Becoming Fully Human

This week’s Torah portion is the beginning of the Book of Exodus, called Shemot, which means, names. It tells of the first instance of Anti-Semitism, of our persecution and enslavement in Egypt, of the birth of Moses, God’s call to Moses to take the Israelites out of Egypt, and Moses’ first encounters with Pharaoh. This week we also heard about the terrorist attack in France, in which 12 people were killed, not as an act of violence to avenge a murder, but for an insult: the ridiculing of Islam and the prophet Mohammed. A sentence in this week’s Torah portion comes to mind: Why do you strike your fellow?

Moses asked this in a famous incident the Torah describes this way: “…Moses grew up and went out to his brethren and saw their burdens; and he saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man, of his brethren. He turned this way and that and saw that there was no man, so he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. He went out the next day and behold, two Hebrew men were striving. He said to the wicked one, why do you strike your fellow? He replied who made you a man, a ruler, and a judge over us…” (Gen. 2:11-14) Moses, out of compassion for a fellow Israelite, kills an Egyptian taskmaster, who is beating a Hebrew man. The next day, Moses tries to break up a fight between two Israelite men. The question he asks, Why do you strike your fellow? is actually a cosmic question for us. Why do we kill each other? Why are we killing our fellows, our neighbors, the ones who are of ourselves and part of ourselves? The ones who are us?

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch comments on, “Who put you as a man, a ruler and a judge over us.” He says “These words reveal even at this early stage of our history, a trait that characterizes us to this day, one that lies at the root of all our flaws and our virtues as a nation. 600,000 men, or perhaps I should say, 6 million people, cannot muster the courage to defend their children against the minions of one non-Jewish tyrant; but not one of them will accept the authority of a fellow Jew…Of what intractable stuff must we have been then, before we entered the training course.” God, in the Torah, calls us stiff-necked five times. But is this just a Jewish trait, or is this the way we humans are?

Our personal egos are fragile and because of that, we puff them up and also make them rather rigid, disguising our soft, vulnerable inner core, making a shield to protect us from the world. This protection works against us, cutting us off from others. It disguises our negative qualities and lets us pretend to be better than we are.

Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk in a commentary on Shemot, said, “Man’s essential function is to uproot our negative character traits: hate jealously, vanity, lust, envy, and greed. These flaws must be rectified in order that we can rise to great spiritual heights with devekut, cleaving to God, may God be blessed.” (P. 117) We are presented with acts of terrorism which we think are something new: Radical Islam, but is it truly new? Isn’t it hate, jealousy, vanity, lust, envy, greed, and puffed up & rigid ego disguising our inadequacies? The list of flaws was written in the 19th Century, and words like them have been written thousands of years ago.

When we are stiff-necked we are fooling ourselves into believing that we are better than we really are, that we are living up to our professed values and ideals. An examination of our ability to project onto others reveals that we criticize in others what we can’t live within ourselves. Attacking the other then, is a judgment against ourselves. This portion begins by naming Jacob, the person who grew the most of anyone in the Torah, becoming Israel, the one who struggles with God, but also with himself, with his negative qualities. The problems of our society are within us. We can be truth tellers to ourselves, as well as in the greater human community. We can expose, as I like to say, the wolf in grandma’s new dress. We can acknowledge how thin is the veneer of civilization and how far we have to go to be the people we ourselves can look up to.

How far do we have to go to be able to respect ourselves? Moses’ question, why do your strike your fellow? can be answered by the statement: because we are ignorant of our oneness; because we still can’t be the people we want to be; because we still exhibit far too much hatred, jealousy, vanity, lust envy, greed and way too much ego; because we are not yet fully human. Moses asked his question in an attempt to draw out compassion from two people who had forgotten it. That is Moses’ name: drawing out. We can see ourselves in the two Israelites who Moses addressed, but also in Moses. The retort of the Israelite, “Who made you a man, a judge over us,” is another cosmic question. We are made human by the Divine; we are connected, and we are vulnerable and deeply afraid of showing it. But with compassion for others, acceptance of ourselves, and a little more truth, we can move away from needing such great defenses that we will even kill each other to feel better. We can become fully human, a man, a person who stands for truth, compassion, and justice.