Mindfulness in Conflict

AMAZING INSENTIENCE
One particularly poignant moment of this kind comes toward the end when he reproaches the people, “God has not given you a heart to know, or eyes to see, or ears to hear, until this day” (Deut. 29:3).

If he finds it inconceivable to hold this people in the way that he imagines God wants him to do, that is a direct effect of his own earliest history. “Who am I?” becomes a burning question. And when at the end of his life he recognizes a radical deficit in his people, perhaps at the same time he recognizes the ways in which he has not fully held them (“This day I understand that you passionately desire God!”). If they have not developed a certain emotional knowing, perhaps this is both a reflection of his own history and a partial effect of it?

But when Moses last addresses the people before the Covenant, he seems to imply that now, “on this day,” they have finally developed a knowing heart, seeing eyes, and hearing ears—and that he has developed a new understanding of them. Perhaps this moment also marks a development in himself as leader and nurturer?

But this story, which brings to light Moses’ present understanding of himself—“Who am I?”—is composed in the moment of “rebuke.” The rebuke reveals more than perhaps he knows—not only a critique of the people, but a wounded sense of himself. Before Moses voices the critique—in this midrashic version—it is only implicit within the words of the Torah. Now, Moses’ speeches reveal, from between the lines of the Torah, a history of unrequited love and grievance. The people have been heartless, blind, and deaf to the implicit meanings of the story. If they had had a heart to know, they might have put this story together for themselves; they might have understood the ethical demand it made on them to pray for Moses.

This kind of address, as “rebuke,” involves the speaker in bringing his own life into full, vulnerable presence. Tochacha (rebuke) is related to nocheach—being present. In the first person, Moses is present before the people: surrendering his own interests for theirs, ironically comparing the ratios of 1 for 600,000 and 600,000 for 1. If he is to reach them in the singular mode of tochacha, he must bring the concentrated force of his own history, of his emotional presence, to bear on them.

For the first time, he exposes to the people a voice that, in a sense, undermines its own authority. This kind of speech is not that of a master. His knowledge is not in possession of itself. His testimony to the people calls on them to hear him and his unconscious knowledge in a new way: “One does not have to possess or own the truth, in order to effectively bear witness to it.”

He surrenders the posture of privileged messenger, speaking in God’s name. Now, he speaks without himself exhausting the meaning of his words. Through these final speeches there runs a powerful current, connecting moments. He tells the story of his thwarted prayer—“Let me cross over . . .”; he speaks repeatedly of the fact he is not crossing over, while his audience is crossing over; he says, “God has not given you a heart to know, eyes to see, ears to hear . . .” In sensing the current between such moments, the midrash spins the thread of Moses’ unconscious knowledge. The people listen silently, listen with a difference, as unspoken parts of his intimate experience emerge: sacrificial love, anger, disappointment, reproach.

Here is the paradox: the poem is essentially dialogue, but it is lonely, not greatly hopeful, yet still hopeful of a hearing. “Hear o Israel . . . !” As poet-storyteller, Moses yields his authority and unappeasably seeks out “heartland” for his poem: “I on the way to myself.” He invites his people to a new kind of listening, and seeing, and knowing.

He presents himself to them—Hineni—without omniscience or omnipotence, but with the trust that he is indeed a character in the narrative. Perhaps this is why the Torah calls him “the most humble man (anav) on the face of the earth” (Num. 12:3). Perhaps Moses’ anava is precisely this deep knowledge of being haunted by history as well as mysteriously attuned to the call of the Other.