Exile, Alienation and the Jewish Mission
When a man is in his place, everyone knows him, and respects him according to his worth and according to the rank of his forbears. He, too, is familiar with his surroundings, knowing what he should say and what he should not say, what he should do and what he should not do. Once uprooted from his landscape, a man is at a loss, bewildered and perplexed. (Haim Sabato, Aleppo Tales)
In the last chapter, we explored the unusual self-awareness that Moshe brought into his first set of interviews with God. Of course, this perspective did not appear in a vacuum – as with everyone, Moshe was shaped by his life experience. In this chapter we will look at part of this experience, which will both resemble and yet be at variance with many other Biblical Jewish leaders.
Looking at Moshe’s early life, we find a fascinating paradox: The greatest Jew to walk the face of the earth spent his childhood and youth in a completely non-Jewish culture. This forges the great irony that, as opposed to all the other Jews whom the Midrash praises for preserving their Jewish identities through keeping their Israelite names, language and dress (Vayikra Rabba 32:5),62Vayikra Rabba 32:5. Though the extant versions of this midrash do not include clothing, various early commentators mention it, suggesting the existence of such a version. young Moshe’s name,63See Ibn Ezra, R. Shmuel David Luzzatto, Malbim and R. Aryeh Kaplan (Shemot 2:10) on this point. language and certainly mode of dress were all Egyptian.
Various commentators have noticed this and given explanations for the anomaly. Among them, the great nineteenth century commentator, Malbim,64On Shemot 2:10. writes that the royal court of Egypt was the best place for Moshe to acquire the characteristics and abilities that he would need to become the political and military leader of the Jewish people. This approach implies that had there been a Jewish monarch and court from which to learn, it would have been preferable for Moshe to avoid the court of Pharaoh. In other words, Moshe’s apprenticeship in a foreign culture was due to the lack of a better option.
But there is another, more fundamental reason for Moshe’s bicultural upbringing, which sees Moshe’s youth in a foreign court as a necessary part of his formation as the prime Jewish leader and recipient of the Torah. In order to fully appreciate this position, we will first want to compare Moshe’s early life to the early life of one of his great predecessors.
Moshe’s Exile and Ya’akov’s Exile
There appear to be no two extended narratives in the entire Torah as similar as Ya’akov’s exile to Lavan’s house and Moshe’s exile to Yitro’s house.65See Bereshit Rabba 84:6, which suggests such an extended parallel between the lives of Ya’akov and Yosef. Nevertheless, a careful analysis of that comparison would show that many of the similarities are more coincidental. For example, the midrash tells us that both of their mothers had difficulty in childbirth, but in fact, the nature of these difficulties and their contexts are vastly different. (On some level, this and other differences create a “broken” analogy – one that is meant to set up a limited comparison as well as an important contrast.) The lives of young Ya’akov and Moshe, however, seem to parallel each other much more faithfully. The following narrative could uncannily describe either story:
After growing up in a privileged and sheltered environment, the hero runs away from a more powerful member of his household, who has made clear his intention to kill him. The hero goes east and ends up by a well, where his future wife faces an obstacle in watering her sheep. He removes the obstacle and waters the sheep for her. Quickly the shepherdess’s father hears about this and takes in the hero, giving him his daughter as a wife and making him a shepherd over his flock. Eventually, after having children, he tells his father-in-law that he wants to return home. God speaks to the hero and he subsequently returns home to become leader of his clan. On the way back, he meets an otherworldly stranger who attacks him but ultimately relents. This is followed by a reunion with his older brother who markedly embraces him, in spite of the fact that the hero’s return spells a threat to the older brother’s position of leadership.
This astounding narrative analogy can be understood on two levels: (1) On the biographical level, we note the similarity between the actual events that transpired and (2) even more important, on the literary level, we note that the text chooses to record many of the parallel events, often in similar fashion. Since any biographical narrative will mention certain events and leave others out, when the Torah includes so many events that happen to both Ya’akov and Moshe, it is attempting to draw our attention to the similarities in the early lives of these two protagonists.
With parallel narratives, either one or both of them are highlighting the similarities in order to create a sort of internal commentary on the other (a literary technique referred to as intertextuality). This begs the question, “What are we supposed to gain by comparing the lives of Moshe and Ya’akov in their respective exiles?” Or to put it another way, why did Moshe’s life not run as closely parallel to the lives of the other patriarchs, Avraham and Yitzchak?
One answer might be that Ya’akov and Moshe serve as the “bookends” of the exile in Egypt. As such, their lives are bound up with the concept of exile in a way that the lives of Avraham and Yitzchak are not. There is certainly much to say about this notion, but it fails to provide a comprehensive explanation to such a pronounced narrative analogy.
A more fundamental approach to the question may lie in the fact that both Ya’akov and Moshe are highly central characters. More specifically, both of them play out their lives at formative stages of the Jewish people’s development.66Moshe’s seminal influence on the Jewish nation goes without saying. It was he who took them out of Egyptian bondage to become a nation. It was also he who brought them to Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. If less obvious than in the case of Moshe, when we think carefully, a critical formative influence should be attributed to Ya’akov as well. Whereas the future of Avraham and Yitzchak’s mission had been tenuous up until now, by the time Ya’akov transmitted that mission to the next generation, it lay on solid footing. If for no other reason, Ya’akov simply had many more offspring than either his father or his grandfather. Even more important, however, is the fact that he was able to put an end to the previous pattern, whereby only one child would take on the mission of his father. By having twelve sons who all accepted his vision and then transmitted it to their own children, Ya’akov created the demographic basis for the Jewish people. In this way, his efforts to create the physical basis of the Jewish people parallel Moshe’s efforts to form the ideological basis of the nation later on. Consequently, it appears that the type of seminal experiences that were common to Moshe and Ya’akov are a type of prerequisite in the life of a formative leader of the Jews.
The outstanding feature of the narrative analogy between Moshe and Ya’akov is their intense personal exile. They are in foreign lands, marry into (ultimately) foreign families, work with property that doesn’t belong to them and live alongside unfamiliar cultural values.67This is most powerfully driven home by Lavan, who tells Ya’akov that he couldn’t have given him his younger daughter before his older daughter because “such is not the practice in our place.” Whether Lavan is lying or not, Ya’akov seems to accept the basis of the argument, showing agreement that Ya’akov is, in fact, not completely familiar with the ethics of his host culture.
It is true that exile is not unique to these two great figures in the Jewish tradition. Avraham’s very mission is born out of the command to go into exile. He is given the charge to move away from everything he knows in order to become a Jew. Not only that, even when he gets to the Promised Land, he soon feels impelled to move on to a new place of exile. It is also experienced – twice – by David. Yosef is sold into slavery and then taken into exile. Yehudah has his own version of exile when he temporarily leaves his family. The narrative of Yonah takes place almost exclusively in exile. In all of these cases, it is only when he is in exile that the Jewish hero comes into his own. This is hardly a coincidence. The central place of exile in what could be described as Jewish epic literature reveals it as a fundamental component in the heroic Jewish life.
Still, the intensity of exile experienced by Moshe and Ya’akov makes their lives the most intimately and meaningfully connected with this experience. Having identified the key variable in the life of a formative Jewish leader, we now need to analyze its significance.
Exile and Alienation
In the best of circumstances, exile automatically breeds some level of personal alienation. The man in exile initially experiences estrangement from the new host culture to which he is transplanted. The new nation does things in ways that appear strange and unnatural to him. Eventually, however, he begins to feel alienated from his own ancestral culture as well. The strangeness of the new culture starts to dissipate as he experiences their ways on a more regular basis. In fact, depending on the amount and proximity of exposure he or his children have to the new host culture, it is now the “old ways” of his ancestral culture which start to seem unnatural. If familiarity to the new culture facilitates its adoption, so do the benefits frequently bestowed by the host culture onto its new adherents. To give an example from American Jewish history, one of the main causes for Jewish immigrants’ estrangement from Judaism was the tangible rewards earned by those who adapted to American culture. If this was occasionally lost on the first generation of immigrants, it rarely escaped the attention of the second and third generations. As a result of this conditional advancement, many a Jew felt prompted to take a more critical view of the ancestral institutions of Shabbat, kashrut and the like – often impediments to upward mobility – allowing them to more easily justify abandoning these practices.
Even beyond assimilatory behavior, estrangement from a comfortable collective identity brings doubt about one’s very identity. If, for example, one is a Jewish-American, one automatically has a hyphenated identity. A question that such a person will have to face is, “Am I more Jewish or more American?” Moreover, if we are speaking about a person’s cultural identity, can he really be both Jewish and American? Or is culture not an exclusive affair, such that one who attempts to be bicultural ends up being neither really American nor really Jewish? Here too we can look at Jewish-American literature, with its characteristic angst. Through their protagonists, authors of this genre are often grappling with their own evolving bicultural identities and consequent alienation.
Although rare is the man who actually chooses exile, the resultant detachment from a clear and obvious path is not without its benefits. Exile prompts one to greater independence in value formation and, subsequently, in decision making. He has at least two options open to him – to act according to the values of his own ancestral culture or according to the values of his new host culture. Since most people do things because “it’s simply what’s done,” once a person is confronted with the fact that two different groups with which he identifies do things differently, he must make a thoughtful choice about which approach he will adopt. And once the automatic monopoly on what to do is broken, it suggests that other choices are out there as well. A person who needs to think about his course of action will often be led to consider other possibilities that he previously did not realize existed. Simply put, once two choices are available, nearly all choices become available.
Indeed, in many respects, this is the situation of modern man. Though there are still many things that we do simply because “that’s what’s done,” there are many areas in which living in a culturally cosmopolitan world has made us aware of our choices (often to the point of paralysis!).
Hence it could be said that Ya’akov’s and Moshe’s exiles made them into proto-modern men. Moreover, if our modern personal state of autonomy is, indeed, largely a result of our lack of cultural roots, then the more uprooted a person, the more autonomous we can expect him to be. In that case, the extreme nature of Ya’akov’s and Moshe’s exiles likely led them to a heightened level of deliberation and thoughtfulness, such as would rarely be found in even the most modern of men.
Having briefly considered the effects of exile on a person, we are now in a better position to understand why Ya’akov and Moshe had to endure such an intense version of this experience. It appears that the Torah is interested in specifically these great leaders’ making their own decisions. For this to happen, the alienation of exile would first need to facilitate transcendence of the values which they might otherwise have automatically shared with their ancestral and/or host cultures.
It is not that Ya’akov and Moshe would be free of human terms and concepts. One could not expect that from any person.68There is a growing literature on the centrality of a person’s culture to his way of looking at the world and his resulting values. In the footsteps of Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (especially Chapter 10), communitarianism and multiculturalism have stressed the implausibility of some sort of abstract “man” in a cultural vacuum as had been implicitly assumed in classical liberalism. The leading representatives of communitarianism are Michael Sandel – see Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Amitai Etzioni – see New Communitarian Thinking (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995). The leading representative of multiculturalism is Will Kymlicka – see Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) and most recently Politics in the Vernacular (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). See also the important emendation to Kymlicka’s thought by Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal in “Liberalism and the Right to Culture” (Social Research 61:3; Fall 1994). Rather, they would be enriched by the multiplicity of human approaches to which they were exposed and would as a result become unusually thoughtful leaders. And, as we will discuss later, it is this thoughtfulness that would bolster the Jewish tradition’s unusual cultural transcendence and accompanying universal appeal.
Moshe the Outsider
Having seen the centrality of exile and loneliness for the formative Jewish leader, we can still ask whether this solitude need be absolute or whether such a leader can still have some attachments nonetheless. The answer to that question may depend on a further distinction that will lead to different answers for Ya’akov and Moshe.
The characteristic existential loneliness that we described in the previous section is felt in the best of exiles. In the case of Ya’akov and Moshe, however, it is compounded by the additional hardship of having to go it alone. If someone has to undergo exile, he would almost always prefer to be accompanied by his family and, if possible, even by his community.69See Rashi on Vayikra 26:33 based on Sifra, Parashat Bechukotai 6:6. Accordingly, the “exile” of an accidental killer is softened by the stipulation that he be accompanied by his teacher or students into a city of refuge (Makkot 10a). Similarly, once in exile this man commonly marries within his own ancestral community so as to ease the effects of alienation, at least within the four walls of his own home. In contrast to this, Ya’akov and Moshe arrive all alone. Having no other realistic choice, they marry cross-culturally and father children who grow up in the culture of their wives. True, it is Ya’akov’s parents who tell him it is better that he marry specifically in exile. Still, this does not make his ordeal much easier. In both cases, it is likely that some of the difficulties that these two great men experience in their marriages stem from the increased complexity engendered when a man in exile enters a cross-cultural marriage.
Be that as it may, Moshe’s loneliness is not exactly the same as Ya’akov’s. Since Ya’akov had certain advantages in this regard, he is able to create bonds with his foreign wives that Moshe is not. One such advantage is that he is able to marry his cousins, even if he didn’t know them until he moved out of his home. Moreover, his exile was to a land that his grandfather Avraham could still refer to as “his land and his birthplace” (Bereshit 24:4; Bereshit 24: 7).70Bereshit 24:4, 7. Granted, it is neither Ya’akov’s land nor his birthplace, but neither was it completely foreign. In contrast, when Moshe goes to Midian, it is to an altogether foreign place and foreign family. Yet even after taking all these differences into account, Moshe’s highly unusual relationship with his wife and children needs further analysis.
The Complete Alienation of Moshe
Though there are, in fact, several major differences in the two narratives under discussion,71A contrast worthy of study but not obviously relevant to the present discussion is the difference in the relationship between Ya’akov and Moshe and their respective fathers-in-law. We will look at this contrast more carefully in Chapter 5. when it comes to the issue of alienation, the interaction presented between Ya’akov and his wives on the one hand and Moshe and his wife, Tzipporah, on the other, takes on far more importance than anything else. Compared with the description of the marriages of Ya’akov and his wives, the story of Moshe and Tzipporah is highly truncated. In fact, Tzipporah’s name appears only three times in the entire Torah. What we do hear about the relationship between Moshe and his spouse leads us to conclude that it was emotionally distant. Even before their final separation alluded to in the book of Bemidbar (Bemidbar 12:1-4),7212:1–4. Moshe and Tzipporah had already known a protracted geographical separation, something unknown to any other couple in the entire Torah.73See Shemot 18:2. This early separation would not only impact on the frequency of their interaction, it would also set its tone.
Indeed, Tzipporah remains largely invisible. To begin with, she is almost entirely silent – we hear her voice only briefly, when she appears to give Moshe some sort of rebuke concerning the circumcision of their son.74Though even this is far from clear. Some suggest that Tzipporah is not addressing Moshe at all, but rather their son. (See, for example, Rashi on Shemot 4:25, presumably based on the comments of Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel in Nedarim 32b.) Otherwise, we don’t hear from her at all.
Related to the paucity of interaction between Moshe and his wife is the parallel lack of connection between Moshe and his children, who at one point are appropriately referred to as “the children of Tzipporah” (Shemot 18:2).75Shemot 18:2 (see Netziv) and especially 18:6, where Yitro refers to himself as Moshe’s father-in-law, to Tzipporah as Moshe’s wife, but to Gershom and Eliezer as Tzipporah’s children. Though the narrative seems to describe them as “his” (i.e., Moshe’s) sons in 18:5, the reference is not entirely clear and “his” could be referring to Yitro and not to Moshe (see Perush Yonatan on Targum Yonatan, which mentions this possibility). The one clear reference to them as Moshe’s children appears in Shemot 4:20, when Moshe has not yet returned to Egypt to focus on his mission. In other words, they may have begun as his children but they soon enough become his wife’s children. The Torah tells us almost nothing about Moshe’s children – even less, in fact, than it tells us about Tzipporah. That being the case, we are almost surprised when the Torah uncharacteristically focuses even briefly on the significance of their names (Shemot 18:3–4).76Shemot 18:3–4. This is all in marked contrast to the detailed and colorful description of Ya’akov and his children.
Moreover, the anomaly here is not just terseness; the curious fragmentation also demands our attention. This is seen most clearly in the middle of the journey back to Egypt, when a second, unnamed child suddenly appears (Shemot4:20).77Ibid., 4:20. Neither introduced nor explained, his very name is revealed to us only later. In another place, the Torah tells us that Tzipporah came back to see Moshe “after he had sent her away” (Shemot 18:2)78Ibid., 18:2. See Rashbam for an alternative explanation. – as if we already knew this. In fact, it comes totally out of the blue: Earlier, the text tells us only that Moshe’s family started on the road back to Egypt with him. From that point onward, his family is no longer mentioned, making us assume that they had been with him the entire time. After all, we don’t hear anything that would make us believe otherwise, and the default of Biblical couples is to stay together.
One could perhaps suggest that the difference between the Torah’s interest in Ya’akov’s family and its lack of interest in Moshe’s is due to a greater need for the mothers’ influence on the formative stages of the Jewish people. And because the children of Ya’akov were the Jewish people at that time, it makes sense that the Torah would focus on them. In contrast, by the time Moshe appeared on the scene, the Jewish people were a large nation, which made Moshe’s wife and two sons were much less central to the further development of Jewish history.
Along these lines, it is possible to argue that Moshe’s children didn’t do anything that would warrant their inclusion in the text. No doubt all of this is true. Still, the Torah’s terse and fragmented presentation of Tzipporah and her children seems too extreme to be completely accounted for by these explanations. Consequently, it would make much more sense to say that the main reason for this extraordinary presentation has more to do with Moshe himself than it has to do with any external factors.
To help us understand Moshe’s unique isolation, we should turn briefly to the relationship between Ya’akov and his wives. Though we see a similar alienation from his general surroundings, his relationship at least with Rachel can hardly be described as distant. Nor should the dichotomy between his isolation from others on the one hand and the emotional closeness with this wife on the other come as a surprise. It may well be the very intensity of his separation that pushes him closer to Rachel. The loneliest of men can find a welcome vestige of existential communion in the relationship with his wife.79It is well-known that Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, the author of the somewhat autobiographical The Lonely Man of Faith, found great solace in the companionship of his wife. This allows a person to find the strength to endure isolation from others when such separation is necessary.
But Moshe was destined for a different fate. It appears that the one who would receive the Torah could not be entirely “human.” The demanded level of uninterrupted spirituality would require someone as removed from the human condition as possible. Close involvement with someone else, no matter how spiritually uplifting, would necessarily come at the expense of some of his direct involvement with God.80One may then raise the question of why Moshe should have gotten married at all. I can think of two approaches to this problem. On a very basic level, a person has to develop into greatness. This means that the Moshe who married Tzipporah was not the same Moshe who would later separate from her. But there is perhaps another, more important answer. Marriage is an important part of human life and a person who does not know it from the inside cannot properly lead other people in living their lives. Even if celibacy allows a person to focus more on the spiritual (as with the Talmud’s Ben Azzai), it still prevents him from a deeper understanding of this central part of human existence. Though the receiver of the Torah could not be totally human, the first teacher of the Torah could not be anything but completely human. While Moshe had to be as removed as any human being would ever be, he simultaneously had to be personally familiar with what human life is about. The same would be true of Moshe’s role as a father. Being involved with his children would also have come at the cost of the intensity of his relationship with God.81See Redeeming Relevance in Genesis, Chapter 2.
Indeed, the angels’ objection to Moshe’s receiving the Torah is couched in the phrase that he was “born of a woman (Shabbat 88b).”82Shabbat 88b. Their complaint could be understood as pointing to Moshe’s intrinsic inability to escape his human bias.83See Chapter 2, p. 40, for a related discussion of this midrash. We can choose to have no intimate human bonds – except for the bond with the person who bore us. For the angels, that unavoidable human bond disqualified Moshe from being the bearer of the superhuman document called the Torah. This observation notwithstanding, Moshe does separate himself from others as much as is humanly possible.
This is not true of Ya’akov, who actually spends a great deal of energy on family matters. Inasmuch as Ya’akov represents the earlier stage of proto-nation building, his alienation need not be as complete as Moshe’s, as it is the latter who builds the true foundations of the Jewish people. In this sense, Ya’akov is in point of fact an earlier, yet necessarily incomplete, prototype of Moshe. He sets up the mode of behavior in order for it to be perfected by Moshe later on. When it was time for Moshe to take on his role, however, his alienation would need to be total. Even the last stronghold of human bonding and communion that we find in marriage would have been counterproductive for his particular mission. In this sense, Moshe can be described as the most, and maybe the only truly, lonely man of faith. But what type of faith is generated by this type of complete alienation from others?
Moshe the Universal Leader
We know that the human bonds to community and family are a great blessing. But as with anything else, it is a blessing that comes at a cost. On the one hand, family and community are just about essential to the creation of identity and, ultimately, of meaning.84See note 7, above. But these same bonds of loyalty that allow us to be more receptive and helpful to our own group are also what prevent us from being more understanding of those outside our circle. We all understand events from the perspective of a specific community; this is the way we make sense of our experiences. In turn, this prevents us from seeing events in the same way as they are seen by others. It is humanly impossible to give complete and total support to two competing narratives of the same story.
Moshe’s alienation from his wife, his family and his nation allowed him to transcend the normal boundaries that separate us from those outside these circles. He could not remain tied to his family. Otherwise, there would always be an in-group and a resultant out-group. This is what made Moshe into a universal leader – he could identify with other groups as easily as he could identify with his family; with non-Jews as easily as with Jews. As a result, when considering Moshe, other nations would not perceive an unfriendly bias that would disqualify him from their allegiance.
The rabbinic tradition that Moshe insisted on bringing the group of foreigners known as eiruv rav (the mixed multitude) out of Egypt along with the native-born Jews85See Shemot Rabba 42:6. serves to strengthen our contention. Moreover, it leads to the conclusion that Moshe’s experience with other cultures does not end when he comes back “home” to his own people. Moshe remains a leader of mankind even when he becomes the leader of the Jews.
Moshe’s stance may well be grounded in the nature of the Torah itself: While sometimes overlooked, the Jewish understanding of revelation is far from being an exclusively Jewish affair. The Torah describes the Jews as a nation of priests (Shemot 19:6),86Shemot 19:6. meaning that they have a responsibility to spread the Torah’s moral and religious principles beyond the Jewish people. How they are to do that is beyond the scope of the current discussion, but it is clear that this is a major goal of the Jewish people. To put it differently, even as the Torah’s specific laws are meant for the Jews, its ethical and spiritual vision is intended for all of mankind. Thus, the Torah has an uncommon dual identity, addressing a specific national culture on the one hand yet implicitly speaking to all who are created in the image of God on the other.
As the central figure and communicator of this dual doctrine, Moshe needed a dual identity: to be a representative of the Jewish people and still also be a true citizen of the world. Only in this way would Moshe be able to receive the Torah in both of its dimensions. As such, the faith of Moshe is the faith of man as man as well as that of man as Jew.87Parallel to his dual identity is Moshe’s need for domestic bifurcation. He must be the completely objective leader of the Jewish nation as if he didn’t have a family, and yet he needed to be grounded in an actual family framework to allow him to relate to normative human experience.
Moshe the Jew
Moshe’s alienation did not only benefit the world at large, it also brought significant direct benefits for the Jewish people as well. Moshe was in charge of leading the Jews through the greatest revolution in history – a revolution that would require them to address their faults in as complete a fashion as possible. Such leadership could only come from someone who saw the Jews objectively – who could recognize their weaknesses unapologetically. As mentioned earlier, it is a natural tendency for a person to assume the values of his culture, even when these values are not ideal. From this point of view, there was a need for the Jews to be led by an “outsider.”88It is in this spirit too, that Tosefot Yeshanim understands the statement in the Talmud that “converts are like a scab to the Jewish people” (Yevamot 47b). This Talmudic commentary implies that the convert does not have any role models and thus performs the mitzvot the way they are supposed to be performed and not necessarily the way they are actually performed. As such, his unusually model conduct is abrasive to the rest of the Jews, who are used to a lower standard since “this is simply the way things are done.”
At the same time, being purely objective is not what was desired of Moshe either. Cold objectivity makes it more difficult to feel the nation’s suffering – and easier to say that they deserve these punishments. Although Moshe’s foreign objectivity benefited the Jewish people, he could not be their leader if he did not empathize with their affliction. So even though Moshe had to be raised by Egyptians, his earliest childhood had to be among Jews. He had to be emotionally connected from the crib. This early connection was needed to connect an ultimately universal Torah with the specific nation that was destined to fulfill it. Indeed, as a leader, Moshe needed to have both of these qualifications – objective universal intellect and subjective Jewish emotion.
Exile and the Jews
Returning to Moshe’s universal role, it is not only the Torah of Moshe that has a universal side to it, it appears that the Jewish people itself has a universal side as well. More than any other nation, the Jews are called upon to perform a transnational function.
Hence, it could well be that the cultural alienation experienced most powerfully by our formative leaders is something that the Jewish people would need to experience on a national level as well. As Moshe would have to be a universal man, the Jews too would have to be a universal nation. From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that the Jewish people has known more years of exile than of statehood.
The Jews’ relationship to exile is based not only on its being the more frequent situation in which they have found themselves. Exile is also a key element in the very foundation of the Jewish people. The Torah makes a point of telling us that Avraham was not born or raised in Israel (Bereshit 11:26–31).89Bereshit 11:26–31. Just as he was born outside his homeland, the Jewish nation too would have to be “born” outside their homeland (i.e., in Egypt). This means that the Jew’s relationship to his land is not the same as that of other nations. He belongs in it but he also belongs out of it.90This consciousness could be one of the main functions of the sabbatical year, wherein a Jew temporarily relinquishes ownership of his agricultural land.
And whether it was God’s original intention or not, the so-called “wandering Jew” is an almost ubiquitous feature of our world. The Jews are a nation that maintains its own identity in exile even as it assumes much of the cultural trappings of its hosts. Indeed, Jews don’t only resemble their gentile neighbors, they often take a leading role in their societies. A Jew is both a Jew and a universal man. This unique situation is perhaps the result of being the spokesperson for a document that is meant as much for universal consumption as it is for Jewish consumption.
Beyond Avraham’s foreshadowing our identity as strangers, we also see that this very first Jew created a tone of concern for others outside his immediate sphere. He did this by praying for wicked neighboring communities, taking care of wandering strangers and rebuking leaders who did not live up to their moral calling. By embedding these actions into its first stories, the Torah forever binds the Jew to all those with whom he comes into contact. From these beginnings, the Torah develops this theme more fully in the uniquely transcendent personality of Moshe.
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The Jew is called to emulate Moshe and somehow try to hear the national narratives of others – to be above his own culture while he lives within it. In the post-nationalist world of today, the Jewish take on nationalism is extremely useful. For in truth, contemporary post-nationalism is only one side of today’s equation. Although increasingly permeable national borders result in their taking on less importance, nationalism is still not entirely a thing of the past. Nor is it likely (or even desirable) that it will completely disappear in the foreseeable future. The problem raised by the vestiges of nationalism in an increasingly multicultural global community is how to simultaneously cling to the meaning given by one’s own particular identity and still be able to work with others who don’t share it. Hence, the unique Jewish model just explained could make a singular contribution. Properly understood, Jewish duality represents the notion of a people comfortable with its own tradition yet sufficiently alienated from it to listen to competing narratives. Such a paradigm allows for the grounding influence of one’s own culture while leaving room for other visions of the good.
Alienation from Above
If we have begun to understand the reasons for Moshe’s exile, we have certainly not exhausted the topic. It may prove useful to revisit the fact that Moshe (as well as Ya’akov) spent most of his days in exile as a shepherd. The motif of a young Jewish leader as a shepherd or shepherdess is actually found in several places.91See especially Kli Yakar (also R. Bachya and Netziv) on Shemot 3:1 on why so many Jewish prophets (and leaders) had been shepherds in their youth. The leading of sheep is meant to prepare and foreshadow a future leader’s responsibility for his “flock,” the Jewish people.92See Abarbanel on Shemot 3:1. Nonetheless, when we look at Moshe and Ya’akov, here too we see that they deviate somewhat from the standard version of this motif.
In the standard shepherd scenario, the sheep are obviously analogous to the Jewish people.93The Jewish nation is compared to a flock and its rulers referred to as shepherds more than once in the Bible itself – see for example, Bemidbar 27:17, where Moshe asks for a worthy successor that will prevent the Jews from being “like a flock without a shepherd” and Tehillim 77:21, where Moshe and Aharon are described as the shepherds of the Jewish people. More subtle is the further analogy created by the fact that the shepherd-leader is usually tending his or her father’s flock.94Such as David and the sons of Ya’akov (and maybe Rachel and Tzipporah). If we expand this category to include herdsmen, we can also add Amos, Elisha and Shaul. The father, of course, represents God.95The comparison is most familiar to us from the Jewish liturgy, especially from the Avinu, Malkenu (Our Father, our King) prayer. Nonetheless, this imagery can already be found in the Bible – see, for example, Yirmeyahu 31:8. Thus, the full imagery is of the Jewish people as God’s flock, which He entrusts to faithful caretakers. If we look more carefully, an ordinary shepherd has two primary responsibilities – to protect his sheep from predators and to make sure that they find food to eat and water to drink. This is exactly the two main responsibilities of the Jewish leader: to protect them from their enemies and to provide them with sustenance, both physical and spiritual.96The well-known comparison of Torah to water only reinforces the significance of the shepherd analogy.
In the cases of Moshe and Ya’akov, the analogy is more nuanced. While the master still represents God and the sheep continue to represent the Jewish people, the relationship of shepherd to both flock and master is different from the classical case where the leader tends his father’s sheep. Ya’akov and Moshe were watching sheep that did not belong to them.97See Malbim on Shemot 3:2, who makes this observation concerning Moshe. They were essentially tending a foreign flock for a foreign master.
Hence, when Ya’akov and Moshe would become the shepherds of the Jewish people, they would not relate to the sheep as their own, and more important, they would not relate to the owner of the sheep as their Father. If we may at first doubt such a conclusion, when we look at the relationship of these two great men with the Jewish people and with God, we truly see that there is a greater degree of separation than we might expect.
For example, when Moshe sees the negative effect his mission is having on the Jewish people, he laments to God about the state of “this people” and “Your people,” but not “my people" (Shemot 5:22–23).98Shemot 5:22–23. This parallels perfectly Moshe’s relationship with the actual sheep that he had once tended for his father-in-law. There too, he could have referred to the sheep as these sheep or your (Yitro’s) sheep but not as my (Moshe’s) sheep. Moreover, God’s possibly rhetorical suggestion to Moshe that He would destroy the Jewish people and create a new nation from Moshe (Shemot 32:10)99Ibid., 32:10. The discussion that precedes and ensues God’s suggestion is also worthy of note, in that God first calls the Jews Moshe’s nation, to which Moshe responds by calling them God’s nation. only adds to the notion that Moshe represents a shepherd who is not completely identified with his flock. Moshe’s unique stance is further seen from his many arguments with both the Jewish people and with God, acting once on this side and once on the other, as we would expect from an independent third party.
Granted, this distinction of the shepherd as separate from God and from the Jewish people is less clear when it comes to Ya’akov. Though Ya’akov is not as passive as his father Yitzchak, neither does he appear to be as independent as his grandfather Avraham. However, his wrestling with what tradition describes as an angel (Bereshit Rabba 77:3)100Bereshit Rabba 77:3. is unprecedented and certainly bespeaks independence – far beyond the autonomy typified by the arguments that Avraham had with God. Since an angel is an agent of God, standing up against it is a type of insubordination, if apparently an acceptable one. From this incident alone it would seem that Ya’akov is not as pliant as we might otherwise think. A further indication of his independent attitude is his removal of the God-given birthright from Reuven. A careful reading of the Ya’akov narrative shows us a determined patriarch who, if not as dramatic as Moshe, is still capable of disagreeing with his Master as well as with his flock.
In short, the position of Ya’akov and Moshe toward their flock is that of a manager whose job it is to detachedly determine both the master’s and the sheep’s best interests, not necessarily his own. His interests and theirs are not always identical, as he is not self-employed or working for blood relatives. For those who are, financial security is completely tied to the outcome of their work, for it is their own property that they aim to preserve and increase.
The relationship of a manager to both the master and the flock is obviously more removed and less emotional than that of a shepherd toward his or his own father’s flock. In this regard, it is sometimes easier to manage someone else’s money than one’s own, since the emotional concerns that can lead to bad business decisions are avoided. A manager is typically less afraid to take a calculated risk since he doesn’t identify with the possible loss as intensely as if it were his own money.
Yet the detachment of Ya’akov and Moshe from the Master and His flock may well have importance beyond its contribution to their effectiveness. As mentioned, an employee formulates his interests separately from his employer. Even when the employer was God, the Torah wants us to note the autonomy of the managers. In this context, we should remember the highly symbolic wrestling of Ya’akov (Bereshit 32:25–31)101Bereshit 32:25–31. and note that a similarly symbolic scene is reenacted on some level when Moshe and his wife meet their otherworldly assailant on their way to Egypt (Shemot 4:24–26).102Shemot 4:24–26.
In thinking about a religious leader – and certainly a prophet – we would naturally assume that he needs to draw himself as close to God as possible. In this regard, it is surprising to see that Moshe assumes a certain distance from God. Exactly because it is surprising, it is also instructive.
It is axiomatic that God wants man to obey Him and to elect to do His will. But He also wants a genuine partnership. That is to say, He wants a man to be a free agent who comes to agree with God neither from meek submission nor from cultural tradition. Precisely because both Moshe and Ya’akov would become so close to God, He had to make sure that they would perceive God’s interests (as well as those of the Jewish people) separately from their own. This is especially true concerning Moshe: the man who would become God’s humble servant is most clearly in danger of losing his own independent perspective. Moshe’s separation from his wife and temporary abstinence from food and drink (Shemot 34:28)103Ibid., 34:28. (See also Rambam in Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah 7:6.) only underscore the danger of his losing his humanity – i.e., that which makes him a genuine partner of God.
In the case of Moshe, it was necessary for the man who would receive and first teach the Torah to lay the groundwork for the partnership between man and God that Jews would subsequently call Talmud Torah. This is maybe best summarized through the classic rabbinic dictum, “lo beshamayim hee” (the Torah is not in Heaven). Via this principle, the Jewish people has enshrined the idea that God wants man – within certain parameters – to decide for himself the best way to understand the Torah.
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In the final analysis, the Jewish tradition’s unusual involvement with exile and alienation is precisely that which makes it particularly Jewish. Ironically, those very elements that we identify as “Jewish” also give Judaism its relevance to mankind as a whole. Without putting the importance of nation completely aside, the Torah teaches all men to recognize the centrality of universal human values. Connectedly, the narratives we have studied also illustrate God’s insistence that man be human and not superhuman – to accept the legitimacy of his own emotions, needs and aspirations in order to formulate that which is incumbent upon him to request from his Almighty Partner.
Perhaps the following midrash most succinctly illustrates how Moshe combined a universalist ethic with human autonomy:
[The mixed multitude is called Moshe’s] people. Moshe said, “Master of the world, what is the reason that they are my people?” God said to him, “They are your people because when they were still in Egypt . . . I told you not to mix them in with the [native-born] Jews and since you were humble and righteous you told me, One should always take penitents. And since I knew what they would do I said no, but I [still] did as you wanted" (Shemot Rabba 42:6 ”104Shemot Rabba 42:6 (emphasis mine).
After the mixed multitude is identified as the group who worshiped the golden calf, Moshe is castigated for his lack of proper judgment. Still, the midrash approves of Moshe’s motivation to the point that it tells us that God accepted his argument. In doing so, the midrash reiterates the monumental significance of his stance – a stance born of exile and alienation.
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The return of Jewish statehood has brought many challenges with it. Even as the opportunities created are myriad, one of its greatest spiritual challenges is the resultant effacement of our sense of exile. As we see from our great formative leaders, this is part of our national legacy and thus its loss is not completely positive – at least, not unless we can continue to dip into the consciousness of our historical alienation and transculturalism and make it a cardinal feature of the still-new Jewish state.
In this context, it is interesting to speculate that the development of the State of Israel has roughly coincided with another phenomenon that could help to remedy the isolationist trends that come naturally with statehood. The so-called ba’al teshuva community (returnees to traditional Judaism), from which I draw my own roots and with which I still have much contact, is the segment of committed Jewry that grew up in the “Egyptian court.” This means that they have the ability to be more objective about the Jewish people and constructively point out its weaknesses. By and large, this is not what we see. Instead, the more objective viewpoint of the ba’al teshuva is often criticized as foreign, causing most returnees to question their own frequently legitimate perspective and to bow to the pressures of traditional society.
I remember discussing a certain series of children’s books with a kindergarten teacher working for me at an Israeli school a few years back. I told her that I did not feel the books were appropriate, as all the non-Jewish characters were caricatured as stupid and anti-semitic. She responded by saying that she did not understand what I meant and that I had a somewhat “goyish” view of things. My thought was that my point of view was in fact much more “Jewish” than hers – I wonder if Moshe’s leadership was also castigated for being “goyish”?
When I was criticized by my employee, I had two advantages that most ba’alei teshuva do not have. First, I was her supervisor and, “goyish” or not, I was the one who made the final decision. Secondly, I had pursued my Torah studies to the point where I could feel self-confident in my own understanding of Jewish tradition.
Be that as it may, all ba’alei teshuva need to realize that veteran religious Jews are not always correct in their opinions, and base much more than they might think on “this is simply how things are done.” Much of the ba’al teshuva’s initial dissatisfaction with his new world comes from a greater objectivity. And just as objectivity was needed in the time of Moshe to help the Jews improve themselves, so too is it needed today if the Jews are to truly improve themselves. Coming to this realization is not just good for the ba’al teshuva, it is, more important, good for the Jewish people as a whole.