TI Torah Study Parashat Chukat: Crime and Punishment

July 13, 2024 / 7 Tammuz 5784

Numbers 19:1−22:1

Parashat Summary (further your study on this portion at ReformJudaism.org )

• The laws of the red heifer to purify a person who has had contact with a corpse are given. (19:1-22)
• The people arrive at the wilderness of Zin. Miriam dies and is buried there. (20:1)
• The people complain that they have no water. Moses strikes the rock to get water for them. God tells Moses and Aaron they will not enter the Land of Israel. (20:2-13)
• The king of Edom refuses to let the Children of Israel pass through his land. After Aaron's priestly garments are given to his son Eleazer, Aaron dies. (20:14-29)
• After they are punished for complaining about the lack of bread and water, the Israelites repent and are victorious in battle against the Amorites and the people of Bashan, whose lands they capture. (21:4-22:1)

What was the Sin at the Rock?

Commentaries gleaned from "Torah Commentary for our Times by Harvey J. Fields"

Moses’ sin lay in striking the rock rather than speaking to it. Had Moses done as he was commanded, the people would have learned an unforgettable lesson: “If a rock, which neither speaks nor hears nor is in need of sustenance, obeys the word of G-d, how much more so should we.” (Rashi)

God punishes Moses because of his exasperation with the complaints and quarreling of the Israelites. Extreme anger is his downfall; intelligence and impatience condemn him. Moses should have exercised moderation by being more understanding of the Israelites’ frustrations and more accepting of their criticism, including their baseless accusations. Instead, he allows anger to control him, insults the people, flies into a rage, calls them names, and forcefully shatters the rock. Such as extreme response deserves punishment. (Rambam - Shemonah Perakim 4)

R. Joseph Albo and others (including Ibn Ezra) suggest that the sin lay in the fact that Moses and Aaron fled from the congregation and fell on their faces, rather than standing their ground, confident that G-d would answer their prayers.

The sin of Moses grew out of his deep disappointment with the people. He is stunned that after forty years he still must carry his staff to prove his credibility. For that reason he speaks in words of deep reproach… and in passionate agitation struck the rock. (Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch)

Moses may have been justified in rebuking the people, but he erred in the sequence of events. First he should have given them water, showing both the power and providence of G-d. Only then, once they had drunk, should he have admonished them. (Rav Shach)

Aaron is condemned because he watches silently while his brother flares out of control. He does nothing to pacify him, nor does he speak out to defend the Israelites. “Aaron could have pointed out to Moses his error and requested him to stop. Through not protesting, he became an accomplice and was penalized accordingly.” (Pinchas Peli)

Abarbanel makes the ingenious suggestion that Moses and Aaron were not punished for what they did at this point. Rather, their sins lay in the distant past. Aaron sinned by making the Golden Calf. Moses sinned in sending the spies. Those were the reasons they were not privileged to enter the land. To defend their honor, however, their sins are not made explicit in the biblical text. Their actions at the rock were the proximate rather than underlying cause (a hurricane may be the proximate cause of a bridge collapsing; the underlying cause, however, was a structural weakness in the bridge itself).

In all the sins of Moses, whether we consider the murder of the Egyptian, the breaking of the commandments, or the striking of the rock, there are the common elements of anger and violence, of unbridled self-will, and of temporarily ignoring God. The sin of Moses at Meribah is thus characteristic of the man, one of the series, and serious. Why serious? Serious because civilization depends on humility. Without a sense of limits that flows from the awareness of a moral law and an ethical God, every brutality, every corruption, every atrocity becomes possible (Rabbi Norman D. Hirsch)

The Torah text is deliberately vague because it means to teach us by indirection, as it so often does, the great truth that the sins of leaders are not necessarily overt, blatant, obvious; that the important failings of great leaders could be subtle yet deep, unclear yet destructive.” Few leaders are corrupt criminals. Instead, they fall prey to more invisible temptation.” They seek the approval of the people by bending the truth, by blurring principle, by compromising their independent decision-making for financial support. They make judgments not on the basis of what is true but on how it will be received. Placing themselves on pedestals, they ask, “What are the newspapers saying about me?” and not “What is the right policy to support?” The Torah does not spell out the sins of the leader… but is purposely vague and uncertain. Maybe there was a moment of pride… of anger… a careless word… maybe he failed to apply the wisdom of his mind to today and was satisfied with repetitions of insight taken from remote yesterdays.” It is not the gross and obvious sins that spell defeat but rather the subtle and intangible and impalpable corrosions” that prevent them from entering the Promised Land. (Rabbi Morris Adler)

Was it a punishment or a convenient cover for a more important lesson?

Wisdom by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z'l

One of the most striking features of Judaism is that it is not centered on a single figure - a founder - who dominates its entire history. To the contrary, each age gave rise to its own leaders, and they were different from one another, not only in personality but in the type of leadership they exercised. First came the age of the patriarchs and matriarchs. Then came Moses and his disciple Joshua. They were followed by a succession of figures known generically as 'judges', though their role was more military than judicial. With Saul, monarchy was born - though even then, kings were not the only leaders; there were prophets and priests as well. With Ezra a new figure emerges: the 'scribe', the teacher as hero. Then came elders, Sages, masters of halakhah and aggadah....

Each age produces its leaders, and each leader is a function of an age. There may be - indeed there are - certain timeless truths about leadership. A leader must have courage and integrity. He must be able, say the Sages, to relate to each individual according to his or her distinctive needs. Above all, a leader must constantly learn (a king must study the Torah "all the days of his life"). But these are necessary, not sufficient, conditions. A leader must be sensitive to the call of the hour - this hour, this generation, this chapter in the long story of a people. And because he or she is of a specific generation, even the greatest leader cannot meet the challenges of a different generation. That is not a failing. It is the existential condition of humanity.

The remarkable fact about Moses and the rock is the way he observes precedent. Almost forty years earlier, in similar circumstances, God had told him to take his staff and strike the rock. Now too, God told him to take his staff. Evidently Moses inferred that he was being told to act this time as he had before, which is what he does. He strikes the rock. What he failed to understand was that time had changed in one essential detail. He was facing a new generation. The people he confronted the first time were those who had spent much of their lives as slaves in Egypt. Those he now faced were born in freedom in the wilderness.

There is one critical difference between slaves and free human beings. Slaves respond to orders. Free people do not. They must be educated, informed, instructed, taught - for if not, they will not learn to take responsibility. Slaves understand that a stick is used for striking. That is how slave-masters compel obedience. Indeed that was Moses' first encounter with his people, when he saw an Egyptian beating an Israelite. But free human beings must not be struck. They respond, not to power but persuasion. They need to be spoken to....

Moses' inability to hear this distinction was not a failing, still less was it a sin. It was an inescapable consequence of the fact that he was mortal. A figure capable of leading slaves to freedom is not the same as one able to lead free human beings from a nomadic existence in the wilderness to the conquest and settlement of a land. These are different challenges, and they need different types of leadership....

If this interpretation is correct, then Moses did not sin, nor was he punished.... The fact that Moses was not destined to enter the promised land was not a punishment but the very condition of his (and our) mortality... For each of us, there is a Jordan we will not cross, however long we live, however far we travel. "It is not for you to complete the task," said Rabbi Tarfon, "but neither are you free to disengage from it." But this is not inherently tragic. What we begin, others will complete - if we have taught them how.

Moses was a great leader, the greatest of all time. But he was also the supreme teacher. The difference is that his leadership lasted for forty years, while his teachings have endured for more than three thousand years (that, incidentally, is why we call him Mosheh Rabbenu, "Moses our teacher", not "Moses our leader"). This is not to devalue leadership: to the contrary. Had Moses only taught, not led, the Israelites would not have left Egypt. The message of the rock is not that leadership does not matter: it is that leadership must be of its time. A teacher may live in the world of ancient texts and distant hopes, but a leader must hear the music of the age and address the needs and possibilities of now.