They don’t come any more trustworthy than Moses. He was a blameless servant known for his humility — who today wouldn’t give their right arm for a leader with his integrity? And yet, this week’s Torah portion opens with something you would never suspect to happen to such an upstanding public figure.
Moses was audited.
As the sole treasurer overseeing the construction of the tabernacle, Moses had to break out his shoebox full of receipts to show how he spent the community’s funds. What’s most fascinating is that there was no ancient IRS holding Moses accountable. The audit was entirely self-imposed. Moses explicitly asked for the oversight. As the text tells us, “these are the records of the Tabernacle … which were drawn up at Moses’ bidding” (Exodus 38:21).
Why would Moses invite that kind of scrutiny?
A midrash tells of one Israelite who remarked to another that Moses was looking a little chubby lately. “What do you expect, a man in charge of the construction of the Tabernacle not to be rich?” the other Israelite responded. Both comments implicitly accused Moses of skimming off the top to feed himself well — perhaps a bit too well. When Moses heard this sentiment, he said, “I vow, as you live, that as soon as the Tabernacle is complete, I will give you an account of everything.”
Moses understood that appearances matter. When we don’t have access to information, there’s something in human nature that leads us to speculate about what we don’t know. We fill in the gaps in our information with stories we create, and it’s easy for this speculation to then be taken as fact. As we see in this midrash, Moses figured out that transparency was his best asset as a leader.
Transparency in public matters is not an innovative concept, and Moses was not the first — nor was he the last — public figure to have seen its merit. But the value of transparency isn’t always so clear-cut: There can be competing interests that muddy the waters. Take, for example, the most recent public conversation around the FBI’s order for Apple to write code to unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. Protesters, who worry that the creation of this code would put their privacy in jeopardy, have been gathering outside of Apple stores to support the company standing up to the FBI’s request.
Reasonable people can disagree about the case between Apple and the FBI. But in our culture, there does seem to be a consensus around the general value of privacy for individuals.
Notably, Jewish tradition also seems to place a value on ensuring individual privacy: “A man must not make his windows to open into the courtyard [that he shares with neighbors]” (Mishnah Baba Batra 3:7). There’s even a category of damages created for unwarranted attention from neighbors — hezek re’iyyah, “harm caused by seeing” (Baba Batra 2b), indicating an awareness of the potential dangers of the public exposure of private matters.
Yet at the same time, our culture asserts the general value of transparency in public matters. Is there not a contradiction here? How can we demand transparency in the public sphere but get squeamish when we make those same demands of individuals? Why doesn’t the logic that transparency staves off speculation in the public sphere translate into our private lives?
Perhaps the difference lies in the purpose served in the two instances. In the case of the public sphere, the human impulse for speculation functions as a safeguard. It helps stave off corruption and build trustworthy institutions that will benefit the community. But when applied to private life, this same impulse is more likely to be destructive. No public good comes out of rumors — nor, for that matter, of exposing intimate facts — about the personal lives of others.
How fascinating that our tradition nurtures our impulse for speculation in one realm and guards against it in another. It’s a good reminder to us that when we feel that speculative impulse, we might take a moment to understand what’s at stake and what motivates us — our own curiosity or the public good — before we indulge it. Only then can we ensure that we’re acting from our better selves.
Rabbi Sarah Bassin is the associate rabbi at Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills.
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