It’s exam season, here’s a little physics, for those of us who still shudder at the thought of spending these weeks desperately trying to remember Newton’s First Law of Motion, or some such.
An object, Newton articulated, will remain in uniform motion,
in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external
force.
I’m not, you are probably relieved to hear, going to give a
sermon on exam stresses, or Physics. But I am interested in the way in which we
travel – in uniform motion or in a changed state – through our lives.
I am interested in the way in which once set in motion, we
continue – which is fine if we were set in motion running directly alongside every
other human being in the world, each of us set in motion exactly in unison, so we
can all travel together in this lonely world.
But what if, for whatever reason, we weren’t set into the
world in such perfect alignment with our fellows? What if, what with us all
being unique and individual and even deliberately created unique and individual,
we were created in diversity – different attitudes, different abilities,
different goals, different loves and different hates. If that is the case, then
the straight lines go off in opposition.
I mean, if that is the case, and I think that really is the
case, then the journey through life would be one of increasingly discovering
one’s aloneness, one’s opposition and the loss of fellow travellers. And it
really can, in this strange world in which we live, too often feel as if we are
increasingly siloed and at odds and in opposition.
If that is the case, then surely the single most important
lesson we could imagine, the single most important thing to discover is how to
be, as Newton put it, an external force that can pull us away from our straight
lines, bend us towards one another, align us, rather than leave us to our
lonely straight lines of uninterrupted wandering.
I want to look at Moses, Moshe Rabeinu, in this context, and
in particular, the remarkable moment in the heart of the story we read today.
The spies go off. They come back with a bad report – dibat ha-aretz.
And the dibah, the Torah tells us, spreads through the camp, vyotziu dibat Haaretz
- and soon everyone is heading off in their own directions of mistrust and
fear and opposition. And the unity of the people is falling apart.
And it gets worse. When the report of these revolting spies
reaches God, God decides God has had enough, “How long will this people despise
me [says God,] I will smite them with pestilence and destroy them.” And here we
have our scene, of the people heading off in their varying directions of diba –
bad-mouthing the land and the leadership, and God, God, heading off in a
direction of destruction.
And then along comes this external force, a force that succeeds
in changing the will of God, and bending the straight lines from opposition and
conflagration into something more hopeful.
Moses starts with a brilliant ploy – God, if you destroy the Children
of Israel now, all the other nations will think it’s because you weren’t able
to bring them into the Land as you promised.
It’s an appeal to God’s sense of self – God wants to be seen
to be powerful. The Children of Israel don’t see that, so God is ready to
destroy them, but wait, Moses says, if you do, everyone else will think you are
lacking in power.
There’s a lovely comment on this in the Talmud Brachot.
“What,” the Rabbis imagine God responding to Moses (brachot
32a), “what do you mean the people won’t think I’m powerful, didn’t they see
the miracles I wrought when the Children of Israel crossed the sea?” “Ah,” they
imagine Moses responding, “they’ll think it was just that you were more
powerful than that bumpkin Pharoah.” The Talmud doesn’t use the term ‘bumpkin.’
The way to change the will of God, the way to bend disparate
and disparating forces in the world is to meet them where they are, and
persuade them it is in their interests to bend, persuade them that the bigger truths
of who they wish to be are only available if they change course. That takes
guts and sophistication and a particular kind of emotional intelligence. All of
which Moses possess.
But this opening salvo is just the warmup. Moses returns with
one of the most remarkable speeches in all of the Torah.
"Now may God’s strength be made
greater, just as you have declared: The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in
love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty
unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the fathers to the third
and fourth generation.' In accordance with your great love, forgive the sin of
these people, just as you have pardoned them from the time they left Egypt
until now."
And God changes.
God replies, I will forgive them, as they request. We use that
phrasing still, right through Yom Kippur – Vesalachti Kidvarecha. Moses
saves the children of Israel, Moses bends the will of God towards compassion
and great love, away from anger – justifiable as it may be – and destructiveness.
Again, the rabbis capture and amplify what is quite so
remarkable about this brief speech.
Make great – they ask in Midrash Yelamdeinu – how is it great
for God to let the children of Israel off the punishment that is their definite
due? The answer comes - Make your aspect of mercy greater than your aspect of
strict judgement.
There is even, in some scrolls, a tradition of writing one of
the letters of ‘Make great’ supersize in
our Torah scrolls. It’s the letter Yud of Yigdal – the letter that makes the
word ‘great’ – Gadol – into a verb in the imperfect, incompleted form – you are
not quite at your greatest yet, Moses is saying to God, you need to get even
greater, and the way to do that is to develop the ability to forgive and show a
capacity to forgive that, frankly, God has failed to show before;
And what a list of characteristics Moses reminds God are utterly
essential to the way in which God wishes to be, even if they are not the way
God has just said God will respond.
Slow to anger?
Forgiving sin and rebellion?
Sure God will punish the evildoers, but Moses allows God to
find a place of softness, and Moses allows God to find the ability to define
God’s self from that place of softness.
And Moses saves a future for the people of Israel.
Again, there’s a lovely Rabbinic moment – in Sanhedrin 110 a-b
- when the Rabbis imagine Moses and God on the mountain, and God is giving
dictation to Moses. I’m going to be slow to anger, God says, “Really?” Says Moses,
“even to the wicked,” “Trust me,” says God, “You’re going to need it when they
rebel.”
I love this kind of rabbinic interplay – sharpening and heightening
the relationship between Moses and God. One leans into the other, and the other
leans back.
God lift Moses up, higher than any human, and in return Moses
pulls God higher, higher, even than God aspired to be.
This is how we can bend in towards one another, in a world
where, without empathy, seeking out points of contact and calling each of us
towards the person we wish to be – rather than that which we become when our
tempers fray and our patience is tested.
This is how the world can be healed.
May we all be merited to find such encounters in our own lives –
may we have people who can bend us towards better versions of ourselves.
And may we all have the courage to bend others, to lift them too towards their
better selves so we may all live in a world less lonely and more united in love.
Shabbat Shalom
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