JUNE 8 • 2023 | 43

A LESSON IN HUMILITY
In the third act, we finally see 
where this drama has been 
tending. Now Moses’ own 
brother and sister, Aaron and 
Miriam, start disparaging him. 
The cause of their complaint 
(the “Ethiopian woman” he had 
taken as wife) is not clear and 
there are many interpretations. 
The point, though, is that for 
Moses, this is the “Et tu, Brute?” 
moment. He has been betrayed, 
or at least slandered, by those 
closest to him. Yet Moses is 
unaffected. It is here that the 
Torah makes its great statement:
“Now the man Moses was 
very humble, more so than any 
other man on Earth. (Num. 12:3)
This is a novum in history. 
The idea that a leader’s highest 
virtue is humility must have 
seemed absurd, almost self-con-
tradictory, in the ancient world. 
Leaders were proud, magnif-
icent, distinguished by their 
dress, appearance and regal 
manner. They built temples in 
their own honor. They had tri-
umphant inscriptions engraved 
for posterity. Their role was 
not to serve but to be served. 
Everyone else was expected to 
be humble, not they. Humility 
and majesty could not coexist.
In Judaism, this entire config-
uration was overturned. Leaders 
were there to serve, not to be 
served. Moses’ highest accolade 
was to be called Eved Hashem, 
God’s servant. Only one other 
person, Joshua, his successor, 
earns this title in Tanach. The 
architectural symbolism of the 
two great empires of the ancient 
world, the Mesopotamian zig-
gurat (the “tower of Babel”) and 
the pyramids of Egypt, visually 
represented a hierarchical soci-
ety, broad at the base, narrow 
at the top. The Jewish symbol, 
the menorah, was the opposite, 
broad at the top, narrow at the 
base, as if to say that in Judaism 

the leader serves the people, not 
vice versa. Moses’ first response 
to God’s call at the Burning 
Bush was one of humility: “Who 
am I, to bring the Israelites out 
of Egypt?” (Ex. 3:11). It was pre-
cisely this humility that qualified 
him to lead.
In Behaalotecha, we track the 
psychological process by which 
Moses acquires a yet deeper 
level of humility. Under the 
stress of Israel’s continued recal-
citrance, Moses turns inward. 
Listen again to what he says: 
“Why have I found so little favor 
in Your sight …? Did I conceive 
all these people? Did I give them 
birth? … Where can I get meat 
for all these people? … I cannot 
carry bear these people alone; 
the burden is too heavy for me.
”
The key words here are “I,
” 
“me” and “myself.
” Moses has 
lapsed into the first-person 
singular. He sees the Israelites’ 
behavior as a challenge to 
himself, not God. God has to 
remind him, “Is the Lord’s arm 
too short”? It isn’t about Moses; 
it is about what and whom 
Moses represents.

A NEED FOR OTHERS
Moses had been, for too long, 
alone. It was not that he needed 
the help of others to provide 
the people with food. That 
was something God would do 
without the need for any human 
intervention. It was that he 
needed the company of others to 
end his almost unbearable isola-
tion. As I have noted elsewhere, 
the Torah only twice contains 
the phrase, lo tov, “not good,
” 
once at the start of the human 
story when God says: “It is not 
good for man to be alone,
” (Gen. 
2:18), a second time when Yitro 
sees Moses leading alone and 
says: “What you are doing is not 
good.
” (Ex. 18:17) We cannot 
live alone. We cannot lead alone.
As soon as Moses sees the 

70 elders share his spirit, his 
depression disappears. He can 
say to Joshua, “
Are you jealous 
on my behalf?” And he is undis-
turbed by the complaint of his 
own brother and sister, praying 
to God on Miriam’s behalf when 
she is punished with leprosy. He 
has recovered his humility.
We now understand what 
humility is. It is not self-abase-
ment. A statement often 
attributed to C. S. Lewis puts it 
best: Humility is not thinking 
less of yourself. It is thinking of 
yourself less.
True humility means silencing 
the “I.
” For genuinely humble 
people, it is God and other peo-
ple and principle that matter, 
not me. As it was once said of a 
great religious leader, “He was a 
man who took God so seriously 
that he didn’t have to take him-
self seriously at all.
”
Rabbi Yochanan said, 
“Wherever you find the great-
ness of the Holy One, blessed be 
He, there you find His humili-
ty.
” (Megillah 31a). Greatness is 
humility, for God and for those 
who seek to walk in His ways. It 
is also the greatest single source 
of strength, for if we do not 
think about the “I,
” we cannot be 
injured by those who criticize or 
demean us. They are shooting at 
a target that no longer exists.
What Behaalotecha is telling 
us through these three scenes in 
Moses’ life is that we sometimes 
achieve humility only after a 
great psychological crisis. It is 
only after Moses had suffered 
a breakdown and prayed to die 
that we hear the words, “The 
man Moses was very humble, 
more so than anyone on earth.
” 
Suffering breaks through the 
carapace of the self, making us 
realize that what matters is not 
self-regard but rather the part 
we play in a scheme altogether 
larger than we are. 
Brooks reminds us that 

Abraham Lincoln, who suffered 
from depression, emerged from 
the crisis of civil war with the 
sense that “Providence had 
taken control of his life, that 
he was a small instrument in a 
transcendent task.
” 
The right response to exis-
tential pain, Brooks says, is not 
pleasure but holiness, by which 
he means, “seeing the pain as 
part of a moral narrative and 
trying to redeem something bad 
by turning it into something 
sacred, some act of sacrificial 
service that will put oneself in 
fraternity with the wider com-
munity and with eternal moral 
demands.
” This, for me, was 
epitomized by the parents of 
the three Israeli teenagers killed 
in the summer of 2014, who 
responded to their loss by creat-
ing a series of awards for those 
who have done most to enhance 
the unity of the Jewish people 
— turning their pain outward 
and using it to help heal other 
wounds within the nation.
Crisis, failure, loss or pain can 
move us from Adam I to Adam 
II, from self- to other-directed-
ness, from mastery to service, 
and from the vulnerability of the 
“I” to the humility that “reminds 
you that you are not the center 
of the universe,
” but rather that 
“you serve a larger order.
” 
Those who have humility 
are open to things greater than 
themselves while those who lack 
it are not. That is why those who 
lack it make you feel small while 
those who have it make you feel 
enlarged. Their humility inspires 
greatness in others. 

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-

2020) was a global religious leader, 

philosopher, the author of more than 

25 books and moral voice for our 

time. His series of essays on the 

weekly Torah portion, titled “Covenant 

& Conversation” will continue to be 

shared and distributed around the 

world. 

