Moses makes the rock an offer it can't refuse
If it's July it must be the Jews complaining about harsh conditions.
In the Bible, that is.
Last week we had the lament about a lack of political voice from a rogue Korach; the week before, some not-so-fly-for-a-spy-guy caterwauling. You missed these? Or you read and can't stop thinking about them? Such can be the effect of a good TGH post. No need to fret; you can catch up on all the recent entries here. Your soul will thank you. As will the part of Mr. TGH’s psyche that obsessively tracks page views.
This week's portion brings us another Grade-A complain-y doozy, what with the people thirsting, Moses hitting, water streaming and all hell break-loosing.
Let's get rocking.
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Det. Lennie Briscoe cracked many a case on "Law & Order" in all his years on the show. ("Try telling that to the hot dog vendor.") But even he might've been stumped reading this week's portion.
Chukat starts with laws of death-purification, useful as Miriam passes shortly after. But its narrative centerpiece is of course the aforementioned rock, beginning with Moses seeking to extract water for a thirsty nation and ending with God's wrathful declaration that he and Aaron won't enter the promised land.
It is the incident of “Mei M'rivah,” the "Waters of Strife," which only sounds like an early rejected name for "Titanic."
Nachmanides calls the incident — and, more important, the punishment thereon — "one of the great hidden secrets" in the whole Torah, and it's easy to see why.
Oddly, we actually have an explanation of what Moses did wrong. But somehow that only obscures the meaning further.
"Ya'an lo he'emantem bee l'hakdisheini l'eini b'nei yisrael," an angry God tells Moses and Aaron in 20:12 after the incident — "and you didn't believe in me to sanctify me to the eyes of the Israelites," before going on to say as a result they won't be allowed to bring said people they've been leading lo these many years to said Israeli land.
We also have the details that precipitated this pronouncement. 1. The people complained about the lack of water. 2. Moses and Aaron prayed. 3. God told Moses to take Aaron and his own staff, gather the people, speak to the rock in front of them and the rock will give its water. 4. Moses and Aaron, understandably annoyed by these kvetching bellyachers, gather the people and then ask them rhetorically "Listen you recalcitrants, from this rock shall we bring forth water for you?" 5. Moses then raises the staff and hits the rock twice, causing a gusher. 6. God lowers Thor's hammer.
Yes, we have those details. We just don't know which one of them was the problem.
Scores of interpretations have tried to take their shot — David Lynch himself has inspired less puzzled commentary. Let's focus on the approaches of the group of Medieval commentators, who got here first and offer a trove.
These commentators can, broadly speaking, be divided into two categories.
First, there are those I'll call the hitting crowd. These are the folks who say that the sin lied in some way in Moses' striking of the rock.
There's Rashi (and grade-school teachers the world over), saying Moses should have talked to the rock instead of hitting it, as God seemed to command him to do. There's Ibn Ezra, noting that Moses hit it twice instead of waiting for the first smack to do its job. There's Maimonides, who, citing the hitting, says Moses "erred on the side of anger and deviated from the mean of patience."
These thinkers believe Moses was charged to behave a certain way — a way manifesting restraint and decorum — and instead went in the other direction. So he suffered a punishment, or at the very least the relieving of leadership responsibilities.
According to these commentators, what the text is really doing here is modeling a certain behavior — when taking on a mission, don't be like Moses at the rock, great as he is elsewhere. Show more patience and restraint; don't get caught up in your emotions of the moment. Because you do that, bad things happen.
Then we have the second group. Let's call them the faith crowd, or maybe the divine-credit crowd. These are people who don’t much care what physical action Moses took. They see the sin in Moses and Aaron’s overlooking who really was performing the miracle. We're talking people like Rabeinu Hananel, the 11th-century Tunisian scholar and a predecessor of Nachmanides, who focuses on the "we" in the "shall we bring forth water for you" — Moses and Aaron omitted any mention of God and thus showed a lack of divine faith/credit in front of the people.
There's Nachmanides himself, who runs through what he sees as the many problems in the arguments of the hitter/anger camp and then cites Hananel's faith-based explanation as the most correct — Moses and Aaron didn't credit or glorify the God who they knew was behind this.
And there's the Bechor Shor, the 12th-century French commentator, who suggests that this was such a faith crisis that it went even beyond optics — that Moses and Aaron themselves lacked such belief. When they asked the people “from this rock shall we bring forth water for you?” it wasn't rhetorical; they genuinely didn't know if it would work. (In a truly novel twist, the Bechor Shor actually thinks this whole tale is simply another account of the same story in Exodus and not a new story at the end of the desert wandering; you can read more of what he's got going on here.)
These camps don't like each other much — Nachmanides, leveling some Drake-level shade at Rashi's Kanye, calls the latter's commentary a "homiletic interpretation that doesn't clarify."
There are of course proofs to be brought both ways and diss tracks to be dropped in each direction.
(The faith camp, basically: Why was Moses told to bring a staff if he wasn't going to use it, and anyway, wasn't he told to hit the rock in the Exodus story?)
The anger camp, basically: Sure, but he wasn't told to hit it here, and isn't that the nub of the problem — acting impulsively without listening to instructions?)
At the heart of the argument, textually speaking, is what the “l’hakdisheini l’einei bnei Yisrael” can encompass — can it include Moses’ actions of striking the rock? Or does it speak only to words and attitudes?
Much as we're a problem-solving bunch here at TGH, I don't think we'll resolve this definitively in either direction, any more than we'll figure out just what in the name of Naomi Watts happened at the end of “Mullholland Drive.” Both of these approaches in fact seem plausible — the Torah is filled with archetypal stories of both incorrect temperaments and misguided faith choices, and there’s textual evidence to support either one of these possibilities happening here.
But we are also a harmonizing bunch. And, it should be noted, a bunch that likes “The Godfather.”
One of the great hotheads in all of cinema comes in Francis Ford Coppola’s holy text. I refer to Sonny Corleone, Vito Corleone’s oldest son. Sonny is a forceful presence (a helpful skill in a group of mobsters) but has a bad tendency to fire first and think second. After one such misstep, his father warns him to be "the rapier, not the club" — to react with precision and deliberateness, not gut-level force.
For a chunk of the movie Sonny is destined to take over for his father as the Don of the Corleone crime family, and in fact even does so when his father is incapacitated. I say a chunk of the movie because at one point, after several rash decisions, Sonny makes the rashest of all, beating his brother-in-law Carlo to within an inch of his life.
That pummeling upsets Carlo, and in turn opens an opportunity to the very powerful rival don Emilio Barzini. Realizing he now has an ally in Carlo as a result of the beating, Barzini reaches out to recruit him in an anti-Sonny plot. The two then conspire to set a trap for the rash upstart in which they again play off Sonny’s intemperance and bait him into an impulsive drive without backup across a deserted toll plaza late at night, where he is gunned down.
Sonny’s violent end is an object lesson in the foolishness of acting first and thinking second, and would seem to support, or at least run in very close parallel to, the interpretation of the first Chukat camp, who see the same signs of a hotly impertinent Moses in the rock story. Faith, on the other hand, doesn’t have much to say here.
Except —
Earlier in the “Godfather” story, a drug baron named Virgil Sollozzo is trying to attract Corleone investment and meets with the family. Vito wants to play it poker-inscrutable, but Sonny expresses interest in the deal, in a tell that would turn out to have tragic consequences. Vito pulls his oldest son aside after and says his impulsiveness was a mistake.
“Never tell anybody outside the family what you're thinking,” he admonishes Sonny, seemingly mad about his son’s impulsive speech. But his message actually isn’t only about impulsiveness — it’s about faith. Faith that the way Vito has done business for years is the best way, no matter how it might not seem so to Sonny’s lesser, non-Don eyes. There is a system in place here, Vito is saying, and you have to believe in it.
The insight is revelatory — restraint and belief are connected. Yes, Sonny, you’re impulsive, and that’s a problem, Vito is saying. But it’s also all tied to your lack of faith. Your refusal to believe in a system outside of yourself causes you to act on your own rash instincts. And that’s an issue.
The warning would prove prescient — it was exactly these two related traits that would get Sonny killed, as he both impulsively and without paying mind to a larger order drove through the toll plaza that night. By refusing to believe in a system and instead relying on his own gut instincts, he made a colossal error and got himself killed.
It is perhaps just this linkage that can reconcile the divide in our portion. Over the years the Mei M’rivah commentators are seen as fiercely distinct — a conflict between those who see in the episode either an anger issue or a faith crisis, either a psychological flaw or a theological shortcoming. But maybe we’ve been looking at it all wrong. Maybe they’re not opposites. Maybe the reality is that both are true. Maybe by Moses not understanding that God was driving this, all he was left with was his own anger. And that proved to be his undoing.
Both Nachmanides and Rashi are right. Or half right. When we lack patience we also lack faith; when we feel the need to act impulsively we are also not trusting the system. After all, what is faith but a willingness to wait through the darkness?
Rashi himself may be intuitively grasping this connection. In his commentary he writes, “For had you spoken to the rock [rather than struck it] and it would have brought forth water, I would have been sanctified before the eyes of the assembly.” Restraint and belief, he implies, are related. If you were willing to curb your appetite, you would have been recognizing My wisdom; if you had more faith in Me, you would have been more capable of patience.
Sonny Corleone was played by James Caan, the Bronx-born actor and certain longtime TGH reader. Caan died this week, and I can't help feeling a little shudder at the timing. The man who played a character best known both for impulsive behavior and a lack of faith in a higher wisdom (and who paid the price for it) left earth the very week we are reading about his ancestor, in an earlier holy text, doing the same and paying the price for it. Maybe, just maybe, the universe is underlining this message of the connection between patience and faith.
Maybe it’s saying that, whether via Sonny or Moses, when you can’t see outside yourself you tend not to make the smart and deliberate choice. So try to go the other way. You might enter a promised land. Or at least avoid a gruesome end in a toll plaza halfway through the first of a three-picture franchise.
Thank you for reading.