by Rabbi James Ponet
Moses and God are at it again; Moses rants:
When I told you I don’t speak in public, that I’m a shy guy, you glowered and raged: “I’m the author, I give words to my characters!” Did I give birth to this people? No! No, they’re your people and their failures reflect your authorial choices. Not mine. I’m not an author, not a co-author. It’s your book and as far as I’m concerned you can take me out of it. I’m your character, your dubious attempt to create a walking mouthpiece who’d spout your words to an ornery folk you dreamed up. I warned you that I couldn’t accept the role. But you were the author. I resisted, thought I could reason with you. But there was no dialogue. Have you ever once really listened to me? You think I gave in, agreed to leave the comforts of home because you said you’d send my older brother to travel with me? Aaron! hadn’t seen the guy since we were kids, and you tell me he’ll be my press secretary? You think that cheap trick relieved my anxieties, soothed my nerves? I went back down to Egypt because I saw I had no choice. No choice.
I give up my comfortable life as a shepherd, take my wife and boys from the only home they’d ever known, Eliezer ababe still sucking at Tzippi’s breast, and the four of us hit the road. That first night out we stop at an encampment and there, as the boys sleep next to their mother, I cannot rest, I can barely breathe; I feeI like an infant flailing in a river, fighting for air. My beloved Tzippi, awakened by my screams, holds me to her, calls me her “bridegroom,” assures me we’re on the right path. Nonetheless, though able to breathe without gasping, I knew then that had she not stepped between us, you would have killed me. To you I was useful but expendable, your slave. As the poet put it: “The Moving Finger writes; and having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
Somehow you got me, along with my brother, to get this people chased out of Egypt. You split the impassable sea for them, and then drowned the pursuing army in its waters. And there we were bewildered in the wilderness, blinded in the blanching sun, the people crying like babies for milk, and me speechless. Silent, I hit the rock as you’d instructed and the people having drunk from the gushing waters let down by the rock were temporarily quieted.
By the time I’d learned to address them, to orate like a prophet, to speak in torrents from hilltops, and in gentle rivulets to Joshua and the elders, you told me I was through, that you were going to kill me off. “Climb that mountain,” you said. “And die there.” So I told the people my days were coming to an end, that old age had overtaken me and I designated Joshua my successor. I did not try to talk you out of it. Joshua followed me at a distance as I bounded up the mountain, my strength unabated, my vision clear.
But then you say, “Oh, and one more thing; after you die this people is going to go berserk, lose its moorings, turn against itself and become a scourge to others, and not only will you no longer be there to straighten them out, I too am going to abandon them. They will suffer torments and traumas, while I watch and listen from an infinite distance and hear them declare that I, like you, am dead.
“But I have an idea,” you say. “I want you to write a song and give it to them, a song whose melody will melt their hearts, whose words will ricochet inside their hollows, lead them to know beyond explaining, they are not alone. Your Godsong in their mouths and in their hearts will lift them above the abyss of our absence. Our presence is now in your hands.” “Are you out of your mind?” I shout. “I do not sing; I do not compose.” “Write it now!” you say.
Days or maybe only hours later, thirsty and filled with yearning, I find myself reciting and writing words I’d never before heard; phrases tumbling out of me: “A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou, Beside me singing in the Wilderness, Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”
And then, like water bursting out of rock, the words flow in torrents. At the top of the mountain of my dying, I see again our mad nightime scramble out of Egypt, feel again the terror, the chaos, when I believed we were all of us about to drown, like crazed Nachshon who’d leaped shrieking into the waters. But the sea seemed to soften around him, at first a widening between waves, flat and still, then a falling into itself, a sinking that deepened and broadened till soon we saw water stand like dark rock on either side of a walled alley through which we could pass. Single file we marched across the parted waters. And I wrote, “Moses and the children of Israel sang this song to You: Who is like You among the gods, shrouded in mystery, laden with miracles?” (Exodus 15).
I thought of Tzippi and the boys whom over the years I’d allowed to slip out of my life, heard her voice: “Moshey, remember, we teach what we need to learn,” and I wrote, “In your eyes, a thousand years are but yesterday. Show us how to count our days and we will let wisdom fill our hearts.” (Psalm 90).
Then the memory of my last words to the tribes gathered at the edge of the longed-for land, close by the Jordan River, played in my mind, and I drank again from the silent source that had poured and pulled those words out of me then, and I wrote, “You are blessed, O Israel; who is like you, a people saved by God?” (Deuteronomy 33).
I handed the parchment to Joshua, charged him: “Bring the lyrics down to the people and say to them, “These words are to be sung with all your heart; you must plant them in your mouths and your children’s mouths, sing them new every morning and every evening, when you rise and when you sleep, when you eat and when you pee, when you work and when you rest, when you cry and when you laugh. Sing them like the blues, chant them like prayers, whisper them like lullabies, shout them, dance them, weep them, woo them. Keep them new, encourage young bards to set and reset them, as anthems, hymns, choruses, and those words will lead you out of Egypt and through the wilderness and just might bring you home.”
Then Moses, his eyes and skin radiant, turns to address an invisible audience, his readers:
So far as I can tell, I was not Omar Khayyám, an 11th century Persian author, nor Edward Fitzgerald, Tennyson’s classmate and friend at Cambridge, who, in 1859, turned Khayyám's quatrains into metered Victorian English. But I think they became me…
For it was their words that had entered my soul, buoyed my spirit, relieved and comforted me, and eventually drove me to write a story about a man named Job. How else could I record, for those with the ears to hear, just what it had meant for me to be God’s slave? I think it reads like a song of liberation—uncommissioned yet coerced—maybe it’s my memoir masked as roman a clef; certainly it’s revelation. In any event, writing it kept me in life till the end when, ready at last to give everything back, it sang me into a peace I had never known. Another time I will tell you about Job and his book. But for now, let this be enough. And if you really listen to me, maybe I’ll also tell you the tale of a she-ass who spoke, for as it says in the Talmud, (Baba Batra 15A): “Moses wrote his book, the story of Bilaam, and the Book of Job.”
Rabbi James E. Ponet is the Howard M. Holtzmann Jewish Chaplain Emeritus at Yale University
He can be reached at: james.ponet@yale.edu