Of all the questions posed by rabbinic commentators – ancient, medieval, and modern – about the book and story of Exodus, none looms as large or has endured as long as the question of “Why Moses?”
Liberator, lawmaker, and teacher of our people, Moses is the measure against whom every leader has been measured ever since, as the Torah itself concludes: “Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses” (Deuteronomy 34:10). And yet, as vaunted as Moses’s life – and afterlife – would become, his origins are as modest as they are improbable. We barely know his parents at all. The Torah offers no lineage, no fanfare, stating simply: “A certain man of the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman” (Exodus 2:1). There is no annunciation, no heavenly sign announcing his arrival, no moment that tells us this child will change history. Even when God finally does call to him at the burning bush, Moses resists. He demurs. He insists that God has the wrong guy, that he is unworthy, unqualified, slow of speech, that no one will listen to him. Send someone else, he pleads. Moses doesn’t know why he was chosen. Nobody knows why he was chosen.
This morning, I want to offer my own response to this age-old question by way of a close reading of a small cluster of verses that precede Moses’s encounter at the burning bush – three brief scenes of character formation that chart Moses becoming Moses. I want to suggest that together, they signal the core qualities that made him worthy of God’s call, qualities that Moses would be asked to draw upon again and again throughout his life, qualities of leadership of which our own moment stands in desperate need.
Scene One, perhaps the most famous. Moses, raised in the house of Pharaoh, goes out to see his enslaved kinsfolk. He witnesses an Egyptian taskmaster striking a Hebrew. He turns this way and that, and seeing no one, no ish, as the Hebrew puts it, he strikes down the Egyptian and buries him in the sand (Exodus 2:11–12).
The episode is as significant for what it reveals as for what the Torah leaves unsaid. Traditionally, we read this moment as the awakening of Moses’s sense of peoplehood and, perhaps, as an early foreshadowing of his character. This is the first, but not the last time that Moses strikes something in frustration. And while that reading remains compelling, the text invites other interpretations as well. After all, Moses does not “discover” that he was a Hebrew on that day; he has known all along. The Torah is explicit: he went out to see echav, his brothers. His discovery may not have been his identity so much as his sense of obligation. It may have been a moment of existential solidarity with his people or, just as plausibly, a first encounter with the demand of justice itself.
So, too, with the line that Moses “turned this way and that way and saw that there was no one.” We can read it pragmatically: Moses looks around to be sure no one is watching before striking the taskmaster. But we can also read it more poetically – and morally. Moses looks and sees that there is no ish, no one willing to intervene. And in that moment, he refuses to be a bystander. In the absence of an ish, an upstander, Moses becomes one. The interpretive possibilities are many, but the upshot is the same. Moses steps out from the sheltered comforts of Pharaoh’s palace, identifies with the vulnerable, opens his eyes to the harsh realities of his world and his kin – and assumes personal agency. He does not wait to be commanded. He becomes, in that moment, an instrument of justice.
Scene Two: the very next verse, and in biblical time, the very next day. Moses goes out again, but on this occasion, the conflict he encounters is not between an Egyptian and a Hebrew but between two Hebrews. Moses calls out, “Why do you strike your fellow?” The response is swift and sharp: “Who made you chief over us? Are you going to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”
Brief as this episode is, it contains at least three enduring lessons. First, and easily overlooked, Moses’s story is not a “one-and-done.” The day after acting decisively Moses went out again. Leadership, the Torah suggests, is not a moment but a posture, a willingness to show up again the next day and the day after that. Second, and we will return to this point, Moses’s sense of responsibility extends beyond protecting his people from external threat to include confronting internal fractures. It is one thing to step forward when an enemy is clear, when the lines are easy to draw. It is quite another to intervene when the conflict is within the family. To stand not against an oppressor, but between two brothers. This is a different order of courage altogether: the courage to insert oneself into the breach, knowing that neither side will thank you for it. And third, Moses learns that leadership is, at least in part, a thankless calling. “Who made you chief over us?” There is a cost to stepping up. A sacrifice of comfort, of anonymity, of being liked, of being understood. Moses feels it here for the first time; it will not be the last. Every leader who refuses to look away, who refuses to remain neutral, eventually learns the same lesson.
Scene Three: Moses, now on the run, arrives in the land of Midian and sits by a well. There he witnesses the daughters of Midian being harassed by the local shepherds, and once again, Moses intervenes. He drives the shepherds away and waters the women’s flock, a deed they later report to their father in telling terms: “An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds” (Exodus 3:19). On one level, the scene is straightforward. It affirms Moses’s agency and his instinct for justice, and, true to biblical form, provides him with a watering hole love story in keeping with his Genesis forebearers.
What is added, I believe, is the matter of identity. Moses’s first intervention was on behalf of a Hebrew against an Egyptian. The second was between two Hebrews. This third conflict involves people with whom Moses has no familial, tribal, or covenantal connection whatsoever. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose. What makes the moment even more striking is that Moses is identified not as a Hebrew, but as an Egyptian. The credit for this intervention accrues neither to his people nor God, but to a universal moral demand that injustice must be confronted. Something new emerges, even as a pattern takes hold. Moses is not acting out of impulse or loyalty, but beginning to inhabit what would become his vocation – an ingrained readiness to intercede whenever the need arises.
Ten verses, all told: three brief scenes of Moses’s character formation. Individually, collectively, and cumulatively they teach us something essential about him and about leadership in general. These are the core qualities that made Moses worthy of God’s call, qualities he would be required to draw upon again and again in the years ahead.
Most obviously, these scenes reveal Moses’s unwavering defense of his people. We see it when he stands before Pharaoh, when he brings the plagues, when he leads Israel through the sea, when he raises his arms as Amalek attacks, and in every confrontation of the forty-year wilderness journey. Born into privilege, able to pass as Egyptian, Moses nonetheless chooses to bind his fate to that of his people, placing their well-being above his own comfort and security. And it was not always easy. There were moments – when the people complained, when they fashioned the Golden Calf, when they veered into apostasy and despair – when Moses surely longed for an off-ramp. To retire quietly to Boca, maybe tutor bnei mitzvah students, or read a good book. Loving your people, as it turns out, does not always mean liking them. Nor, for that matter, does leadership guarantee that they will like you. “Who made you chief over us?” From the very beginning to the very end – whether in Egypt, at the sea, or across the desert – Moses’s leadership is met with murmuring, mutiny, and resistance. Leadership and popularity, the Torah reminds us, are not coterminous. To show up day after day for your people – those you like and those you do not, when your efforts are appreciated and when they are not – this, too, is leadership.
And is it not just one’s own people. If there is a lasting lesson to be drawn from the interlude in Midian, it is this: as Hebrews, the plight of the non-Hebrew is also our concern. Moses intervenes on behalf of Midianite women who are strangers to him; Abraham pleads for the residents of Sodom who are not of his household; Joseph, as viceroy of Egypt, sustains an entire region in time of famine; Jonah tells Nineveh to repent; and the prophets, again and again, insist that the measure of a covenantal society is how it treats the stranger, the vulnerable, and the powerless in its midst. The Torah’s vision of leadership is unmistakable: fidelity to one’s own people never cancels moral responsibility to others. On the contrary, it deepens it. It demands both.
And if there is a single scene, a single thread that ties it all together, it is the middle scene of Moses stepping up between two Hebrews locked in conflict. It is here that Moses learns the hardest lesson of leadership: to stand in the breach when two of one’s own are tearing each other apart. My late, great teacher Yochanan Muffs gave this posture its enduring name in his landmark essay “Who Will Stand in the Breach? A Study of Prophetic Intercession” – Moses’s willingness to be omed ba-peretz, to step into the space of rupture and refuse to move.
When God’s anger burned hot after the sin of the Golden Calf, it was Moses who, despite being no less outraged than God, nevertheless interceded, talking God down from the divine ledge. When the spies sowed despair and the people lost faith, Moses again stood in the breach, absorbing God’s wrath and pleading for mercy. Time and time again, Moses refuses to walk away or to abandon either side. Even when, especially when, it comes at a great personal cost, he steps up and brings the sides together – the paradigm of the prophetic intercessor. That, the Torah suggests, is the defining work of leadership: not to avoid the breach, but to stand inside it, bearing its weight so that the community will endure.
And I think, as you may have guessed by now, that it is precisely this muscle group that speaks most urgently to me in this moment. The divides in our community are real. There are those who, rightly so, drawn by a fierce sense of particularism and mindful of real and present dangers, believe that now more than ever is the time to circle the wagons, to be vigilant against the threats facing the people and State of Israel. And there are those who, rightly so, drawn by a moral universalism rooted just as deeply in our tradition, believe that now is the time to stand guard on behalf of the stranger, the vulnerable, and those who suffer injustice at the hands of power. Two stances that, at a time when our community suffers no shortage of enemies from without, seem to have no trouble calling out each other as an enemy from within.
I believe, as I hope many of you do, not only that the two positions both find sanction within the tradition, but that they are not mutually exclusive. As the sage Hillel taught, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?” We can fight antisemitism and still welcome the stranger; we can defend our people while remaining fiercely committed to democratic values. We can protect ourselves without losing ourselves. We must resist the temptation to see the world in binaries, as though concern for ourselves precludes concern for others or concern for others comes at the expense of our own safety. Judaism has never asked us to choose between these commitments. It asks us to hold them in tension.
And, like Moses, in such a time as this we must be willing to step up, to step forward, and to intercede when members of our own community come to ideological blows, even when it comes at a personal cost to us. Not just rabbis, not just leaders, but all of us bear the responsibility for the fabric of our discourse: for the tone we set, the lines we draw, the words we choose, the posts we post, the leaders we elect, and the future we are stitching together. Standing in the breach, keeping our divided house together is not only an ancient leadership posture. It is our present-day leadership obligation.
When Moses is finally called by God to lead, it is, we know, at the site of the burning bush, as the verse tells us: “He gazed and the bush was aflame, yet the bush was not consumed” (Exodus 3:2). This is no incidental detail. Moses is chosen not because he extinguishes the fire, nor because he is consumed by it, but because he refuses to turn away. Leadership belongs to the one who can take the heat without being consumed by it. That is the answer to the question of “Why Moses?” Because when that call came, whatever his self-doubts and hesitations, Moses answered with the language of agency and responsibility: Hineni, here I am.
In our own fractured moment, we too are called to stand in the breach, keeping our people together through thick and thin. Like Moses, we are not asked to solve every conflict; only to refuse to turn away: to draw near, to listen, and to answer the call with our own hineni, rising to the calling of the hour.
Muffs, Yochanan. “Who Will Stand in the Breach? A Study of Prophetic Intercession.” In Love & Joy: Law, Language and Religion in Ancient Israel. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992.