Here is the scene: There is no water, the people are thirsty and they complain (again), they say some nasty things to Moshe, and God says – ok, Moshe, go get your stick, gather the people and speak to the rock and the rock will give its waters so the people won’t be thirsty.
Moshe’s Negative View of the People
What does Moshe do? He gets his stick, gathers the people and the first thing he does is say to them – shimu na hamorim, “listen up, you rebels! (Numbers 20:10).” He starts by calling them a derogatory name, morim, meaning something like complainers, rejecters, rebels or idiots (Bamidbar Rabbah 19:9).
What does it feel like when someone insults us this way, especially someone we hold in respect? Part of us takes it in and believes it, even if we are also angry, part of us still believes that this is the truth about us, about who we really are. And we also have inner critics that tend to do the same thing – probably learned from such an external influence – that tend to habitually judge us harshly and call us demeaning names like “idiot.”
In the Moshe story, it makes sense what happens next – Moshe hits the rock instead of speaking to it, not once, but twice in quick succession. Hitting the rock is a physical manifestation of what he is doing to the people, hitting them with his negative view of them. When we are spoken to and viewed in this harsh way, it does feel like a physical blow, like someone hit us or punched us in the belly.
Of course, Moshe’s reaction is also understandable. He has just been through a rebellion with Korah, and now the people are complaining again! And moreover, they have been doing this for almost 40 years. This is the very same complaint their parents had right when they first left Egypt; will they never have more trust? No wonder he has given up on them!
To Be Given Up On
But given up on them he has. In hitting the rock again, as was his instruction the first time round, 39 years earlier (Exodus 17), Moshe shows that he does not believe in their growth. He sees them as stuck in the same place, even though later in the parsha we see evidence of the people’s growth (they make their own deal with God at Hormah; they send out messengers to Sihon, and they call up a well on their own with song, all signs of growth and independence). But for Moshe, the people are the same. He has written them off as incapable of changing and moving forward. We can imagine what that feels like, too, the sense of a leader, a mentor, a guide, giving up on us, someone who is supposed to be coaching us and helping us grow, but instead sees us in this negative light, not just our actions, but our essence, as if there is no hope for us, as if we are in essence stupid, rebellious, and incompetent, incapable of transformation.
The Alternative: Beruriah’s Advice
A story is told in the gemara about Rabbi Meir. There were some thugs in his neighborhood that were causing him distress, and he prayed for them to die. His wife Beruriah said to him – that’s not the way to do it. The Psalm verse says: yitamu hataim min ha’aretz – may hataim, “sins,” disappear from the land, not hotim, “sinners.” You shouldn’t pray for the people to die; you should pray for them to change, to repent (Talmud Brachot 10a)!
Our Essence Is To Grow
Beruriah is wise. Maybe if Moshe had been closer to his wife, he, too, could have gotten some of this wisdom. People are not in their essence bad or stupid or rebellious. They may take actions that we disapprove of, like the Israelites’ complaints to Moshe, but in their essence, people are never bad, because people are capable of change and growth and transformation. We are above all growers by nature.
Shema Yisrael Instead of Shimu na Hamorim
Instead of shimu na hamorim, Moshe could have said, as he says later in Devarim, shema Yisrael (Deuteronomy 6:4), using that same verb, shema, “listen,” but with the name Yisrael. Yisrael implies growth. It is a symbol of Yaakov’s transformation from crookedness to straightness, from crouching behind someone to standing straight and tall, aligned with God. To say to the people, shema Yisrael is to say: listen, you people who are capable of great things, listen to who you could be, how you could, with God’s help, transform yourself like Yaakov did. You are in your essence people of growth.
Turning Towards Ourselves as People of Growth
So what if we said that to ourselves, if we turned towards ourselves with the attitude of shema Yisrael instead of shimu na hamorim? We can first feel inside for the shimu na hamorim sensation, for how it feels to be continually pushed down by our inner critics, noticing how we do give up on ourselves, write ourselves off, the sinking collapse of that attitude, the slumped shoulders, the giving up quality in our body and soul, and then asking those critical parts if they would try instead to say: Shema Yisrael. Your essence is Yisrael, is one of growth. Listen to who you could be, listen to the sound of your own growth potential, remember that, never give up on yourself.
God Never Gives Up On Us
Never give up on yourself because surely God never gives up on you. Ad yom moto tikhakeh lo, we say on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, until the day of a person’s death, God waits for us, ever hopeful and believing in us. Perhaps this is why God had to end Moshe’s leadership. Because God understands that in order for us to grow, we need guides who believe in us and who help us to believe in ourselves, help us learn to view ourselves differently – speak to the rock le’eynehem, “before their eyes”– help us see who we could be.
In This Environment, Our Waters Flow
Something shifts in us when we view ourselves this way – when we stop hitting ourselves, and learn to speak gently and encouragingly to ourselves, believing in our own capacity for growth – something happens which is magical. Moshe doesn’t follow this route, but still, God offers us an image of what could have been and what could still be: venatan meimav, the rock will freely give its waters; in such an environment of confidence and encouragement, our soul naturally gives its waters, there is flow inside us, we flower and give what we are meant to give. A process of growth and transformation wants to unfold inside us so that we can reach our full soul potential, but we make it harder for ourselves by beating ourselves up, by the harshness of hitting and name-calling.
Maybe we can sense inside us something hard that doesn’t trust, that, like the Israelites, sees the future through an exclusively negative frame, seeing that tendency and speaking to ourselves gently through that, not hitting ourselves and calling ourselves names, but instead, speaking gently to the hardness, trusting in our innate capacity for growth, trusting that we have something of God in us, believing in ourselves, believing in our capacity to grow in love and trust, in our capacity to bring forth our soul waters, and then letting them flow – venatan meimav, just letting them, on their own, flow through us. Our soul has waters that want to flow forth. They have been stuck inside by our judgment and tension and censoring, stopped up like water in a dam, and they can be released through our gentle faith in ourselves, by releasing the tension and trusting the flow. Like the rock, there is something magical here, but also something so natural. You were made to do this, made to flow. Believe in yourself.
It Doesn’t Take a Lot
Perhaps it doesn’t seem possible. Perhaps you are thinking: there is not enough faith in me; I don’t have enough capacity to let the waters flow in this way; I am overwhelmed by worry and tension and judgment. But the thing is: it doesn’t take a lot. The midrash says about the scene in front of the rock, where all the people gathered in a small space: this is one of the places where muat mahzik et hamerubeh, where “something small can hold something large” (Rashi on Numbers 20:10). It only takes a small amount of faith inside us to hold all of that distrust and negativity. It only takes a drop, nekudah tovah, one small good point, and we all have such a point planted inside us. God only needs a tiny hole, like the eye of a needle, and through that tiny hole, huge wagons of love and trust can flow through us (Midrash Shir HaShirim 5:3). Remembering this when we are overwhelmed, as surely the Israelites were at that moment, overwhelmed by the negativity of life – a rebellion and a plague, Miriam’s death, no water, endless desert, no land or end in sight – so much, merubeh, to carry. But the people needed to know: muat mahzik et hamerubeh – it doesn’t take a lot to hold that. Just a drop of divine energy inside us, a tiny drop of faith, can hold all the troubles of the world. Sometimes we feel overwhelmed and hopeless, but we can also trust that what we have inside, though tiny, is enough.
Shimu na hamorim, “Listen up, you rebels,” Moshe said, and wrote us off as incorrigible in our essence. But God never writes us off, never gives up on us, and we can take that in, take in the steadfast faith of the divine and learn to believe in ourselves and in others that way, to say to ourselves and each other not Shimu na homrim, but Shema Yisrael – listen to the sound of your own growth.
Photo by Rachel Claire at Pexels
