Part 3

Overcoming Life's Disappointments
by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner

(Page 3 of 5)

These experiences leave their mark on Moses' way of understanding the world. They teach him the importance of a safe, protective home in the midst of a dangerous world. They prepare him for his encounter with a God who is both male and female, simultaneously powerful and dangerous but also lifesaving and protective. The God of Moses will sometimes show masculine-aggressive traits, raining down plagues on Egypt, striking down sinners by the hundreds and thousands, calling for the demolition of sites of idolatry. But that same God, though the Bible will refer to Him grammatically as male, will just as often display a feminine, nurturing side, bringing forth life, feeding the hungry, comforting the fearful, tending to the sick. Moses will come to recognize his own masculine and feminine sides, both the angry, destructive impulses welling up from within him (smiting the Egyptian and later quash- ing rebellions against his authority) and the tender, nurturing impulses (leading a people through a wilderness, providing them with food and water, both of which he will go on to do) as manifestations of God and of his own reach toward godliness.

The second theme sounded by that incident of the quarreling Hebrews will be an even more constant refrain in Moses' life. If, as the Bible emphasizes, there were no witnesses to his striking down the Egyptian except for the Hebrew man being beaten, how did the fact become known barely a day later? One commentator suggests that the Hebrew who challenged Moses on the second day was the same man he had saved from a beating the day before! Who else would have been in a position to know about it? Isn't it psychologically understandable that a man who had just been beaten up might himself look for someone weaker to beat up, in order to restore his sense of power? Moses has just learned his first lesson, to be repeated often in the ensuing years, about the ingratitude of people he has set out to help.

The cynical wisdom that "no good deed goes unpunished" may be true. Many people resent having favors done for them. Being in need of someone's help can make a person feel weak, less than competent. During the forty years that Moses will spend leading his people through the wilderness, there will be frequent occasions when they will forget that he was the one who brought them out of slavery. They will even forget how miserable slavery was. All they will know will be the discomfort of living in a wilderness, the uncertainty of finding food and water, the elusiveness of their destination, and the abundance of rules designed to keep them from doing what they might want to do. Moses' gifts of leadership through much of that time will be not only the heroism of the leader who struck off slavery's chains and parted the Red Sea, but the perseverance and loyalty of the leader who remains committed to his goals even when the people for whom he is working fail to appreci- ate him.

Joseph Campbell, the authority on mythology well known for his books and his appearances on public television with Bill Moyers, finds a pattern in the life of virtually every hero, historical or mythological. He describes a cycle of separation, initiation, and return. Confronting a society in turmoil, a person who has lived an ordinary life to that point leaves that society and spends years in exile or isolation. There he undergoes a transformative experience. He is exposed to a truth of which he had not previously been aware. He may be given a secret weapon, a charm, or a valuable bit of information that will enable him to carry out his task. He then returns home, as Campbell says in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, "armed with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." Historian Arnold Toynbee uses the terms detachment and transfiguration to describe the same process. That is precisely what will hap- pen to Moses following his flight from Egypt after killing the Egyptian.

I should emphasize that just because this pattern is a constant element of mythological tales doesn't mean that it is not true and did not really happen to Moses, or that his story was altered to fit the mythological hero pattern. Consider the life story of Martin Luther King Jr., so recent a figure that mythical elements have not yet crept into his story. Born into the segregated South, he left to study theology at Boston University, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the theology of nonviolence. He then returned to the South, armed with the knowledge, inspiration, and confidence to lead his people to freedom. His life story follows the mythological hero pattern to the letter, but it is in fact exactly what happened and thus can teach us to recognize that there may be historical as well as psychological truths in the myth-tales.

For that matter, we can see the young Franklin Roosevelt as a charming but lightweight political dilettante who had to withdraw from public life when he lost the use of his legs to polio. In those years of exile, he developed the strength of character that enabled him to become the leader he would go on to be.

To return to the biblical account: Moses then spends several years in the home of Jethro, long enough to father two sons. The Bible gives us no clue as to whether at this point in his life he knows he was born an Israelite or whether he thinks of himself as an Egyptian. When Zipporah brings him home for the first time and tells her father of how he had helped them, she says, "An Egyptian man rescued us from the shepherds" (Exodus 2:19). But now something happens that will change his life, and ultimately change the history of the world.

Moses is caring for Jethro's flock of sheep, pasturing them in the vicinity of a mountain considered holy by the Midianites, when he sees a bush that is on fire but does not burn up. Intrigued by the phenomenon, he approaches it, at which point God speaks to him out of the burning bush. (Many religions, from Judaism to Zoroastrianism, use light and fire as symbols for the presence of God, perhaps because light, like God, cannot be seen but permits us to see everything there is, perhaps because fire liberates the energy hidden in a log of wood or a lump of coal just as God liberates the potential energy to do good things that is hidden in every human being, just as God will be the fire that burns within Moses, enabling him to do the great things he will go on to do, but not consuming him in the process.) The voice from the bush identifies itself as "the God of your father, the God of your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," and says, "I have seen the suffering of My people in Egypt and am about to deliver them."

Copyright © 2006 by Harold S. Kushner.

About the Author

Harold S. Kushner is Rabbi Laureate of Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, where he lives. His books include When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Who Needs God, and How Good Do We Have to Be?