Characters in the Torah: Moses

With this I will begin a series looking at character portrayal in the Torah, specific examples of the points made in the September postings.

Moses is an ambiguous character. We are taught that he is our greatest prophet, whose communication with God was unlike any that preceded or followed him – it was “face to face.” He is the figure that dominates our central story –Exodus from Egypt and revelation at Sinai. And yet we cut him out of the story completely when we tell it at Passover. To eliminate the possibility of cultic worship, we are not permitted to know his burial place, so serious is the risk because of his greatness and his pivotal role in our national saga.

So when the Torah tells of his life and times, it is similarly ambivalent about the telling. We do not follow the details of his escapades from youth to old age, as we do with Jacob or King David. Rather, in leading up to the moment of his call at the burning bush, Torah first gives a detailed account of his deliverance as an infant from Pharaoh’s genocidal decree, and his ending up in Pharaoh’s palace, raised by a princess. What we will know of his youthful character is left to two brief vignettes.

“And it was in those days, that Moses grew up and went out to his brothers, and saw their suffering…” When he sees a taskmaster beating a slave, he kills the oppressor and buries him in the sand. The next day he comes across two Hebrews fighting and asks the wicked one why he is beating his countryman. “Will you kill us like you killed the Egyptian?” comes the reply. Moses recognizes that his actions have placed him in peril, and he flees before Pharaoh can harm him. In the second vignette, Moses ends up some time later at a well in the land of Midian. Although a solitary stranger in a foreign land, when he sees shepherds bullying shepherdesses who have come to water their flocks, he is again impelled to action. He saves the shepherdesses and helps them water their flocks. Taken into their home, he marries one of the women, and joins the household of their father Reu’el/Jethro. It is while watching Jethro’s flocks that he will discover the burning bush and reluctantly accept his mission.

This is sparse material, yet it is enough to impart a sense of the young Moses. The aspect of Moses’ character that emerges from these two stories is an exquisite sensitivity to oppression of the weak by the strong. Heedless of his own safety, he is unable to stand by and watch. God’s mercy towards the helpless and powerless will be a major theme of the exodus, and a basis for the expectation that his people will establish a social order that protects the “the stranger, widow, and orphan.” The selection of Moses as the emissary for liberation is understandable. The Torah’s artistry in portraying these qualities, while leaving us guessing as to other aspects of character – what Moses is really like – is not likely accidental, but rather in accord with how our tradition treats him: compassionate, heroic, but also somewhat distant and mysterious. In a story that we want to preserve a sense of gratitude for Divine intervention in our history, we avoid excessive preoccupation with its human agent.

This approach of course leaves many questions unanswered. There is one which has always preoccupied me. How could he refuse the call at the burning bush? “Send anyone else!” from the person who risks his own life to rescue a single slave? It doesn’t make sense. Worried about mumbling? Excessively humble? This is not my sense of the rash and reckless rescuer of shepherdesses in a foreign land. But this will have to wait for another series of postings.