Shmot 5773

 

The message I choose to focus on this week is humility. As defined to me by my elementary school rabbi, Steven Moskowitz, it refers to recognizing that one's God-given abilities must be used for the betterment of mankind; it is the rejection of one's talents and strengths that leads one to not only be at dissonance with himself but far from fulfilling the role entrusted to him.

 

Eisav, after all, did not want to receive the firstborn rights because he feared that though he had the abilities to conduct the observance of the firstborn in the home of Hashem (the firstborns were only replaced by the Kohanim after the former sinned in the sin of the golden calf), he simultaneously felt that it would be too demanding on his constitution were he to engage in the minute nuiasances of the Temple service. When he gave up the birthright, Hashem explicitly states, "And Eisav disgraced the birthright!"

 

When Moshe goes out to see the suffering of his people, it is out of humility that he strikes the Egyptian who had been beating his fellow Jew. When he looked from one direction to the next taught YU President Richard Joel, he was in fact looking inwards to discover his own manhood; when he saw that there was no "man" within, he decided to act.

 

This safe motif can be found when Moshe faces Hashem at the burning bush. Perhaps it can be said that the reason- though the bush burned it was not consumed- can be linked to the spiritual reality or tenor of Hashem's inscrutable existence. The same way that mankind cannot conceive answers to the questions the likes of "Can God create a rock he cannot lift?" it can be said that innate to the experience of mankind is a humility founded in being cognizant of our inability to understand Hashem. That creates a rather large and telling irony. It is our recognition of our inability to understand Hashem that solidifies our own belief in our own abilities; Hashem who has entrusted us with these abilities-whose own abilities are beyond us-believes in us! The mysterium magnum as Rav Soloveitchik called it in the Lonely Man of Faith, is not paralyzing yet energizing. Thus when Moshe is asked to remove his shoes, it is to connect with the very source of his life, the earth from which he stems and the earth to which he will return, sensitizing his consciousness to his rootedness to the Eternal one blessed be he.