The Splitting at Meribah: Words and Deeds

At the beginning of this week’s Torah reading, Parashat Chukat, Miriam has died, and the Israelites can find no water in the desert (Numbers 20:1–2).

The people, once again, express their defeatism (Numbers 20:2–5). God orders Moses and Aaron to assemble the people, speak to a rock, and water will spring forth (Numbers 20:7–8). Moses proceeds to call the Israelites “rebels” and strikes the rock (Numbers 20:10–11). As had happened before (Exodus 17:6), water emerged. But God tells Moses and Aaron that they have not trusted in God, and they would not enter the promised land (Numbers 20:12).

The episode at Meribah is mysterious. Why did Moses strike the rock? Did it represent his stubborn people, whom he once again had to rescue in light of their lack of trust in their destiny and in their partnership with God to achieve it? Was Moses angered by a perceived humiliation of being ordered to speak with an inanimate object? Was the punishment out of proportion to the crime? God—at Moses’ behest—has again and again forgiven Israelites for their faithlessness and fickleness (Numbers 14:20). Why not forgive Moses and Aaron for adopting the wrong methodology to pursue an ordained objective?

For two millennia, commentators in the Tradition have explored the meaning and consequences of the rock-striking episode. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks proposes that it illustrated the need for new human leadership to accompany the change of the Israelites being led. The new generation, which would enter the promised land, were a people born in freedom; and you inspire and guide free people by words, not by menacing physical demonstrations.

There is some truth in Sacks’ views, but we need to put them in wider context: about the change in God’s own leadership. It is not as though Moses was chronically or rigidly committed to action over words. Earlier, before the Israelites come together and leave Egypt, he instructs them on how to prepare for their escape (Exodus 12:3–28). He directs them on how to carry out the paschal lamb sacrifice and the marking of their doors to spare themselves the slaying of the firstborn (Exodus 12:29–30). At Sinai, after the crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:21–22), he brought words of God to his people. Moses brought down the tablets from the mountaintop (Exodus 31:18). After a rock-striking kind of physical outburst—smashing the tablets in the face of the golden calf episode (Exodus 32:15–19)—he returns with another set of engraved words (Exodus 34:1–4). Later, after the striking of the rock episode, Moses gives his valedictory address: the entire book of Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 1:1–31:30), a staggering verbal performance by a 120-year-old.

Moses was not only adept at speaking with the Israelites—he was more than skillful at advocating on their behalf with God himself (Numbers 14:13–20). He not only pleads for an outcome—spare the Israelites from punishment for their misdeed—but provides compelling reasons why God should do so—such as the need to preserve His repute in the wider world.

What is changing by the time of the rock-striking episode is not only the needs of his people. It is the methodology of God Himself. He has freed the Israelites through a display of miracles and wonders—the plagues in Egypt (Exodus 7:14–12:30), the parting of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:21–22). But increasingly, his interventions in history will be more subtle; if the Israelites are redeemed from other captivities, it will be through the hand of a liberator like Cyrus (Isaiah 45:1–3) and without an overt display of divine power.

In the later time of the Prophet Elijah, God verifies the prophet’s standing in the face of his competitors with an Exodus-like intervention: his fire consumes Elijah’s idolatrous competitors (1 Kings 18:38–39). Later, however, Elijah is told that God is not in thunder and lightning, but—in one of the most remembered phrases of the entire Bible—in a still small voice (1 Kings 19:11–12). The sound of God is not all thunder that all can hear, but a whisper that can be heard by a man who is prepared to quietly listen.

One of the most moving episodes in the entire Talmud is one I keep returning to—Akhnai’s oven (Bava Metzia 59b). A group of rabbis is debating a point of holy law. One of them summons up old-fashioned spectacles to support his interpretation; at his behest, rivers are diverted, carob trees move, the walls of the study hall bend, a voice from heaven speaks in concurrence. But the majority of the rabbis insist that the Torah is not in spectacles; it is in the hearts of the Israelite people, where the holy books are inscribed, and from where their proper understanding must emerge.

The history of the Jewish people is a story of human words and deeds, and Divine words and deeds. The divine deeds, the miracles and wonders, are perhaps in the far distant past—at least any deeds that are clearly visible and audible as signs from heaven. The words of God live on, and the Jewish people interpret them, each generation reverent of the past understandings, each capable of new understandings.

And the deeds of redemption? Inspired by the words, we can hope, but in these times, not the deeds of an imposing Creator, but the deeds of his people. The words of God sustained the Jewish people through two millennia of dispersal. There is a luminous combination in the scriptures of thoughts—including nuance and contradiction—righteous aspiration and sheer literary mastery.

In exile and dispersion, lacking any kind of political power, the Jewish Tradition lived on through the reverence and creative interpretation and elaboration of the words of the sacred scriptures. The survival of the Jews is often viewed as miraculous; but where were the miraculous deeds from Heaven, the signs and wonders from Heaven? They were often—always?—absent.

While the Passover Haggadah says that in every generation God will save us, there have been no more partings of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:21–22), no more stopping of the sun in its course as in the time of Joshua (Joshua 10:12–14), Moses’ successor, so they could finish a battle in victory.

The Jewish people still carry the words of the Tradition, from the Bible and beyond, in their hearts. In these times, we are assaulted, at times almost overwhelmed, by the blaring cant of those who hate us. We are inundated with the rote repetition of the clichés of modern antisemitism, gushing from would-be intellectuals who pretend to have achieved a higher freedom and enlightenment, but are in the thrall of a leftist quasi-religion. They are rigid, close-minded, resistant to empirical evidence, preeningly self-righteous and narcissistic. Old Jew hatred in new plastic bottles.

A people who produced and preserved the most influential words in world history beset with a drone of defamation. We wish there could again be righteous storms from heaven. Those days are long gone. Those who believe in the messianic age hope for their return. In the meantime, the deeds of redemption may be inspired by the scriptures, may be inspired by the kinetic partnership of God and man in ancient times, but now—the deeds of redemption are acts of reverence and kindness to preserve the Tradition and acts of physical and mental courage, daring, and stamina by the people who keep the tradition alive.

In the last few weeks, strikes from the heavens devastated a nuclear and missile program designed to annihilate Israel. The bolts were not, however, from the Creator, but from skilled and courageous aviators among His creations. Some may have been religious, some secular, but perhaps many were inspired by both the words and deeds of the era when God directly manifested his words and deeds before all of Israel and its enemies.