40 years have passed between last week’s Parasha and this week’s Parasha, Chuqat. We are right now at the last moments of the journey . The generation that lived in slavery disappeared. Those who remain are their children, who were born in captivity, but had 40 years to deprogram their slave-mentality and think and act as free men and women. And unlike their parents, this new generation is not scared to fight and conquer the land that was inhabited by their ancestors.
THE QUESTION
The situation our Parasha describes is not easy. The Israelites had tried to get into the land of Israel through Edom, the area between modern Eilat and the Dead Sea. But Edom, a future Israel neighbor, does not allow them to pass. Israel then has to circumvent the land of Edom. And the new journey is very long, and people are exhausted. In our Parasha we find a memorable sad episode. People complained about the lack of water. HaShem tells Moshe to take his staff (maté) and to gather the people in front of a rock. Moshe must speak to the rock, and a spring of water will emerge from it. Moshe does everything that HaShem tells him. Well, almost everything: instead of speaking to the rock, Moshe hits the rock with a stick. HaShem says to Moshe, without explicitly indicating what was his fault, that he and Aharon are not going to lead the people into the promised land. Moshe will die in the desert. And Yehoshua will lead the new generation to conquer the land of Israel. All Biblical commentators wondered what did Moshe do to deserve such severe consequences. Rashi insists that “Moshe should not have hit the rock, he should have spoken to it.” But the punishment still seems too severe. Was Moshe’s error so serious? Especially if we take into account that HaShem asked Moshe to take his staff with him when speaking to the rock … and also that 40 years ago, in a very similar situation, HaShem told Moshe that he should hit the rock in order to have the water to come from it. How is that such a small deviation, probably a mistake, deserves such a severe punishment?
A POSSIBLE ANSWER
We need to go deeper into the symbolic aspect of “hitting” the rock vs. “talking” to the rock. Remember the context: the previous generation was a generation of slaves who were trained to obey by violence. The only way to make slaves moving and acting was with the whip or the stick: physical punishment. In an article called “Slavery, a dehumanizing institution” Nell Painter explains that in the 16th and 17th century African slaves were exposed to all kinds of physical and psychological torture: they were branded as animals, mutilated, violated and forced to watch the tortures applied to the members of their family. In Egypt, 3000 years before that, the conditions of the Hebrew slaves could not have been much better …. and all these horrifying experiences left their mark in their character.
But the new generation was different. They had time to adopt their new identity: now they are the people of HaShem. They have voluntarily submitted to the instructions of the Tora, which includes self-discipline (qedusha). This new generation has to be educated and led with words, not with whips. Think of the difference between our modern society and the society 40 or 50 years ago: then, teachers beat their students in class to discipline them. The world, in that aspect, changed radically. Today, in civilized countries, a teacher will never hit her students. A similar phenomenon occurs within families. I know many parents who were raised by their parents “with the whip”, and who find it very difficult to free themselves from that burden when educating their own children. It is difficult to stop using force as a tool of persuasion when one was not educated in other ways to obey the voice of authority. Younger parents, however, learned to replace the whip for the word, and to establish their authority by the weight of what they say.
It is possible that in our Parasha something similar happened. The new generation had to reprogram and forget the power of the “whip”. It is as if HaShem had told Moshe, “Take the stick, but do not use it! Just talk to the rock, and do not hit it! The new generation needs to be free of the whip and learn to obey not with violence but with persuasion.
SHABBAT SHALOM
