The Staff and the Hand

Moses starts off his mission as God's emissary using his staff. Along with Aaron's staff, it was the instrument of the signs he was to do in Egypt - turning into a snake, bringing on the plagues.

However, if you look carefully, from the moment the plagues begin, the staffs become interchangeable with the hand.

Plague of BLOOD:
And the Lord spoke to Moses, Say to Aaron, Take your staff, and stretch out your hand upon the waters of Egypt… that they may become blood…

Plague of FROGS:
And the Lord spoke to Moses, Say to Aaron, Stretch forth your hand with your staff over the streams, over the rivers, and over the ponds, and cause frogs to come up upon the land of Egypt

And so on:

LICE = "staff"

HAIL = "Stretch out your hand" (but Moses stretches his staff)

LOCUSTS = ditto

And at the Splitting of the Sea - staff, hand, hand, hand, hand.
(And the battle with Amalek - staff, hand, hands)

What is going on here?

It seems as if God started off with the staff intentiionally. Either because a staff is more impressive and would grant Moses and Aaron more respect. Or perhaps because people's attention would be more drawn to a staff as a symbol of God's power.  Also because they would, at the outset, not attribute the powers to Moses and Aaron, something God did not want to happen.

But then it begins to not matter when the hand is used instead. In fact, the hand takes over at the sea. 

Based on responses I received at a Bibliodrama session, we could suggest that the staff was educational at the beginning, but then after that God wanted them to see that it didn't matter if it was a staff OR a hand, because all of it was from God. And that is the main thing, not to start attributing false power to an object (we run into this risk later with the Ark of the Covenant too, when it is taken into battle).

Masculine/Feminine

One more idea is that the staff is a very masculine (phallic) symbol, in the positive sense in that it makes this happen and can be used for dramatic and violent effect - but also in the negative aspect of masculinity i.e. in being rigid, authoritarian, and punishing.

The hand however is feminine in being soft, human, flexible and fluid, able to take on infinite different shapes, and connected not only to itself but to the entire whole (i.e. the body). 

Therefore the move from staff to hand represents the transition from the masculine to the feminine mode, in a very subtle way that was before its time, and only becoms clear to us today as we reclaim "the moon's lost light".

(It takes a while for Moshe to understand this. He continues to use his staff, though God is commanding hand).

And yet, once again, ultimately it matters not if it is masculine (staff) or feminine (hand), for all are instruments for God's power and light. 

* Thank you to my Bibliozoom group for helping me develop these ideas.

Serving God in the Moment

After the devastating plague of locusts, Pharaoh hurriedly calls for Moses (Exodus 10)

24. And Pharaoh called to Moses, and said, Go, serve the Lord; only let your flocks and your herds stay; let your little ones also go with you.

25. And Moses said, You must give us also sacrifices and burnt offerings, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.26. Our cattle also shall go with us; there shall not a hoof be left behind; for we must take it to serve the Lord our God; and we know not with what we must serve the Lord, until we come there.

These last few words are interesting. It's true that Moses might simply have been giving Pharaoh some kind of excuse, to explain why they needed to take all the cattle with them. However, there is also a deeper truth in the words "we know not with what we must serve the Lord, until we come there."

For a while I studied with a teacher of the Yemima method. One of Yemima Avital's fundamental principles was that every moment has its diyuk - its precise and right action. The aim and skill in life is to live each moment as rightly as possible, bearing in mind all factors. You cannot predict the diyuk in advance, based on yesterday's diyuk or your imagination or logic. It is only in the moment that the true diyuk emerges. To me, these words of Moshe's point to that. We need to come as prepared as possible because service of God is not (or not simply) by pre-prescribed laws, but rather also according to the call of the moment.

Those of you familiar with the Myers-Briggs test will recognise the P here, rather than the J. Come prepared by all means -  but don't plan out every second, remain flexible.

Rebbe Nachman has a teaching that also helps us to remain in the present and focus on the avoda of the present (Likutei Moharan 272:1 translated by Sefaria):

“Today! if you heed His voice.” (Psalms 95:7) 

A very important rule in Avodat Hashem is to only focus on what one has to do today. Whatever it may be a job, work, learning... One should always only focus what he has to do that day and not think ahead and look at everything he has at once. Focus on what you need to do at that moment alone.

When someone wants to improve in his Avodat hashem, of he doesn't take this advice and try to focus on everything he has to do not just today but the next day and the next week it will seem like a burden and too hard to follow. But when he only focuses on that day, that moment alone it will feel much easier. And he will be much better off.

And it's very important to not delay it and say, I will start tomorrow or later because all we have to do in this world is to focus on what we should be doing right now. That's why the pasuk said היום אם בקולו תשמעו to דוקא listen and start improving ourselves right now, one step at a time with whatever we have to do right in front of us right now.

Moshe's life journey taught him not to plan. He took every day as it came, listening for G-d's intructions for that day. Planning for the future didn't work out for him - he never entered the Promised Land, though that was the original plan. On any given day in the desert, he did not know if the pillar of cloud would begin moving again. Yet he was able to spend a full 120 years in this mode. This is the mode of faith.

The Precise Thing for Every Moment

In Bamidbar chapter 27, God tells Moses that his life is drawing to a close. Moses’ concern, upon hearing this news, is not for himself but for the people. They will need a new leader. He says to God: 

16. Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation,

17. Who may go out before them, and who may go in before them, and who may lead them out, and who may bring them in; that the congregation of the Lord be not as sheep which have no shepherd.

Wait a minute! Isn’t there a person who has been groomed for the leadership for the past 39 years - Joshua? He was placed in charge of the battle against Amalek. He was the only one Moses took with him (at least partway) up Mt Sinai. He was at the Tent of Meeting with Moses. He was one of the only two good spies. Isn’t it obvious that he is to be the successor, having been mentored by Moses, having spent all these years learning from him, and being the only Israelite with the military experience necessary to conquer the land?

So why does Moses phrase it as if there is no specific candidate, and his request is for God to choose “someone”? Does Moses really expect God to reply, “Ok, appoint Joe Shmoe.”

I’ve been pondering this question and for me, the point emerging from this one brief interchange is that we should never think we know God’s will. Even Moses, the prophet who “knew” God better than any human, needed to humbly acknowledge that God’s will is connected to a larger picture that we can never fully fathom, and therefore there may be surprises. Moreover, even if God’s favour seemed in the past to have been leaning towards Joshua, that doesn’t mean that at this moment it is still the same.

Important to note: This does not mean that God is capricious and acts on whims. What it means is that life is dynamic. Every moment comes with new energies, new strategies, and new mindful behaviour. As the verse is Psalms says, “Today, if you listen to his voice” and as Rebbe Nahman of Breslov points out, “This is to remind us that we must do our living in the present, in today. Every day, every hour has its own specific work, regardless of the past.”

This is a lesson I learned from Yemima Avital, creator of the Yemima method (see my article here for more): that every moment has its diyuk, its precise action. So Moses, accordingly, did not make assumptions and he waited to see what God’s will was in the now. 

We too need to become aware that whatever was right in the past might not be right for now – but if we plug into our intuition, do a clarification process, pray, we will hopefully discover what that precise right thing actually is.

Joshua: Son and sacrifice

Joshua is an enigmatic figure. He is present in a number of stories in the Torah and yet slips under the radar, such that people are not able to, off the cuff, recall much about him except for his being one of the “good spies” and eventually taking over from Moses.

We know nothing about his childhood or background apart from the fact that he is the son of a man named Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim. But there is a fascinating midrash from Yalkut Shimon that suggests a very formative incident:

Rabbi  Eliezer said: For all those years in which Israel sat in Egypt, the Ephraimites sat securely, tranquilly and serenely, until Nun, a descendant of Ephraim, came and declared, “The L-rd has appeared to me and commanded me to take you out.” [He felt/He did it due to the] pride in his heart that they were of royal descent and great warriors; and they got up, took their sons and daughters and exited Egypt. Then the Egyptians arose and killed all their warriors.

In this narrative, where Joshua as a young man experienced this tremendous failure on the part of his father, and perhaps his death, we could understand it if he began to see his teacher and mentor Moshe as a surrogate father figure. Moshe clearly trusts him, appointing him to be the military leader in the battle against Amalek. But we have stronger indications of a bond that is more akin to father and son.

When Moses climbs Mount Sinai, he takes only Joshua with him (although Joshua seems to vanish immediately, with Moses ascending alone – Ex. 24:13,15). Moses tells the elders “Wait here until we will return” (Ex. 24:14) in language very reminiscent of the Akeda story in which Abraham says to his servants, (Gen. 22:5) “Stay here with the donkey… and we will return to you.” Yet Abraham is misleading them. He cannot be sure that “they” will return; according to God’s command, only he will come back.  

In suggesting “And we will return”, Moses is referencing that foundational Jewish story. This does two things: (a) He is placing himself and Joshua in a father-son type relationship (b) He is placing Yehoshua into some kind of sacrificial role. But what that is unclear.

The sacrifice theme continues much later when Joshua is finally officially appointed as Moses’s successor. Moses lays his hands upon him, an action associated with sacrifices.[1] However, Joshua is not to be “sacrificed” in the sense of being put to death. How is he a sacrifice then? The answer I can think of would be that He is a sacrifice in the sense of something pure and worthy, being offered up to God’s service. The intertextuality here hints to us that he has the purity both of Isaac and of the animal at the altar.

Moses’s own children are not worthy successors; Joshua functions as his surrogate son. For Joshua, Moses replaces his failed father Nun, unlike him being someone who genuinely hears God’s voice, correctly and accurately, and leads the people into life, not death. It may even be, as is so often the case, that this early trauma propelled Joshua into his role, spurring him to take on responsibility and leadership so as to fix the crack that opened in his soul.

* * These ideas emerged during a Bibliodrama on Joshua in Efrat, August 2022, based on insights by Rabbi David Debow and others. Yael Valier was the first to suggest the connection between the language of the Akeda and that of the scene at Mt Sinai, but she takes it in a slightly different direction. Her own interpretation of the connection of Sinai with Akeda is that it is intended to indicate the selection of Joshua at this moment for something "big", just as Isaac was being selected for something important – with the others (Ishmael, Eliezer) being told to “remain behind”. 

---

[1] God says “lay your hand” and yet Moses lays both hands. It seems as if Moses deviates from the details of the divine command. The Talmud (Menachot 93b) discusses the discrepancy between one hand and both hands, and there Resh Lakish concludes that in the context of animal sacrifice, it is the same thing and the language is interchangeable. He explicitly excludes this case, when the hands are laid upon Joshua; but the idea suggested in this blog would allow him to include this case too in the same category, of "animal sacrifice" so to speak, in a metaphorical sense. Which saves Moses from the charge of not properly fulfilling the divine command.

Miriam's Trauma/Healing By Water

Let’s talk about Miriam – prophetess, leader, water-bringer. In her life, there are two crucial scenes that take place next to water:

(1) BY THE NILE

 As a young girl she stands by the Nile, watching her baby brother Moses float in a basket, placed there anxiously by his mother after Pharaoh decreed that all baby boys must be thrown in the Nile (Exodus 2):

3. And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark made of reeds, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child in it; and she laid it in the rushes by the river’s brink.

4. And his sister stood far away, to see what would be done to him. 

Pharaoh’s daughter takes him and saves him from the genocidal decree by adopting him, and Miriam is instrumental in that.

(2) BY THE SEA

Much later, as a woman of eighty-five, after the Red sea has split allowing the Israelites to go through and then closed over the Egyptian foe, she witnesses her brother Moses singing the famous song known as “Az Yashir”. Then, following his  lead, she takes up her tambourine and leads the women in song and dance by the sea (Exodus 15):

20. And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines, dancing.

21. And Miriam answered them, Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider has he thrown into the sea. 

In the first instance, she is not named – she is only named in the second story, many decades later. Why is this? And moreover, why don’t hear anything of Miriam in the intervening years between these two scenes? What was she doing in Egypt? Was she not involved in leading the people? What happened to the resourceful little girl who spoke up boldly to Pharaoh’s daughter – why does she vanish from the text?

And since we are asking questions, let us also wonder why Miriam is described here suddenly as “sister of Aaron”?

* * *  

Many answers are possible, but one that ties all these threads together emerged during a Bibliodrama I ran in Rechovot. It goes as follows:

Let’s conjecture that the first incident caused young Miriam to experience a trauma. Yes, her baby brother was saved from death, but he was still ripped away from his family, taken to the palace of the cruel tyrant whom the Israelites hated and feared, and raised there by another woman as an Egyptian. We have no idea if Miriam even saw him from that day forth. Perhaps this took all the wind out of her sails. She was unable henceforth to step up to leadership roles; she could never forget her little brother or stop being worried about him.

Fast forward to the redemption by the sea.

If the first scene took place by the Nile, the god of the Egyptian, water that belonged to the enemy and served its genocidal purposes, this scene takes place by a sea that was friendly to the Israelites, that opened for them and closed over the Egyptians. Finally, they were safe. And now Miriam also sees her brother sing gloriously, leading all the people – something he has never done before. A moment before that, we learned that the Israelites “believed in God and in Moses his servant.” Miriam can finally put her mind at rest. Moses is okay, he is whole – she can see it. She is entirely joyous now - where in the previous scene "she stood", here she dances. 

In this moment, as her trauma recedes in what we in Hebrew call a חוויה מתקנת. a rectifying experience, she can come into the fullness of her being and be named. She can also finally let her anxiety about Moses rest. And if all these years she neglected her middle brother, Aaron, being unable to give him the attention and love he deserved, perhaps now she can finally become his sister.

* * * 
Two verses later, and surely not by coincidence, the letters of Miriam’s name מרים appear again as “Marim”, bitter. But Miriam’s bitterness has now receded, just as the bitter waters will recede when Moses puts a tree or stick into them. The tree of life. A sweet experience of life – and the tree of life, the Torah – can heal bitterness, as it did for Miriam.

Then, in her merit, the well of life-bringing water comes to the people and remains with them until her death.

[1] With thanks to Aviva Harbater-Tsubeiri for her insight regarding the trauma of the first incident, and to other members of the Berman synagogue in Rechovot for their input and ideas.  

 [2] For more on how the Israelites' belief in Moses enabled him to sing his song, see here.