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Shabbat Chukat July 12, 2024
Last Shabbat, I jokingly said I’d save politics at least until my second week on the job. And while normally, I’d wait a bit longer before diving into such a contentious topic until we got to know one another a little better, I just couldn’t resist, given the serendipitous convergence of the American political moment and this week’s parashah, Chukat.
This week’s portion marks a turning point in the story of the Israelite people. After nearly 40 years of wandering in the desert, the generation that left Egypt has all died. Our portion describes the deaths of both of Moses’s siblings, Miriam and Aaron, and the ordination of Aaron’s son Eleazar as the new High Priest. It is a time of loss and transition. But the most significant and dramatic part of the story focuses on Moses. I’ll set the scene.
Miriam has just died and the Israelites have no water. They complain bitterly to Moses, as usual, blaming him for their tzuris and asking why he even brought them out of Egypt just to die in the wilderness. As on numerous other occasions, Moses appeals to God, who provides for the needs of the community through a miracle. God says, “‘You and your brother Aaron take the rod and assemble the community, and before their very eyes order the rock to yield its water. Thus you shall produce water for them from the rock and provide drink for the congregation and their beasts.’ Moses took the rod from before ‘ה, as he had been commanded” (Num. 20:8-9).
This time, though, things go awry. We read, “Moses and Aaron assembled the congregation in front of the rock; and he said to them, ‘Listen, you rebels, shall we get water for you out of this rock?’ And Moses raised his hand and struck the rock twice with his rod. Out came copious water, and the community and their beasts drank” (20:10-11).
We immediately see the consequences of Moses’s act. “But ‘ה said to Moses and Aaron, ‘Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, therefore you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them’” (20:12).
After defying Pharaoh and ushering in ten plagues and one sea-splitting, followed by 38 years of leading an ungrateful, grumbling people through the wilderness, Moses is told that he won’t get to enter the Promised Land. It is a crushing punishment for a single moment in Moses’s long term of leadership of the Israelites. It is crushing especially because we don’t exactly know what Moses’s sin was. Over the past 1500 years, various scholars have offered numerous possibilities. We won’t go through them all, but here are some highlights: Rashi suggests that Moses’s sin was striking the rock instead of speaking to it. Maimonides says it was Moses’s anger at the people, calling them “rebels,” that was the problem. Nachmanides thinks the issue was in saying “shall we bring forth water,” implying that he and Aaron had the power, rather than God. Some modern commentators suggest that Moses must have done something really terrible that the Torah has chosen to omit, which is the real sin that merits such a harsh punishment. But the interpretation that speaks to me this week, and that speaks to our political situation, comes from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who was the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain. Here’s what he says:
“The remarkable fact about Moses and the rock is the way he observes precedent. Almost forty years earlier, in similar circumstances, God had told him to take his staff and strike the rock. Now too, God told him to take his staff. Evidently Moses inferred that he was being told to act this time as he had before, which is what he does. He strikes the rock. What he failed to understand was that time had changed in one essential detail. He was facing a new generation. The people he confronted the first time were those who had spent much of their lives as slaves in Egypt. Those he now faced were born in freedom in the wilderness…. What Moses failed to hear - indeed to understand - was that the difference between God's command then and now ("strike the rock" and "speak to the rock") was of the essence. The symbolism in each case was precisely calibrated to the mentalities of two different generations. You strike a slave, but speak to a free person.
Moses' inability to hear this distinction was not a failing, still less was it a sin. It was an inescapable consequence of the fact that he was mortal. A figure capable of leading slaves to freedom is not the same as one able to lead free human beings from a nomadic existence in the wilderness to the conquest and settlement of a land. These are different challenges, and they need different types of leadership…. The fact that at a moment of crisis Moses reverted to an act that had been appropriate forty years before showed that time had come for the leadership to be handed on to a new generation.”
When Moses strikes the rock, whether it is out of a lack of faith, anger, or just inattention to God’s command, what becomes clear is that it is time for someone else to lead. The Lord Almighty literally tells him so! “You’re not up to the task, Moses. Someone else needs to lead this generation.” Rabbi Sacks insists that Moses having to hand over his leadership of the people isn’t a punishment; it’s a necessary requirement of being human.
What happens next? The story quickly turns to another incident involving the king of Edom, so we have no idea how Moses and Aaron react to the news. But a few chapters later, when God reminds Moses that he won’t be going into the Land, Moses asks God to appoint another leader “so that ‘ה’s community may not be like sheep that have no shepherd” (Num. 27:17). God selects Joshua, and Moses lays his hands on Joshua to ordain him in the sight of all the people. Moses gives his blessing and his endorsement to Joshua, ensuring that the people will accept Joshua’s authority.
Moses is wonderfully, painfully human throughout this ordeal. He does the right thing, handing over power to Joshua and accepting that his time of leadership is ending. But he is not happy about it. In Deuteronomy, he lashes out at the Israelites, blaming them for his predicament. “I pleaded with ‘ה at that time, saying… ‘Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan….’ But ‘ה was wrathful with me on your account and would not listen to me.” (Deut. 3:22-26). In the midrash collection Tanchuma, written several centuries after the Torah, the rabbis imagine a long, wrenching argument between God and Moses. Moses reasons, bargains, guilt-trips, and begs almost until his dying breath for God to reconsider and let him enter the Land of Israel. But in the end, God stands firm, and Moses finally accepts his fate with dignity and grace.
I know we don’t live in the world of the Torah, and I know that our portion doesn’t address the complicated political issues of our day. It would be simpler if we could count on God to tell us who the next president should be (and even more miraculous if we actually listened to God and followed Their directions). But our parashah does speak to us now, reminding us of these essential, eternal truths: Aging is inevitable, mortality is inescapable, and those are difficult truths to contemplate, whether you’re the President of the United States or any one of us here tonight. Knowing this, we should have compassion for those who are struggling. Moses had trouble facing those facts, and he got to live to be 120! Moses teaches us that leadership isn’t about being – or pretending to be – immortal or infallible. It’s about knowing our strengths and accepting our limits. Most of all, it’s about putting the well-being of the community above everything else. Moses was a leader par excellence. May our leaders follow in his footsteps.