Sacks
Civil Disobedience
“The Torah’s ambiguity on this point is deliberate. We do not know to which people Shifra and Puah belonged because their particular form of moral courage transcends nationality and race. In essence, they were being asked to commit a “crime against humanity,” and they refused to do so. Theirs is a story that deserves to be set in its full historical perspective.”
“One of the landmarks of modern international law was the judgement against Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg trials of 1946. This established that there are certain crimes in relation to which the claim that “I was obeying orders” is no defence. There are moral laws higher than those of the state”
“At stake in the principle of civil disobedience is a theory of the moral limits of the state.”
“When God tells Moses to say to Pharaoh, “My son, My firstborn, Israel” (4:22), He is announcing to the most powerful ruler of the ancient world that these people may be your slaves but they are My children. The story of the exodus is as much political as theological. Theologically, the plagues showed that the Creator of nature is supreme over the forces of nature. Politically it declared that over every human power stands the sovereignty of God, defender and guarantor of the rights of humankind.”
The Light at the Heart of Darkness
“Indeed Moshe – Meses – is an Egyptian name, meaning “child,” as in Ramses (which means child of Ra; Ra was the greatest of the Egyptian gods).”
“That the Torah itself tells the story the way it does has enormous implications. It means that when it comes to people, we must never generalize, never stereotype. The Egyptians were not all evil: even from Pharaoh himself a heroine was born. Nothing could signal more powerfully that the Torah is not an ethnocentric text; that we must recognise virtue wherever we find it, even among our enemies; and that the basic core of human values – humanity, compassion, courage – is truly universal. Holiness may not be; goodness is.”
The Belief of a Leader
“Moses replied: “But they will not believe me. They will not listen to me. They will say, ‘God did not appear to you.’(Exodus 4:1)
The sages, ultra-sensitive to nuances in the text, noticed two important features of this response. The first is that God had already told Moses, “They will listen to you” (3:18). Moses’ reply seems to contradict God’s prior assurance.”
“The second detail is that, whereas Moses’ other refusals focused on his own sense of inadequacy, here he speaks not about himself but about the people. They will not believe him.”
“The rabbis put these two details together and connected them to an anomaly in the signs that God gave Moses to authenticate his mission. The first (the staff that turns into a snake) and third (the water that turned into blood) reappear later in the story; they are signs that Moses and Aaron perform not only for the Israelites but also for the Egyptians. The second, however, is never actually used at all. God tells Moses to put his hand in his cloak. When he takes it out he sees that it has become “leprous as snow” (4:6). What is the significance of this particular sign, in view of the fact that it is never used? The sages recalled that later, Miriam was punished with leprosy for speaking negatively about Moses (Numbers 12:10). In general they understood leprosy as a punishment for lashon hara, derogatory speech. Had Moses, perhaps, been guilty of the same sin? Was this sign actually a rebuke?”
“This is an extraordinary passage. Moses, it now becomes clear, was entitled to have doubts about his own worthiness for the task. What he was not entitled to do was to have doubts about the people. In fact, his doubts were amply justified. The people were fractious. Moses calls them a “stiff-necked people.” Time and again during the wilderness years they complained, sinned, and wanted to return to Egypt. Moses was not wrong in his estimate of their character. Yet God reprimanded him; indeed punished him, by making his hand leprous. A fundamental principle of Jewish leadership is intimated here for the first time: a leader does not need faith in himself, but he must have faith in the people he is to lead.”
“That, according to the sages, was what God was teaching Moses: What matters is not whether they believe in you, but whether you believe in them. Unless you believe in them, you cannot lead in the way a prophet must lead. You must identify with them and have faith in them, seeing not only their surface faults but also their underlying virtues. Otherwise, you will be no better than a detached intellectual – and that is the beginning of the end. If you do not believe in the people, eventually you will not even believe in God. You will think yourself superior to them, and that is a corruption of the soul.”
“Who is a leader? To this, the Jewish answer is, one who identifies with his or her people, mindful of their faults, to be sure, but convinced also of their potential greatness and their preciousness in the sight of God. In effect, God said to Moses: Those people of whom you have doubts are believers, the children of believers. They are My people, and they are your people. Just as you believe in Me, so you must believe in them.”
Of What was Moses Afraid?
“It was just this of which Moses was afraid. If he could “look at the face of God,” if he could understand history from the perspective of heaven, he would have to make his peace with the suffering of human beings. He would know why pain here was necessary for gain there; why bad now was essential to good later on. He would understand the ultimate justice of history.
That is what Moses refused to do, because the price of such knowledge is simply too high. He would have understood the course of history from the vantage point of God, but only at the cost of ceasing to be human. How could he still be moved by the cry of slaves, the anguish of the oppressed, if he understood its place in the scheme of things, if he knew that it was necessary in the long run? Such knowledge is divine, not human – and to have it means saying goodbye to our most human instincts: compassion, sympathy, identification with the plight of the innocent, the wronged, the afflicted and oppressed. If to “look at the face of God” is to understand why suffering is sometimes necessary, then Moses was[…]”
“It is an astonishing volte-face. Better the protests of Job than the acceptance of fate on the part of his friends. Yes, there is an ultimate justice in the affairs of mankind. But we may not aspire to such knowledge – not because we cannot (because, being human, our minds are too limited, our horizons too short) but because we morally must not, for we would then accept evil and not fight against it. God wants us to be human, not divine. He seeks our protest against evil, our passion for justice, our refusal to come to terms with a world in which the innocent suffer and the evil have power”
Excerpt From
Covenent & Conversation
Jonathan Sacks
Torah portion by portion
“The second book of the Torah is Exodus, from the Greek word for “going out”. In Hebrew it is called Shemot or “Names”. It starts by listing the names of Jacob’s sons, the tribes of Israel. Joseph had died, the Hebrews had many children, and in time there was a Pharaoh who did not remember the good Joseph had done for Egypt.”
“Remembering and forgetting are important road signs in the Torah. Good things happen when God and human beings remember promises and vows. But bad things happen when people forget promises and vows. Joseph’s Pharaoh remembered. He lived up to all the promises he made to Joseph. In this portion we read about a new king who forgot Joseph and forgot all the promises made to Joseph. Bad things began to happen.”
“This portion is called Shemot, “names”, and one interesting name is “Moses”. By the time the story was written down, few Israelites could speak the Egyptian language. So the Torah explained the name with a word-play, saying that Mosheh came from the Hebrew word mashach, meaning “take out from”. The two words are different, but they sounded alike enough to make this a very popular little pun.
Still, the Egyptian princess who named Moses probably knew less Hebrew than you do, so Moses was surely not a Hebrew name. In Egyptian, “moses” means “child of” and is normally joined to the name of an Egyptian god to make a complete name. For instance, “Tutmose(s)” means “child of [the god] Tut” and “Rameses” means “child of [the god] Ra”. So something is definitely missing in Moses’ name! Where is the name of a god that it should begin with? Perhaps it was meant to be this way: the name Moses may mean “child of [the invisible God]”. Giving Moses a half-name that points to the God of the Hebrews may even have been a way of poking fun at the gods of the Egyptians.”
“Before the burning bush story, some Torah stories use only the names El or Elohim (we translate both as “God”). Other stories use only the name YHVH (which we translate as “Adonai”). Only once, in one creation story, God’s name was given as YHVH-Elohim. After the burning bush story the names—El, Elohim and YHVH—are used together, anywhere and any time.
There are many ideas about why this happens. One idea is that only some of the Hebrew tribes were slaves in Egypt. Leaving Egypt, they entered Sinai and wandered in the wilderness until they joined with the Hebrew tribes that had never left Canaan. The tribes in Canaan knew many stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—they knew their God by the name El or Elohim. The tribes coming from Egypt knew their God by the name YHVH. The Torah uses the story of the burning bush to inform all the tribes—the ones who were in Egypt and the ones who stayed in Canaan—that El, Elohim, and YHVH are all names of the One God. Another idea is that our Torah stories are based on even older stories. One of these old stories—the[…]”
Excerpt From
The Torah: Portion-by-Portion
Seymour Rossel
HELD
Why Moses?
What sets Moses apart is that he does not merely recognize oppression; he also acts unflinchingly to bring it to an end.”
“The Torah wants us to know that Moses is not just offended by injustices perpetrated against his own people. Moses also defends foreigners and strangers, and “his passion for justice makes no distinctions between nations.”
“Asked why he, a man, should be so ardently involved in the struggle for women’s dignity, Douglass explained: “When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.”
“what both Moses and Frederick Douglass intuitively understood is that for all the profound importance of ethnic solidarity, a wider human solidarity is also fundamental. One cannot lead this particular people without a concern for justice for all people(s).”
“Not only must a leader take offense at injustice and act accordingly, in other words; he must also have compassion and act accordingly. Real compassion is not just an emotion—Moses does not just “feel bad” for the kid; real compassion is a weave of emotion and action. God’s appointed leader does not merely feel for others. He acts decisively to alleviate their pain”
Gratitude and Liberation
“When God is revealed at Mount Sinai, it is not as Creator of heaven and earth but as the “God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage” (Exod. 20:2; Deut. 5:6). And when the Torah demands that the Israelites take care not to oppress the stranger, they are repeatedly reminded why: “For you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exod. 23:9).
And yet in some Jewish sources, the story takes on a seemingly very different hue. A narrative of subjugation and deliverance becomes, of all things, a tale of gratitude and ingratitude”
“When the Torah tells us that Pharaoh did not “know” Joseph, in other words, it means to suggest not that Pharaoh was unacquainted with Joseph, but rather that he did not acknowledge Joseph and the great debt that Egypt as a whole, and Pharaoh in particular, owed him.”
“At bottom ingratitude reflects an inability—or perhaps an unwillingness—to acknowledge our dependence on, and our indebtedness to, anything or anyone beyond ourselves. To be ungrateful is to be unable—or again perhaps just unwilling—to acknowledge other people, past or present, who have made our lives possible;”
“When Moses refuses to go to Egypt before he secures Jethro’s permission, he is not just fulfilling a personal obligation—though he is surely also doing that. He is tacitly saying: It would be inappropriate for me to lead the Israelites out of this bastion of ingratitude by first behaving like an ingrate myself. I am going to model a radically different way of living; I am going to lead like the anti-Pharaoh and model what a life of gratitude could look like.
This may be precisely why God chooses Moses to lead the Israelites in the first place: In the end only a person who truly understands and embodies the quality of gratitude can lead the slaves out of Egypt, an abyss of cruelty fueled by pervasive ingratitude. God’s hope, then, is not just that the Israelites will leave the political oppressions of Egypt, but also that they will leave behind the culture that makes such oppression possible—and for that they need a leader who embodies a life oriented by gratitude.”
“Leaving a place of ingratitude is leaving a place of enslavement in another crucial sense as well. It is not just that those who are devoid of gratitude may feel license to dehumanize others, but also that ingratitude itself constitutes a kind of prison. If we refuse to be grateful, we close ourselves off from the possibility of real relationship and connection to others. To be ungrateful is to be stuck inside ourselves, to be shackled in a prison of our own making; it is like living in a form of solitary confinement.
Conversely to be grateful is a powerful manifestation of freedom—the freedom to live a life infused by mutuality and reciprocity. In allowing ourselves to be grateful, we free ourselves from the prison of our own self-enclosure and become available to meet and be met by others.”
Excerpt From
The Heart of Torah, Volume 1
Shai Held
Mens Torah
“Moreover, Moses responds in this quintessentially masculine way precisely because there is no one else there to defend the hapless Hebrew. His turning “this way and that” is not because he is avoiding detection; it is simply because, as the text tells us, ki ein ish, literally, “there was no man.” In fact, Rashi explains that he is looking for other “men” who could adjudicate the struggle between the Egyptian and the Israelite. Moses isn’t looking to see if there are any potential witnesses to his act of defense; he is looking to see if there are any other people around to whom he could make a moral appeal. But he is alone—radically alone. At this moment, Moses knows that he has to be the man, anticipating by a millennium the words of the sage Hillel, “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man”
Excerpt From
The Modern Men's Torah Commentary
Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=1133756397
This material may be protected by copyright.
A Year with the Sages
“Akiva enlarges this conception to teach that in every exile, including the current one of his time, God’s Presence, the Shekhinah, accompanies Israel into exile and returns only when Israel returns. Thus, with no explanation of how this can be, and with the caveat that this can be said only because it is written in the Bible, Akiva contends that God is a suffering God, God is enslaved and in exile, and when we celebrate our redemption, as we do at Passover, we are actually celebrating God’s redemption as well. “Said Rabbi Meir: The redemption is Mine and yours. As it were I was freed together with you!” (Exodus Rabbah 15:12).”
“Rather, by God’s suffering he means that God identifies so closely with those who suffer that it is as if God were suffering. God feels our pain and is relieved and redeemed only when we are.
From Akiva’s understanding, when suffering comes upon us, we need not believe that it is God’s doing or that it represents God’s will. We may not be able to explain why the good suffer and we may not be able to answer the question, Why did God permit this? but we can assert that God identifies with those who suffer.”
“Theologically, Tisha b’Av has a very different answer to the question, Why did this happen to the Jewish people? The destruction of the Temple was God’s punishment for the sins of the people. The prophetic teachings and even sections of the Torah that speak of God’s forthcoming punishment as a result of disobedience are completely clear on the matter. And so, to merge the Jewish people’s commemoration of the Shoah with Tisha b’Av would be to say that the Shoah too was a punishment that reflected God’s will. This idea is in fact still found in the writings of certain extremist groups who point the finger at Zionism, secularism, or even non-Orthodox forms of Judaism as inducing God to punish European Jewry. I find the idea repulsive and insulting—insulting to God and insulting to the millions who perished.”
“As my teacher Prof. Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “History is the arena in which the will of God is defied.” The Holocaust was not God’s punishment of the Jews; it was the result of human beings defying God’s rules and God’s will. Indeed, “in all their troubles He was troubled.”
Excerpt From
A Year with the Sages
Reuven Hammer
Alter Five Books of Moses
“It should be noted that the dominant Hebrew tradition assigns names to each of the Five Books of Moses based on the first significant word in the text, and so this book is called Shemot, “Names.” The English tradition of titles follows the Greek practice, which is to use topical names, hence Exodus”
“but Joseph was in Egypt. The particle waw, which usually means “and,” either is the indication of a pluperfect or, as here, has an adversative sense when it is followed by the subject and then a perfective verb (instead of the normal imperfective verb in initial position and then the subject).”
“Moses. This is an authentic Egyptian name meaning “the one who is born,” and hence “son.” The folk etymology relates it to the Hebrew verb mashah, “to draw out from water.” Perhaps the active form of the verb used for the name mosheh, “he who draws out,” is meant to align the naming with Moses’s future destiny of rescuing his people from the water of the Sea of Reeds.”
“thing. The Hebrew davar variously means “word,” “thing,” “matter,” “affair,” and much else.”
“The last of these terms marks the end of the narrative segment with a certain mystifying note—sufficiently mystifying that the ancient Greek translators sought to “correct” it—because it has no object. “God knew,” but what did He know? Presumably, the suffering of the Israelites, the cruel oppression of history in which they are now implicated, the obligations of the covenant with the patriarchs, and the plan He must undertake to liberate the enslaved people. And so the objectless verb prepares us for the divine address from the burning bush and the beginning of Moses’s mission.”
“Jethro. In the previous episode he was Reuel. Modern critics generally attribute the difference in names to different literary sources.”
“But Pharaoh is presumably manifesting his own character: callousness, resistance to instruction, and arrogance would all be implied by the toughening of the heart. God is not so much pulling a marionette’s strings as allowing, or perhaps encouraging, the oppressor-king to persist in his habitual harsh willfulness and presumption”
Excerpt From
The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary
Robert Alter
Reuben - Kaplan
“Before Moses is able to experience God’s presence, he has to be open enough to recognize the sacred in the ordinary, to believe that a simple bush burning in the wilderness could contain the deepest mysteries of the universe, and from there to hear the voice of divinity speaking from that bush aflame on a mountain. ”
“As far as Jewish religion, with its teachings and rituals, is concerned, it matters very little how we conceive God, as long as we so believe in God that belief in Him makes a tremendous difference in our lives.
Here Kaplan gives expression to one of his most powerful ideas: Our individual conceptions of God are not very important in and of themselves. What matters is that our particular understanding of God is functional for us in a meaningful way—making a real difference in our personal and professional relationships, and in how we feel compelled to engage in and affect the world at large. For our conception of God to really matter, it must inspire us to be better human beings, better spouses, partners, parents, children, friends, colleagues, leaders, and participants in our ongoing sacred task as co-partners with God in completing the work of creation.”
Excerpt From
A Year with Mordecai Kaplan
Steven Carr Reuben