Moreh Nevukhim #19 - 1:13-14

Listen to tonight's class on Moreh Nevukhim 1.13-14 here.

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The "Man of God"

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Holding on to Heaven

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Revealed & Concealed

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Living in the Shadow

 

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The Torah of Humans

 

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Forget About It!

Listen to tonight's class, "Forget About it!" here.

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Read a related devar Torah, from Mishpatim 2020, here.

Parashat Ki Tissa: Dialogue

Dialogue

Thoughts on Ki Tissa 2019

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As his forty-day rendezvous with God drew to an end, Moshe received the luhot:

And He gave Moshe when He had finished speaking with him on Har Sinai the two tablets of the Covenant, tablets of stone written by the finger of God. (Shemot 32:18)

Those days were filled with deep dialogue, and now – “when He had finished speaking with him” – Moshe was handed a physical manifestation of Torah. Receiving the luhot, then, represented the shift from a spoken mode of transmission to one that was textual. The luhot were, in the words of Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, “the permanent residue of a dialogue between God and man.”[1]

Descending Har Sinai and encountering the panicked people of Am Yisrael, however, Moshe reflected upon the dangers of a system that could potentially deemphasize presence and dialogue. It was, after all, Moshe’s absence that inspired het ha-egel:

And the people saw that Moshe lagged in coming down from the mountain, and the people assembled against Aharon and said to him: “Rise up, make us gods that will go before us, for this man Moshe who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.” (32:1)

And so, Moshe then “flung the tablets from his hand and smashed them at the bottom of the mountain” (32:20). Realizing the importance of personal involvement to the Torah’s transmission and fearing the danger of a potentially “impersonal” growth by means of the “speechless” luhot, Moshe sought their immediate destruction.

The Hakhamim famously portrayed the altered reality that resulted from smashing the luhot: “If the tablets had not been broken, Torah would not have been forgotten in Israel.”[2] Surprisingly, however, Ibn Ezra cited from R. Saadia Gaon, who contended that the second luhot were in fact greater than the first ones that he smashed.[3] Basing himself on several midrashim, Nessiv explained that the second luhot differed from the first by introducing the reality of Torah she-be-al peh – the Oral Law. While Moshe received a vast knowledge of Torah and its laws at the time that he received the first set of tablets, the possibility of future interpretation and creative commentary, as transmitted from teacher to student, was born only with the second luhot.

The first luhot were “God’s doing” (32:16), which represented an explicit reception from God and the impossibility of forgetting. The second tablets, in contrast, were crafted by Moshe (34:1) and prone to the human reality of forgetting, thus emerging as the forebearer of oral transmission.[4]

Indeed, in the aftermath of het ha-egel Moshe seemed focused on the restoration of God’s presence amongst the people. He moved the Tent, and named it “Ohel Mo’ed – the Tent of Meeting”:

And Moshe would take the Tent and pitch it outside the camp, far from the camp, and he called it Ohel Mo’ed (the Tent of Meeting). And so, whoever sought God would go out to Ohel Mo’ed which was outside the camp. (33:7)

And the nation understood and appreciated his own dialogue with God:

And so, when Moshe would go out to the Tent, all the people would rise and each man would station himself at the entrance of his tent and they would look after Moshe until he came to the Tent. And so, when Moshe would come to the Tent, the pillar of cloud would come down and stand at the entrance of the Tent and speak with Moshe. And all the people would see the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance to the Tent, and all the people would rise and bow down each man at the entrance of his tent. (33:8-10)

Am Yisrael then learned that transmitting the Torah entailed more than merely passing down a text; it required presence and dialogue:

And God would speak to Moshe face-to-face, as a man speaks to his fellow. (33:11)

In her best-selling book Alone Together, psychologist Sherry Turkle pointed to a particular digression that has emerged with our smartphones. The invention of the first telephones, she observed, enhanced our long-distance expressions of emotion by moving us from the impersonal texts of letters and telegrams to sharing our actual voices. Our smartphones, in contrast, depersonalize even our short-distance expressions of emotion by replacing our voices with the words and letters of text-messages, emails and Twitter posts. Turkle quoted a friend, who remarked: “We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted among us has this incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotion. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?”[5]

The failure of the first luhot stemmed from feelings of absence – Moshe’s immediate disappearance from the people, and the potential of God’s transcendence “when He had finished speaking with him.” And so, the creation of the second luhot and all that then ensued were meant to restore those lost feelings of communion and conversation. In a world that increasingly reverts to a reality akin to the first luhot, perhaps it is time to contemplate the enduring lesson of the second tablets and restore presence and dialogue to our lives.

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[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (New York, NY, 2001), pg. 399.

[2] Eruvin 54a.

[3] Commentary of Ibn Ezra (ha-kassar) to Shemot 34:1, s.v. pesol.

[4] R. Naftali Sevi Yehudah Berlin, HaAmek Davar to Shemot 34:1, s.v. ve-katavti.

[5] Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York, NY, 2011), pg. 207.

Parashat Ki Tissa: Sensitivity

Sensitivity

A Message for Parashat Ki Tissa 2018

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As Moshe and Yehoshua walked together to the scene of het ha-egel, the cries of the nation rang out from a distance. Yehoshua exclaimed, “A sound of war in the camp!” But Moshe corrected him: “Not the sound of crying out in triumph, and not the sound of crying out in defeat. A sound of crying out I hear” (Shemot 32:18-19). Imagining the full effect of Moshe’s reaction at that time, the Hakhamim retold: “Moshe said: ‘Yehoshua, a person who will in the future lead six hundred thousand people doesn’t know how to distinguish between one sound and another?’”[1] The Rabbis clearly understood that this ability to “distinguish between sounds” was a vital quality of leadership, but they never explained why. How was this trait related to the proper guidance of Am Yisrael?

R. Yehuda Amital z”l, the former rosh yeshivah of Yeshivat Har Etzion would often describe the unique character of his students' involvement even beyond the walls of the beit midrash by means of a Hasidic story. R. Schneur Zalman of Liadi –  the “Alter Rebbe” and founder of Habad – and his grandson, R. Menahem Mendel – the “Semah Sedek” – once sat studying Torah in a three-room house. The Alter Rebbe sat in the inner room, while the Semah Sedek was in the middle, and his baby slept in the outer room. The baby began to cry, but the Semah Sedek was so immersed in his studies that he did not hear it. The Alter Rebbe, however, heard the baby and quickly ran to soothe it. As he returned to his place in the inner room, he reprimanded his grandson: “If someone is studying Torah and fails to hear the crying of a Jewish baby, there is something very wrong with his learning.”[2]

I believe that although Yehoshua did hear the cries of the people at that time, his failure to understand them was similar to the Semah Sedek’s mistake. Each of them lacked sensitivity. Moshe was teaching Yehoshua that his inability to decipher the nation’s shouts signified a disconnect. The ears of a sensitive leader can hear beyond the muffled calls of his people – he can understand why they are crying, as well.

In his best-selling book Principles, billionaire Ray Dalio listed many of the recurring lessons that he has encountered in his climb to success as an investor and hedge fund manager. One of his core principles is to “remember that the who is more important than the what.” He explained that potential visionaries sometimes fail at their projects by mistakenly focusing on what they want accomplished, and overlooking who will accomplish it best. He wrote: “Not knowing what is required to do the job well and not knowing what your people are like is like trying to run a machine without knowing how its park work together.”[3] The success or failure at “being in sync” with your team will oftentimes dictate the successive results of the project. This was, in a sense, Moshe’s message to Yehoshua at that time: he taught him that leading a nation entails more than tactical planning and perceiving vision – it requires understanding the people.

Moshe’s words to Yehoshua extend further than the realm of national leadership and project management. They affect our vital roles as friends, spouses and parents, as well. They teach the essential lesson of sensitivity. Shared dreams can only carry our relationships as far as we can hear and understand each other’s cries.

Shabbat shalom!

Rabbi Avi Harari

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[1] Kohelet Rabah 9:11:1.

[2] As retold in Elyashiv Reichner’s By Faith Alone: The Story of Rabbi Yehuda Amital (New Milford, CT, 2011), pg. 23.

[3] Ray Dalio, Principles (New York, NY, 2017), pg. 400.

Parashat Ki Tissa: Fire

Listen to last night's class, "Fire," here.

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See, as well, a past devar Torah, which compliments the theme of fire as a representative tool of creation, here.

Parashat Ki Tissa: True Leadership

True Leadership

A Message for Parashat Ki Tissa 2017

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A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. (Thomas Carruthers)

In his recent book, The Myth of the Strong Leader, Archie Brown noted the mistaken tendency to equate “strong leadership” with “good leadership.” He argued that it is wrong to believe that the more power one individual wields, the more impressive a leader he is. Drawing from examples on each end of the historical spectrum, Brown illustrated the dangers inherent in a system governed by a single individual and the potential success latent in one that includes the voices of many.[1] This perspective on leadership has shed light for me upon Moshe’s several actions in the immediate aftermath of het ha-egel.

The episode began with the nation’s nervousness at that time:

And the people saw that Moshe lagged in coming down from the mountain, and the people assembled against Aharon and said to him, “Rise up, make us gods that will go before us, for this man Moshe who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him”. (32:1)

Am Yisrael’s description of Moshe in the moments prior to their sin portrayed their mistaken conception of the nature of his role as their leader. Overlooking God’s part in the exodus from Egypt, they declared Moshe their singular leader and panicked in his absence. God hinted at their seriously mistaken understanding when he then commanded Moshe: “Quick, go down, for your people that you brought up from Egypt has acted ruinously” (7). Moshe’s descent from the mountain was thus charged with the mission of fixing the nation’s broken conception of leadership.

And Moshe stood at the gate of the camp and said, “Whoever is for God, to me!” And the Levi’im gathered round him. And he said to them, “Thus said Hashem, God of Israel, ‘Put every man his sword on his thigh, and cross over and back from gate to gate in the camp and each man kill his brother and each man his fellow and each man his kin.’” And the Levi’im did according to the word of Moshe, and about three thousand men of the people fell on that day. (26-8)

Michael Walzer highlighted the political significance of this episode. He noted that whereas many of the other murmurings in the desert ended with the wrongdoers’ death by God – at his word, the idol worshippers in this instance were killed by the people – at Moshe’s command. Walzer detected in Moshe’s cry of “Whoever is for God, to me!” an expression of true leadership, seeing in it an immediate creation of a subgroup of leaders whose vision was focused on the future. Moshe drew to his side the “new-modeled men” who were committed to the covenant of a “chosen people,” and thereby created the magistrates of the future – the priests and the bureaucrats.[2]

In stark contrast to his previous acts of justice individually performed in Egypt – when he killed the Egyptian and separated the quarreling Israelites, Moshe now widened the nation’s circle of leadership and emboldened the appropriate people of caliber.

Moshe’s most memorable action at that time, however, was the smashing of the tablets (19). I believe that the true significance of that decision lay in the people’s understanding of the tablets as a body of knowledge necessarily taught by to them by Moshe.[3] Bill Gates wrote that “good leaders will challenge themselves, bring fresh thinking and expert advice, and not only invite but seriously consider opposing viewpoints.”[4] Understanding the unhealthy dependency of the people upon him at that time, that is exactly what Moshe did. He smashed the tablets and beckoned the people to think independent of himself. He forced them to seek knowledge and to discover parts of the Torah on their own.

It is in this light that I understand, as well, several midrashim that describe a fundamental difference between the two sets of tablets. The Hakhamim envisioned the first tablets as miraculously encompassing all the Written and Oral Torah, while the second set taught only the Written Torah.[5] By smashing the first tablets, then, Moshe was necessitating the people’s self-engagement and individual efforts in studying and explaining the Torah.

R. Mosheh Lichtenstein detected a similar initiative in Moshe’s subsequent actions:

And Moshe would take the Tent and pitch it for himself outside the camp, far from the camp, and he called it Ohel Mo’ed (the Tent of Meeting). And so, whoever sought God would go out to Ohel Mo’ed which was outside the camp. (33:7)

R. Lichtenstein noted that Moshe was no longer in the camp – teaching the people in their own homes, walking among them, bringing the Torah to their door, and instead required anyone who desired the Word of God to make an active effort to go outside the camp and seek God. He thereby created a new echelon of active spiritual leadership and shifted the people from a leadership model based on passive acceptance to one that demanded initiative and effort.[6]

Het ha-egel taught Moshe the vital lesson of the “myth of the strong leader.” He learned that the people’s dependency upon him as their sole leader had led to their swift downfall and he quickly sought to change that conception. His string of successive actions – demanding that the God-fearers murder the idol worshippers, smashing the tablets, and moving the Tent outside of the camp – were all aimed at broadening the leadership of the nation. It was in those hectic moments of crisis that Moshe emerged as a true leader.

I’ve seen firsthand how ineffective and even dangerous it can be when leaders make decisions alone – and how much good we can do when we work together. (Bill Gates)

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[1] Archie Brown, The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age (New York, 2014).

[2] Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York, 1985), pg. 60-1.

[3] Consider, for example, the nation’s request of Moshe at Har Sinai: “Speak you with us that we may hear, and let not God speak with us lest we die” (20:19). See, as well, Devarim 5:20-4.

[4] Bill Gates, “What Makes a Great Leader.”

[5] See Beit ha-Levi, derush no. 18 (printed at the end of Responsa Beit ha-Levi) and HaAmek Davar to Shemot 34:1 and Devarim 9:10.

[6] R. Mosheh Lichtenstein, Moses: Envoy of God, Envoy of His People (Jersey City, NJ, 2008), pg. 72-6. Cf. the introduction to Harerei Kedem vol. 2 (Jerusalem. IS, 2004).