Rebuke and the Bitter Water

Recurrent ceremonies observed with dedication to form promote wisdom. Or we may gerrymander Channukah or Christmas into indictment of Capitalism and the Distribution of Goods; or hijack Passover as a delivery medium for platitudes about Social Justice (whatever that is). But no one ever increased in wisdom from listening to his own opinions, whether from his mouth or that of a rabbi.

The traditional celebration of holidays induces one to reflect on changes in himself. If the liturgy for the Days of Awe does not change, nor the sermons stand in for Journalistic Commentary, the penitent may note a year’s changes in his own understanding of them.

“Reformed” religions all veer toward atheism, as they enshrine the momentary understanding of writ and ceremony as pretext for and so celebration of the individual’s superiority to Divine Will and its expression in Scripture.

All religions are subject to, and products of revision and reformation of course, as they are human, and, so, flawed attempts to codify the metaphysical. Both Chabad and the woke-Reform offer forms called Judaism; and one is free to choose non-alignment, Re-alignment, and various flavors of “free-thinking,” or, worse, its decay into “right-thinking.” But who rose from a religious celebration reasoned into political commentary enlightened or refreshed? No one. What, then, was being celebrated? The superiority of the individual’s wisdom to God’s.

Happy the Jew who reads the Torah every year. Its periodic reexamination can reveal a new, and, so, interesting, understanding. For the intervening year has changed his physiology, and, so, his various desires; it has presented him with new triumphs, failures, and disappointments; and with new concerns and confusions. (See Aging, Challenges of.)

In Exodus 17, the Jews, as always, are complaining about Moses. God has given them Manna, but, camped at Kadesh, they are thirsty, and begin demonstrating against Moses. He cries out to God, “What shall I do for this People? Before long they will stone me.” God tells him to take the staff with which he struck the Nile, march before the People, strike the rock, and water will come out of it. And so it was.

In Deuteronomy 32 Moses is instructed to climb Abarim Mountain and die before entering Caanan with his people. He’s told he will be debarred because he broke faith with God at Kadesh, when he struck the rock. But he was directed to strike it. Generations of commentary explains Moses’s sin was that he struck the rock twice.

But it’s not written in the Torah.

Why did the commentators assert the repeated blows? As they, like millennia of readers, wanted to understand why Moses would be punished for doing exactly that which God instructed him to do.

For years I congratulated myself on a progressed understanding. Moses, it was clear to me, was not punished by exclusion from the Promised Land, but excused, as an example of God’s Mercy. He’d taken the Jews from slavery. He’d protected them and triumphed over every obstacle for the Forty Desert Years in which his only difficulties were the Jews themselves.

God aided Moses against ever tribe, king, and kingdom that stood in the Jews’ way; and, throughout, they carped, rebelled, and mutinied. Throughout the Torah, Moses pleads with God not to destroy his charges in their rebellions and sin. And Moses prevailed. Having brought them to Jordan, to the edge of the Promised Land, God, in His Mercy, spares Moses the knowledge of what the Jews will become in freedom.

That’s how I understood it until this year.

I heartily recommend The Chabad online Torah. Every week’s Parasha is presented in English, and Hebrew, with the Rashi in both languages. Additionally one gets commentary from learned contemporaries.

This last week I found wisdom from The Rebbe on rebuke. It was said that one who was near death could rebuke effectively and acceptably. Why? The Rebbe explained that the elder knew that the rebuked might accept correction from one he need not fear he would encounter afterwards. That is, he need not avoid the rebuker for fear of shame. (We know that Jewish thought equates shaming with murder – in each case the victim turns red.)

At the Jordan, Moses, in his final interchange with God is rebuked. A slight reorganization of the Rebbe’s wisdom is that God does so as it is their final interchange. But if it is a true rebuke, rather than a diplomatic explanation (“I’m exempting you from witnessing the oncoming tragedies”), what behavior prompted it?

My drash: It was not that Moses struck the rock twice – thus, as sometimes explained, doubting God’s Power to effect the miraculous with the one, ordered blow – but that he displaced his fury at the Jews onto the rock.

In the verse previous to his pietrocide, Moses cries out “What shall I do for this people, they will stone me next.” His attack on the rock is understood, by God, by his charges, and, this year, by me, as violent rage against his charges. Here, God, in effect, proclaims, “I commanded you to lead them. I didn’t order you to like them.”

Devar Achar.

REBUKE AND THE BITTER WATER
for The Jewish Journal
by David Mamet