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.