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For assistance, please call Dina Gudai at 074-780-0643 (8:00 AM – 3:00 Israel time Sunday through Thursday).
Your donation will be tax deductible in the US to the extent allowed by the IRS.
To make a tax-deductible donation by wire transfer in the US, please contact:
Avrum Lapin, North American Representative
Toll-free: 1-866-830-3321
Email: schechter@thelapingroup.com
To make a tax-deductible donation in Israel, please contact:
Dina Gudai, Israeli Representative
Phone: 074-7800643
Email: dina@schechter.ac.il
Please mail your check to:
The Schechter Institutes, Inc. (a 501(c) 3 tax exempt organization)
Box #3566
PO Box 8500
Philadelphia, PA 19178-3566
Attn: Mr. Avrum Lapin, North American Representative
Toll-free: 1-866-830-3321
Email: schechter@thelapingroup.com
Please indicate the donation is "for your joint Schechter Institutes program."
Checks should be made payable to the Jewish Theological Society of Canada and mailed to:
Jewish Theological Society of Canada
c/o Camp Ramah in Canada
3845 Bathhurst St., Suite 310
Toronto, ON, M3H 3N2
Phone: 416-789-2193, ext. 2139
E-mail: accounting@campramah.com
Please mail a check to:
The Schechter Institutes
Attn: Dina Gudai, Finance Department
PO Box 16080,
Jerusalem, 9116002
Israel
For assistance, please call Dina Gudai at 074-780-0643 (8:00 AM – 3:00 Israel time Sunday through Thursday).
The Torah’s choice of Moshe teaches us to value strength of character, sense of justice, and modesty, when choosing whom to follow. Despite the efforts of wise educators and constitutional framers over the millennia to protect us from ourselves, there are many examples of a clever or dynamic speaker causing a people to make the wrong choice. Listen to Eitan Cooper’s lesson.
At the start of this week’s Parshah, Va’era, God responds to Moshe’s despair at the end of Parshat Shemot last week with a stirring speech, articulating the great vision of liberation and redemption for the Children of Israel. Moshe then returns to the Elders of Israel, repeating God’s message, but at that point they are just too discouraged to listen to it. This is the first indication of the Torah’s lesson – inspiring speeches are not enough.
Then God tells Moshe to speak with Pharoah, and command him again to let the Israelites go, and Moshe responds that he can’t, because if the Elders of Israel didn’t listen, Pharoah certainly won’t respond, and moreover he is “ערל שפתיים of uncircumcised lips”. Many commentators and midrashim saw this as another expression of Moshe’s resistance to accepting God’s mission during the Burning Bush in last week’s Parsha, because he had a speech defect, perhaps a stammer.
This conjures up the image of the late Queen Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, in the wonderful film “The King’s Speech, or of President Biden. Both of them had to overcome this natural disability in order to lead their nations in crisis – their achievements are inspiring examples of the human spirit.
But Rashi, using other examples from the Bible of the expressions “uncircumcised lips,” “uncircumcised heart,” and “uncircumcised ears” explains that the expression really means “sealed lips.” Moshe’s taciturn and slowness of speech reflect his natural modesty. He never spoke with a stammer, he just didn’t yet feel worthy of speaking. Moshe eventually found his voice, but at the start of his mission, it is Moshe’s character that we are asked to consider, not his speaking ability. It is his willingness to stand up and act on behalf of what is right, for those who can’t, that makes him worthy of leadership.
I recall reading an ethical and historical insight into the choice of Moshe to lead the Children of Israel, despite his incapacity as a public speaker, in one of the letters of Rav Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook.
According to Rav Kook, the Torah’s description of Moshe was a critique of ancient civilizations, in which professional speakers called “sophists” were often hired to convince people to act on behalf of the truth or of the good, without any real regard to what is true or good. Socrates commonly called these men out in Plato’s Dialogues, and they were often condemned in the descriptions of ancient Greek and Roman historians. Today, we would call someone like Alcibiades, whose charisma, self-confidence and dynamic speech directly led Athenian democracy directly to its ruin, a populist. An oft cited example of populism in Torah is Korah, Moshe’s cousin, who challenges Moshe for leadership in the desert.
It certainly helps to be a good public speaker, but the Torah, in its choice of Moshe, teaches us to first value strength of character, sense of justice, and modesty, when choosing whom to follow. Despite this lesson of Torah and the efforts of wise educators and constitutional framers over the millennia to protect us from ourselves, there are many examples of a clever or dynamic speaker causing a people to make the wrong choice.
May the calendar year 2024 be a year of good choices for leadership, a year marked by progress towards our redemption.
Shavua Tov from Schechter
(image: Moses – painting by Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni) collection Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Eitan Cooper is the former Executive Vice President of The Schechter Institutes. From January 1, 2024, he is a part-time consultant at Schechter. Since coming to Schechter in 2000, he has served in various capacities, including TALI Outreach Coordinator and Vice President for Development. Mr. Cooper holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MA from the Hebrew University. He is a graduate of the Mandel School for Educational Leadership and a licensed Israeli tour guide.
Eitan and Anita Cooper made Aliya from the United States in 1983, and are proud parents and grandparents to their growing Israeli family.
