There is an incredible non-sequitur early in this week’s Torah reading. Moshe says “The children of Israel have not listened to me; how then shall Pharaoh hear me…” And Hashem seems to answer with a genealogy. But the genealogy is not of the children of Israel or of Moshe. It is of a part of the tribes of Reuven, Shimon and Levi. And after the genealogy, Moshe asks another question “Behold I am of uncircumcised lips, how shall Pharaoh listen to me?” Somehow, the genealogy has answered Moshe’s question regarding the Jewish people.
What is going on here?
My wife and I were discussing the mass rally against terror in Paris when she said something quite insightful: rallies only matter if the people the people they are meant to influence actually care about rallies. But if not, then rallies are meaningless. Rallies against totalitarian regimes work if the soldiers and police meant to uphold the regimes care about those protesting. Otherwise (as in Syria and Tiananmen), they are simply an opportunity to crush opposition. We generally care about rallies, and so Muslim participation (and thousands or tens of thousands of French Muslims participated) mattered to us and them. It sent a useful message – some decent fraction of French Muslims stood against this terrorism.
But a rally has no effect on the terrorists themselves. At best, it is a validation of what they’d done. After all, four individual holy warriors have moved the world.
The three tribes whose genealogy is touched on this reading are quite distinct. When Yaacov blesses the tribes, he constrains these three because, unlike Yaacov himself, they could not constrain themselves. They are, in their character, the most still-necked of a stiff-necked people. In slavery, these are the people most likely to maintain their identify. They represent the rump of the Jewish people at this point – the strongly self-aware Jews. But these three tribes are not calm and sedate; they do not listen easily. The very defiance Aaron and Moshe show by going face-to-face against Pharaoh is built into their characters.
It is in this that we have Hashem’s answer: the children of Israel won’t listen to Moshe and it doesn’t matter. Moshe doesn’t need the support of the people and he doesn’t need the support of the Egyptians. The slavery and the redemption occurred precisely because humankind have had such a difficult time grasping the independence of Hashem. It is hard for our pride to accept that something unseen – something that could be a figment of our imagination – has independent power. The Exodus is the answer to this. It is meant to be an education of the Jewish people and the world. There is no reason for it to start as something popular. It is meant to change perceptions.
Hashem could have redeemed the people overnight. He could have skipped all the plagues and all the trouble. But He didn’t. He carried out an extended and painful process of redemption. The goal was not our rescue; we never needed to be enslaved. The goal was to establish the place of Hashem in our world and define our relationship to Him.
This explains why Moshe only asks for three days in the desert. If Pharaoh did not have such magnificent human pride, he would have accepted. That would have been the end of it. But his pride prevented him from saying yes. He became a foil – the representative of the ultimate human power and pride vs. the power of the divine. My mother wrote a beautiful play about this – Pharaoh, King of Egypt.
As the plagues intensified, Pharaoh continued to have economic reasons to keep the slaves. A man can do 100 watts of work while active. One million of them would be have provided 100 megawatts or enough to power one million homes. There were major costs (because slaves aren’t that efficient), but the Israelites represented actual power and productivity for this non-productive people. They were certainly worth some passing plagues. But with hail, the economic price was inverted; the economic argument disappeared. When that happened, the very presence of Hashem became Pharaoh’s sole motivation. In this way, his heart was literally hardened by Hashem. His pride became his primary driver and in so doing its pointlessness was perfectly illustrated.
Perhaps Moshe’s aral (uncircumcised) lips were the perfect tool for this process. Circumcision is an act of human impact on the fundamentally natural. It is a refinement of our reproductive process – a symbol of our dedication of our reproduction to our continual relationship to the Almighty. Moshe’s speech lacked this refinement. A proud man, a civilized man, would have an even harder time obeying the requests of an unrefined speaker. Nonetheless, as Hashem promised, Moshe was made an elohim to Pharaoh. He was made a greater power and Pharaoh was forced to acknowledge it.
Pharaoh, the embodiment of the Sons of Elohim, was humbled by the most humble of men.
Today’s terrorists imagine themselves in the place of Moshe. Their ‘own people’ may not want to follow them – much less their enemies. But they imagine that Allah will make them elohim to us. They imagine they will crush us with the power of G-d behind them.
But G-d is not defined by others.
Ultimately, these killers will be crushed as have been so many who have come before them.