”)Moses’s personal struggles enable him to summon the strength despite his initial unwillingness. Moses suffered serial difficulties and isolations. Taking on a destiny he did not want, he is betrayed by his own brother and sister (who both gossip about him and, in Aaron’s case, help to build the golden calf), is constantly battled by the people, faces a full-scale rebellion and is ultimately barred from the land by God. The man who led Israel to the Promised Land will see it but never enter it.A lesser man would have collapsed under one or another of these misfortunes. The same Moses who shrank from facing Pharaoh, once irrevocably charged with the task, let nothing intimidate or defeat him.The basket in which Moses is carried is called a teiva, a word used twice in the Bible, first for Noah’s boat and then for Moses’s basket. One carried a physical salvation of the earth and the other a spiritual salvation. In each case a devastation was occurring outside the teiva; the occupant would have to survive and rebuild.When Pharaoh’s daughter approaches the teiva on the Nile, we are told, “she saw a child crying.” Not heard but saw. The rabbis tell us that Moses’s cry was “shut up in the depths of his heart.” Stricken from the start, unable to cry out, Moses from infancy had both the wound and the bow, the pain and the strength. In order to bring God’s word to the world, Moses would have to model for his people the gift of grit, the blessing of overcoming.In Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful, South African author Alan Paton tells the following story: “When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, Where are your wounds? and if I say I haven’t any, he will say, Was there nothing to fight for?”
In Moses, God chose someone who knew there was something to fight for, and had the wounds to prove it.The writer is Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and the author of David the Divided Heart. On Twitter: @rabbiwolpe.
