JOSHUA DID AS MOSES HAD TOLD HIM, TO FIGHT AGAINST AMALEK; AND MOSES, AARON, AND HUR ASCENDED TO THE TOP OF THE HILL.

IT CAME TO PASS THAT WHEN MOSES WOULD RAISE HIS HAND, ISRAEL WOULD PREVAIL, AND WHEN HE WOULD LAY DOWN HIS HAND, AMALEK WOULD PREVAIL.

NOW MOSES' HANDS WERE HEAVY; SO THEY TOOK A STONE AND PLACED IT UNDER HIM, AND HE SAT ON IT. AARON AND HUR SUPPORTED HIS HANDS, ONE FROM THIS [SIDE], AND ONE FROM THAT [SIDE]; SO HE WAS WITH HIS HANDS IN FAITH UNTIL SUNSET.

(Shemot 17:10-12)

 

A True Leader Feels his People's Suffering and Identifies with Them

When the public is burdened with sorrow do not say: "I shall go to my home and eat and drink, and I shall be at peace." If he does do this, Scripture says of him: And behold, joy and happiness, slaying cattle and slaughtering sheep, eating meat and drinking wine; "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we will die." (Isaiah 22).

What is written next? And it was revealed in My ears, the Lord of Hosts; [I, therefore, swear] that this iniquity shall not be atoned for you until you die.

So far regarding those of moderate character, but of the [truly] wicked it says: Come, I will take wine, and let us guzzle old wine, and tomorrow shall be like this, [but] greater [and] much more" (Isaiah 56).

What is written next? The righteous man has perished, but no one takes it to heart, and men of kindness are taken away, with no one understanding that because of the evil the righteous man has been taken away.

Rather: A person should join the public in its sorrow. Thus, we find that Moses joined in the public's sorrow, for it says and Moses' hands were heavy and they took a rock and placed it under him and he sat on it (Shemot 17). Could it have been that Moses did not have a single cushion or a single chair to sit on? Rather, Moses said the following: "Since Israel are in sorrow, I too shall join them in sorrow." And anyone who joins in the public's sorrow - will find merit and see the public's consolation.

(Ta'anit 11a)

 

The Sound of Crying Out and the Sound of Song

Menachem Klein

The parasha is full of surprising reversals. The Israelites are expelled from Egypt and turn on their heels; they stand before the danger of drowning in the sea, of hunger and thirst - and they are miraculously saved. The national mood changes quickly from depression to elation and back to complaining and continuing lack of faith in God. The slaves who have just been freed are deemed incapable of facing the Philistines: God did not lead them [by] way of the land of the Philistines for it was near, because God said, "Lest the people reconsider when they see war and return to Egypt," and yet they are successful in battle against Amalek. What can we learn from these reversals and contrasts?

This week's parasha is multi-vocal. These voices appear and reappear throughout the parasha. Of course, the parasha's dominant voice is that of the masculine Song of the Sea and the accompanying women's singing. This is a public song of thanksgiving, a song of togetherness. It is the song of a choir in which order and harmony are preserved. Then sang Moses and the children of Israel - the verb sang appears in the singular.

However, other strident voices are heard in the parasha. In contrast to the Song of the Sea's unusual unity - the one-time voice of response to the miracle of the splitting of the Red Sea - the parasha presents the recurring voice that arises from the throats of sons and daughters of Israel. The usual, everyday voice of the Israelites shouts and protests, it is a voice of complaint, rebellious and demanding. And the Children of Israel cried out - the crying out is described in the plural in order to express the mix of protesting and shouting voices. And the people complained, and the entire community of the Children of Israel complained - these also use the plural form of the verb. Things come to such a pass that Moses himself cries out, whether we understood him as joining in the people's outcry or as merely passing on the people's outcry to God's ears. And the Lord said to Moses: "Why do you cry to me?"; And the people complained to Moses, saying: "What shall we drink?" And he cried to the Lord. And Moses cried to the Lord, saying, "What shall I do with this people? Soon they will stone me!"

When the Israelites were caught in a vise between Pharaoh's army and the sea, they cried out of their grave crisis - and receive an order to be silent. The Lord will fight for you, and you shall be quiet. But the people did not fall silent. They sang the Song of the Sea. It was precisely out of the silence which united them and ended their shouting that there arose the unusual event of their singing in unison.

One does not sing in daily life. Usually, the Israelites related to their leaders by way of complaint, grumbling, and shouts. Moses points this out repeatedly while rebuking the people in the book of Devarim. In contrast, the Torah presents God as one who speaks or talks. God always speaks, and He commands Moses to speak instead of crying out. And the Lord spoke to Moses: "Why do you cry out to Me? Speak to the Israelites..." Despite the cries of Moses and the Israelites, God answers them and relates to their troubles. It is precisely against the background of their cries that God's speech to them and concern for them becomes salient. There is a flow and a connection between cries and speech, between grumbling and response, between the harmonious song and the everyday cacophony of voices.

The parasha deals with another line of tension; the tension between water and earth and between sea and land. The waters of the Red Sea threaten to drown the Israelites, and the safety of dry land is their refuge. The miracle of the splitting of the Red Sea exposes the dry land and throws the water aside. The dry land is exposed with the help of the staff, which is itself part of a tree that grew on dry land. The tree overcomes water. This motif repeats itself in the story that follows immediately upon the Song of the Sea. The bitter and undrinkable waters of Mara threatened to kill off the Israelites with thirst. The tree - a typical symbol of dry land - sweetens the water. The water did not sustain the tree and sweeten its fruit. Quite the opposite: the tree sweetened the water. And the Lord showed him a tree and he threw it into the water and the water was sweetened.

The staff served Moses once again in the parasha when he used it to hit the rock in order to take water from it. The two earlier stories - that of the splitting of the Red Sea and that of Mara - mention water, but there the water was evil and injurious. Here, in contrast, we have a story about a lack of water. As in the earlier stories, the solution takes the shape of a tree; the staff hits the stone and brings forth water from it. The water did not bring the tree - rather, the tree brings the water. The natural order of cause and effect is reversed. Such is the nature of miracles and so the routine is broken.

The parasha relates to yet a third tension; that between memory and the present. We are commanded to remember miracles in general and the Exodus from Egypt in particular. The parasha deals with memory in two different places; the commemoration of the manna and the commemoration of the battle with Amalek. Moses instructs Aaron, take a jar and put a full omer of manna into it and place it before the Lord to be kept throughout your generations. Following the battle with Amalek, God tells Moses: Write this as a remembrance in a book. In both cases, God commands the institutionalization of memory. This is done by using a text or a sample of manna. That is to say, the memory is placed inside a jar or between two book-covers as something closed and defined while a different reality takes hold around it. Memory exists within a space of forgetting. There is tension between remembered historical events and the present, just as there is tension between unusual, miraculous events and everyday routine. A persistent miracle is no miracle at all, but rather part of the ordinary. Memory which is not history is the present, so of course it is not memory. No wall of iron divides between the poles of miracle and nature, of cause and effect, of history and memory. This is not a matter of dichotomous extremes, but rather of complementary aspects. Nature gains its lawfulness from the miraculous no less than the miraculous gains its authenticity from nature. The shouting and bickering of routine everyday life are illuminated by the Song's temporal uniqueness. The Song, in turn, can only stand out against the background of disharmonious noise.

The generation of the wilderness ate manna daily. They needed no jar to remind them. Those who fought Amalek had no need for a book. Only the later generations, for whom the manna and the battle against Amalek were no longer matters of personal experience needed to read the book and view the jar of manna. It was not the case that everyone was always viewing the jar of manna or reading the book. They lived the present in the present. A memory which is always activated is not a memory. There can be no memory without forgetting, and the past cannot survive without a present that is different from it. The other context and everyday life are the jar in which the manna is preserved, just as they constitute the book's binding. On the one hand, the binding sets limits to text and memory. On the other hand it keeps memory alive and places it within the contemporary context.

The splitting of the Red Sea and the Song of the Sea - like the tree which "grew" water in the desert - are not parts of our lived experience. We do not eat manna and the battle against Amalek is no longer relevant for our generation. All we have left is the commandment to remember. Memory does not bring back the past and set it up in place of the present. The present delimits the past and is different from it. The presents gives the context, it processes the past and preserves a sample or a short text from it.

Dr. Menachem Klein, a member of the editorial board of Shabbat Shalom, teaches in the department of Political Science of Bar Ilan University.

 

Readers Respond

Regarding "And the Crooked shall be Straight" (Vayigash issue)

I think that the presentation of Jacob as a professional cheater points o a simplistic and superficial take on the subject and does not reflect the Jewish understanding of Scripture.

Two principles guide the understanding of Scripture:

1) The eternal truth of the Torah.

2) Beyond the personal stories, the stories of the patriarchs reflect a broad national-historical process, which is part of the encompassing process of divine providence. Those stories must be interpreted in light of that broader process. For example, Jacob wound up in Laban's house in order to marry his daughters and create the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Another example: the sale of Joseph paved the way for the exile in Egypt and the redemption from it and from all of the other exiles in their wake. Jacob's biography must also be interpreted in the light of these principles.

I shall broaden the discussion of truth.

Human truth - in contrast to the absolute divine truth that guides the Torah - is limited by its very nature, in accordance with the limits of human understanding. That is why certain conditions apply to it and in certain cases the Sages permit one to lie. These are:

1) For the sake of peace, such as when God told Abraham that our mother Sarah did not laugh at his old age, but rather at her own age when she was told of Isaac's future birth. One is also permitted to say that an ugly article of clothing is attractive in order to avoid insult.

2) In order to protect human life. For instance, one is permitted to lie to a terminally ill person if true knowledge of his condition would further damage his health.

3) Precision of times. We see that Moses referred to the time of the plague of the first born as being around midnight even though God had announced the time as being precisely midnight.

4) Measure for measure. As the verse from Psalms (18:26) puts it: With a saintly one, You show Yourself saintly, but with a crooked one, You deal crookedly. That is how Jacob dealt with the cheating Laban - he took his family and ran away from him after Laban had cheated him out of his wages and switched Rachel with Leah.

5) Lastly: In the war against paganism, idolatrous rites or a false ideology (remove the false path from me - Psalms 119), as the default option when honest means fail. Abraham and Rachel destroyed their parent's idols at the price of having to lie. In this way they paved the way to monotheism, which is the foundation of the Jewish faith.

This principle also applies to Jacob taking the blessings instead of Esau; he did this in order to bequeath them to the People Israel, in keeping with God's historical plan. If, God forbid, Esau had received the blessings, the plan would have been disrupted, causing a national and spiritual catastrophe to the Jewish People. Isaac, who had grown up in a good environment was seduced by Esau's feigned observance of the commandments. Rebecca and Jacob's less savory family background taught them to see through Esau's pretense and to recognize his wickedness and the spiritual danger he posed. They also realized that the blessings were meant for Jacob. Perhaps, when Rebecca dressed up Jacob in Esau's clothing she was trying to hint to Isaac that he should not judge a book by its cover, but rather by its contents. Indeed, Isaac learned to accept that message. When Jacob's identity was revealed by his good manners, by the fragrance of Eden that wafted from him, and especially by his voice; his mentioning God's name - his faith in personal providence, then Isaac consciously gave him the blessings.

Jacob deserved to receive the blessings; he had clearly purchased the first-born status from Esau. Esau's claims regarding Jacob's double deception in stealing both the first-born status and the blessings were baseless. In addition, even Esau's angel confirmed that Jacob received them fairly, and in order to clear his name of any dishonest connotation, he changed it to Israel. (By the way, Jacob's name derives from the fact that he grasped Esau's ankle [akev] in order to exit his mother's womb first and win the right to officiate in the Temple service - and not from the word akov - "dishonesty")

Tzipi Leader

 

Pinchas Leiser, editor of Shabbat Shalom, comments

I thank Mrs. Tzipi Leader for her reactions to Aviad Stollman's article. Her comments present a different point of view and relate to the stratum of divine providence in the stories of Bereishit in a way similar to the words Joseph spoke to his brothers: you planned to do me ill, but God planned it for the good... (Bereishit 50:19).

The truth is composed from many different strata; "There are seventy aspects to the Torah." In addition to the attempt to understand the divine plan behind the stories of the Torah there is also room to learn from the deeds of the fathers which are signs for the sons. In that sense "The Torah speaks in the language of humans."

The Sages and traditional Torah exegetes did not shrink from sometimes taking a critical stance towards the Patriarchs in order to learn lessons from their deeds.

This principle is exemplified by the comparison made by the Sages between Esau's cry upon his discovery that his brother had cheated him and Mordechai's cry (Esther Rabba 8). Similarly, the RaMBaN and RaDaK did not hesitate to criticize our Mother Sarah for having treated Hagar harshly.

The RaMBaN writes: "Our mother did transgress by this affliction, and Abraham also by his permitting her to do so. And so, God heard her [Hagar's] affliction and gave her a son who would be a wild-ass of a man to afflict the seed of Abraham and Sarah with all kinds of affliction." (Chavel translation).

The RaDaK adopts this line of interpretation..."and this whole story was written in the Torah in order that people learn good characteristics from it and keep away bad character traits.

The providential process does not absolve people from being morally responsible for their deeds. Our ancestors were great and honest people, as the NeTziV refers to them in the introduction to his commentary on Bereishit, which he calls Sefer HaYashar [Book of the Upright]. However, in order that we be able to learn from their deeds, the Torah also tells us of their occasional failings.

 

 

 

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