Covering Up and Circumcision of Lips: Parshat Vaera
Exactly two years ago, I wrote in my blog entitled “Our Humble Leaders of the IDF and the Israelites” as follows:
Maj. Gen. Herzi Halevi took over Monday as the 23rd Commander of the Israel Defense Forces, and vowed to keep politics out of the IDF. His ending words about himself as a member of the religious scouts (tzofim) in Jerusalem were as follows: ‘Today with modesty and humbleness (tzeniut ve-anava) I am ready to take on this job’. Anyone with a sensitive ear will immediately think of Moses who is described by God as very humble/modest — anav me’od (Numbers 12:3). The context of this was when his siblings Miriam and Aaron confronted him about the Cushite woman and God was angry with them about this mini-rebellion. Unfortunately, modesty is a trait lacking in almost every one of our leaders today and would that Halevi be a role model for the rest of the world. But that is not the case. Most leaders today are so sure of themselves. Their attitude is akin to that of Louis XV who is supposed to have said après moi le deluge! In other words, an attitude of: I couldn’t care less what will happen after I am no longer around. Unfortunately, people who choose leaders like that (or their associates) do not understand what they are voting for until it is too late.
Today we are writing eulogies for Halevi. Unlike, the rest of our leadership, he took full responsibility for his failure as the IDF chief of command and will resign in March. I am very sad about this. Clearly his modesty and his vow to keep politics out of the army did him no good in our world of dog eat dog. A year later I wrote:
We all know the story of how Moses goes to Pharaoh and demands that he let his people go free and that it takes ten plagues to finally convince the latter to let them go. In this week’s parsha Va-era, Pharaoh is exposed to the first three plagues, but God “hardens” his heart so that he doesn’t release his slaves. But it is not only Pharaoh who suffers, it is his entire population. Pharaoh doesn’t seem to care about his own citizens; he only cares about himself. Only with the last and tenth plague, the one about killing the first born, –which will bring the suffering into HIS OWN household, will he do an about face and let the Israelite people go.
This ancient story is too close to comfort to our story today. We have our own hard-hearted Pharaoh in place, with Israel’s hardest-line government ever, but no Moses to lead us out of our misery. Our Prime Minister and his cronies have hardened their hearts in order to stay in power and take reckless gambles with our lives in order that all will miraculously turn out well for them. Will this go on until their own lives and their own children are threatened? They don’t seem to care about the harm that an endless war, with no plans for the future, causes the citizens that elected them. All they want is to stay in power. Imagine if there was a tzav shemoneh for all the Knesset members and the ministers. What would happen if they were called up for an open-ended period of time to serve on the battlefield? What would happen when the screaming of the people got to be too much and ended up affecting their own households? Pharaoh learned his lesson:
In the middle of the night יהוה struck down all the [male] first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sat on the throne to the first-born of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the first-born of the cattle. And Pharaoh arose in the night, with all his courtiers and all the Egyptians—because there was a loud cry in Egypt; for there was no house where there was not someone dead (Exodus 12: 29-31).
When Pharaoh was called down from his perch and forced to see that the next one to die would be his first born and perhaps himself, he realized that it was time to let go. All that was in last year’s blog when I wrote about the standoff between Pharaoh and God’s representative Moses–two stiff-necked characters. When will it all end? Underlying all this is that the good among us do not want the responsibility of leadership. They do not want to get dirty in the world of politics. Take Moses as an example
UNCIRCUMCISED LIPS: Aral Sefatayim:
God tells Moses: “Go and tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the Israelites depart from his land.” Moses answers God: “If the children of Israel would not listen to me; how do you expect Pharaoh to listen to me, after all I am incapable of speech!” עֲרַ֥ל שְׂפָתָֽיִם (Exodus 6:11-13). At this point God speaks to both Moses and Aaron and commands them both to deliver his message to both Pharaoh and the children of Israel. This “conversation” is followed by a long list of the genealogy of the Israelites, perhaps to reassure Moses, or to give him a history lesson, since he grew up in the palace. However, right after this, Moses again complains to God, repeating that he is aral sefatayim. And God repeats this time that it will be Aaron who will be the spokesperson: “See, I place you in the role of God to Pharaoh, with your brother Aaron as your prophet.” So despite all of Moses’s efforts to avoid being God’s messenger, he is forced into the job.
What does it mean to be incapable of speech: is it a physical defect, or a moral defect? In Jeremiah 6:10, the ear is uncircumcised, it is unreceptive. And in Jeremiah 9:25 it is the heart or one’s character that is defective. According to Rashi, it is a blockage—something that is holding Moses back from being a leader. Clearly the narrator wants us to pay attention to this phrase, for he repeats it twice. Not everyone is gifted with speech. In fact, very often it is the demagogue who is best suited to convince people and who is chosen to lead. Not everyone is meant to be a leader and the tragedy of Moses is that he was put into a situation by God, where he had no choice but to lead. And his flaws remained throughout his life. Each time the people rebelled and challenged him God had to reassure him. He held his hand, took his side and sometimes put him at odds with the people. Because of Moses’s personal flaws, one of which was his inability to speak, God has him perform miracles to convince him and the nation and ultimately the Egyptians, that he is the true representative of God. But all this is at a cost. The miracles will end up being the 10 plagues and will result in endless suffering to the Egyptians.
THE ORIGIN OF CIRCUMCISION
It is interesting that Isaiah also complains of his lips being tameh (unclean or impure) and thus unworthy of being a messenger of God. His lips are physically cured by an angel who brings a burning coal and touches Isaiah’s mouth and psychologically cures him:
I cried, “Woe is me; I am lost! For I am a man of impure lips And I live among a people of impure lips; Yet my own eyes have beheld The Sovereign GOD of Hosts.” Then one of the seraphs—who had taken a live coal from the altar with a pair of tongs—flew over to me, touched it to my lips, and declared, “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt shall depart and your sin be purged away” (Isaiah 6: 5-7).
Both Moses and Isaiah understand that with leadership comes responsibility—neither of them want it—but they are called by God and have no choice. Both of them say in the end Okay, I’ll go—but with great reluctance. Isaiah says hinneni shelacheni– “Here am I; send me” (vs. 8). This recalls Moses, when God called to him out of the bush saying “Moses! Moses!” And Moses answered, “Here I am.” Hinneni.
But whereas Isaiah agrees with full commitment, Moses does not; he simply states that he is there—but he remains throughout a reluctant leader. One can also compare Moses to Abraham, who gets a name change (from Abram to Abraham) right before the commandment to circumcise all the males in his family, including his slaves. He does so obediently, because it is connected with the covenant (the b’rit) and the promise of land for future generations. And also because of the threat behind non-observance of the commandment: “any male who is uncircumcised, who fails to circumcise the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from kin; he has broken My covenant” (Genesis 17:14)
I am sad today, that the army general, who showed such promise at the beginning and who described himself as being a modest person, misread the signals of October 7th. He will “cut himself off” from the army establishment that is his home. He is not the only one to be at fault. But at the moment, he is the most important person to take full responsibility. He himself, said that he will take this failure to his dying day: “I have borne the consequences of that terrible day ever since and will carry them with me for the rest of my life.” No one forced him to be a general. He worked hard to get to that position of trust. He failed us and took responsibility. We put our trust in him and when he failed, he admitted it. Yet there are those who seek power only for the sake of power and they succeed because they know the ropes, they know how to manipulate and play the dirty games necessary to stay in power. And they never admit failure. We should not trust them; they are only out for their own good. We must continue to criticize and demonstrate and hopefully one day we will find a leader whom we can trust, who will be honest and who will not be seeking power for the sake of power.