Two Leaders in One

One of my great regrets of my years in Chicago is that I never took a class with Dr. Benjamin Sommer. When I was a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, Dr. Sommer was a professor of Bible on the other side of town at Northwestern University. Though I will always be grateful for his warmth and wise counsel, by the time I might have taken a class with him, he was already on his way to a prestigious appointment as Professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is, without a doubt, one of the finest scholars of the Hebrew Bible today, his many books and articles blending rigorous scholarship with deep devotion to the Torah. More than once, I have flipped through the JTS course catalogue wishing that I could audit his class, and the welcome mat is always out for him here at Park Avenue. He is a superb teacher. Should you ever have an opportunity to study with him, do yourself a favor and sign up. I promise you, you won’t be disappointed.

This morning I want to teach from one of Dr. Sommer’s articles, whose subject matter comes directly from this week’s parashah. The article was published in the Journal of Biblical Literature (118/4). Though its title, “Reflecting on Moses: The Redaction of Numbers 11,” may not sound like a nail-biter, if I do my job right over the next few minutes, not only will you find the questions Dr. Sommer raises intriguing on their own right, but you will discover as I did that his inquiries have application well beyond the text of the Torah itself.

In a nutshell: In reading our parashah, specifically Numbers, chapters 11-12, Dr. Sommer observes a number of incongruities in the storyline regarding the figure of Moses. There is an unevenness to the text, multiple – almost competing – narrative elements, which for our purposes we will call story A and story B. Just as there are two different creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, and just as there are multiple versions of Noah and the flood – sometimes with two of each kind of animal on the ark, sometimes with seven – here, too, there seem to be two different narrative strands woven together. Sommer observes the composite nature of the text, and spends the bulk of his article untangling which part is which and how it all fits together.

In story A, Moses is not portrayed in a particularly positive light. When the Israelites complain that they are hungry, Moses erupts into a long and angry outburst, haranguing God for having put him in such a horrible leadership position. “Am I responsible for this people? Moses demands. “Should I have to care for it as if I were its nursing father?” Moses is petulant and bitter and full of self-pity. Worse, Sommer continues, Moses seems to doubt whether God can supply enough food for the Israelites, a lack of trust to which God responds in anger.

Interwoven with that story, however, is another story. As in story A, the people complain, are punished by God, and turn to Moses to assuage God’s wrath. Here in story B, however, God appoints seventy elders to assist Moses – affirming Moses’ pre-eminent status while helping him spread the burden of leadership he faces. Two men, Eldad and Medad, begin to prophesy in the Israelite camp. Joshua, Moses’ right-hand man, fears a challenge to Moses’ authority and informs Moses of what he perceives as their rebellion. But it is not Eldad and Medad who receive a rebuke, rather Joshua, to whom Moses expresses his wish “that all the people were prophets.” In other words, Moses seems to want others to step up as leaders. No sooner has this crisis passed, than Moses’ own siblings, Aaron and Miriam, speak out against their brother, challenging whether indeed God has spoken only through Moses. Not only does the text go to great lengths to signal Moses’ humility, “more humble than any other man on earth,” but it is Moses himself who prays on behalf of Miriam when she is punished by God for her disloyalty to her brother.

I am not able to cover Sommer’s entire article, but the upshot is that embedded in a single narrative there may in fact be two distinct stories that have been spliced together. The Moses A story paints a portrait of a rather self-centered leader, hierarchical, full of first-person declarations and righteous indignation. The other story paints a totally different picture of our leader. Moses B is democratically inclined, self-effacing and selfless. Sommers lays it out like a grid verse by verse – one Moses, split into two.

All of which leads to the interesting question: why? Why would a single text contain such radically different viewpoints? Is it possible that the author of the Bible, what Bible scholars call “The Redactor,” was not aware of the disjointed text? How is it possible that these two mutually exclusive portraits of Moses could be contained in one chapter? Did the author, Sommer asks, suffer from aphasia, or “blindly paste together random scraps in a darkened room?” Is it two narratives, or is it one? What are we to make of these incongruous, if not incompatible, characterizations of our greatest prophet?

To which Sommer answers: “Exactly!” Whether you believe the author or redactor of the Torah to be human or divine, the very point of the uneven text is to reflect the tensions embedded in Moses himself. Was Moses’ leadership style hierarchical, personality-driven and controlling; or was Moses a humble, “not about me,” non-hierarchical sort of leader? Was he Moses A or was he Moses B? The question itself is the answer. Moses was Moses A; Moses was Moses B. To paraphrase Faye Dunaway in Chinatown: he was Moses A and Moses B, and that is the very point the text is trying to communicate.

It is tempting to characterize our greatest leader as exemplifying only one leadership style. But the impossibility of doing that does not stem only from today’s Torah reading. The tension exists in his personality from the wicker basket on the Nile right up to Moses’ death. There is the Moses of the Burning Bush, resisting the call to leadership, humble and demurring. And there is the assertive Moses, the one who kills the Egyptian, who smashes the tablets and strikes the rock. Depending on who you are, the text you are citing, and the point you are trying to make, you may be inclined to draw from one model and the ignore the other, but the truth is that they exist side-by-side. At one juncture Moses wishes the people destroyed, and moments later he intercedes on their behalf to stay God’s wrath. In one text, Moses stands toe-to-toe with Pharaoh, in another he is but one voice singing among the chorus of Israel as they cross the sea together. Here Moses is identified as the only one to liaise with God, elsewhere he appoints leaders to share the burdens of leadership. “Never again,” our Torah will conclude, “did a prophet like Moses arise in Israel.” (Deuteronomy 34:10) Which Moses was it? The “it’s not about me” Moses, or the “it’s all about me” Moses? The answer is that it is a bit of both.

While we have now extended well beyond the scope of Sommer’s article, the astute reader of the biblical text knows not only that Moses’ leadership style was multidimensional, but that both aspects were necessary for Israel’s journey through desert. Were it not for Moses’ “just do it” wiring, were it not for his single-mindedness of purpose, the children of Israel would still be languishing in Egypt. And yet, no matter how driven Moses may have been, it is the constancy of his humility that assures both Israel (and the reader) that his actions are never about him. His purpose is always to serve the greater good and fulfill the task at hand. Neither Moses A nor Moses B would have sufficed; both were necessary to lead the Children of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land.

Ultimately, we also know that neither Moses A, nor Moses B, nor Moses A and B was enough. As we shall discover in the weeks to come, there is a direct correlation between the tensions within Moses’ leadership style and Israel’s readiness to enter a new chapter of their existence. The generation of the desert died in the desert because they were neither able to detach themselves from their past Egyptian servitude, nor did they demonstrate the fortitude of spirit to conquer the land. We can blame the Israelites, but it was arguably the fault of their leader, who failed to create a culture of stewardship that would have empowered them to arrive at their wished for goal. Rarely do we pause to reflect on the fact that the greatest leader in Jewish history – tasked to lead a people into the Promised Land – actually fell short of his stated mission. Yes, he led them through the sea and brought them to the border, but neither he nor the generation of the Exodus would enter the Land. Moses may have been the greatest leader our people has ever known, but anyone studying his leadership style knows that we have as much to learn from his missteps and mistakes as we do from his virtues and victories.

The journeys of our lives can last four years or forty years. Personal, professional and otherwise, there is not one of us in this room that is not trying to reach a Promised Land. The institutions we are seeking to build – be it our home, our synagogue or our workplace – call on us to draw on a variety of leadership styles. It is never one or another. Perhaps true wisdom is the ability to know what muscle group to deploy at what moment. And nobody gets it right all the time, not even Moses. We are all works in progress. But maybe, just maybe, if we all walk this world aware of the question, aware of the tension – we will succeed in reaching the banks of the Jordan and some of us, perhaps, may even be lucky enough to enter the Promised Land.