Getting Our Just Rewards: Moses and the Land of Israel

By BRENT CHAIM SPODEK

Parashat Chukat-Balak (Numbers 19:1-25:9)

Like many people, Moses doesn't get the reward he's been working toward his whole life.

Venerated through the generations as God's faithful servant, Moses discovers in Parashat Chukat-Balak that, because of his own actions, he will die before the Israelites enter the land of Israel.

The scene leading up to God's announcement of this punishment is seemingly innocuous. The Israelite people complain about the lack of water in the desert, and Moses turns to heaven for guidance. The Holy Blessed One tells Moses to take his staff in his hand and order a rock to give water. Moses takes his rod, strikes the rock twice and brings forth copious water. God then says, "Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them."

Generations of Jewish commentators have offered their best guesses as to what, exactly, Moses did to warrant this incredibly severe punishment.

Some have suggested that his sin was to strike the rock twice, while he was told only to hit it once, (Abravanel to BaMidbar 20:12) while others think the problem is that he struck the rock and didn't speak to the rock. (Rashi to BaMidbar 20:12)

Possibly the most audacious claim comes from Moses Mendelssohn, the father of the Jewish enlightenment, who wrote that Moses' sin was that when the people began to complain of thirst, he fled from answering them directly and went to Tent of Meeting to speak to God. (Mendelssohn to BaMidbar 20:6, 12)

A traditional religious mindset might assume that, far from being punished, Moses should be rewarded for this pious turn towards God in a moment of need. But Mendelssohn makes the radical claim that in an age when miracles are few and far between, turning to God at a moment of human need is a grave sin.

Yet many of us in need - the thirsty, the sick, the barren - hope that God will choose to intervene in the normal functioning of the world and miraculously rescue us from our ailments. But miracles are hard to come by. Most of the time, the God who might turn nature on its ear and create the reality we so desperately want seems painfully distant.

We know that the sea is unlikely to split tomorrow and that the hungry of the world are unlikely to wake up to pots full of manna. We know that those who are sick are unlikely to be miraculously cured. And yet at some level, we pray that God will somehow intervene to alleviate human suffering.

The human insistence on reaching out to God is a testimony to the resilience of human hope and the faith that in the past, God did intervene in human history and might yet do so again. But inherent in that turn to God is a flight from responsibility.

After all, if the omnipotent Creator of the Universe might yet reach down from the heavens and transform sickness into health as completely as God once turned darkness into light, then perhaps we mere humans don't have to get involved. Perhaps we can keep doing what we were doing and not be distracted by all those people in need.

But Mendelssohn is pointing us toward a truth we already know - hoping that God will solve human problems isn't simply ineffective, it's wrong. It's wrong because it functionally abandons those in need.

The people of Israel cried out to Moses, and he turned away. Perhaps there was some yet undiscovered way for him to stay with the people and address their needs with the resources he had on hand.

We also often have greater resources than we acknowledge. Even if it seems the only relief can come from a miracle, many of the natural and man-made disasters from which humanity suffers can be addressed by human action.

No supernatural miracles were needed to change the course of the Holocaust, and none are needed to change the course of the genocide in Darfur. Nothing more than human empathy, willpower, competence, and the reallocation of resources and priorities, are needed to alleviate famine or to mitigate the effect that natural disasters have on the poor. (Sen, 2001 #4, Chapters 1 & 3.)

God did send water to the thirsty Israelites, yet according to Mendelssohn, Moses was punished terribly for asking for it. Perhaps the Torah wants to make it clear that God's mercy on the Israelites is the exceptional response to irresponsible leadership, not the rule.

The rule is that we humans can respond to the plight of the suffering, or we cannot. We can hear the cries of those in need in our homes, in our cities and in our world, or we can ignore them. But we cannot honestly think that someone else will respond if we don't.

Reprinted with permission from American Jewish World Service.