Beha'alotkha (Midrash)

Moses and the Seventy Elders

I cannot resist quoting a quip of my friend Yaakov Sach. The Book of Numbers is like the voyage of the S. S. Titanic: it begins with the people in a festive mood, neatly arranged by camps around their sacred center, the Sanctuary; there are a few darker hints, but these are so subtle as to go almost unnoticed. The travelers expect a calm and pleasant journey, and to arrive at their destination quickly; suddenly, in mid-voyage they strike an iceberg and everything changes. In the Torah, this iceberg takes the concrete form of a pair of inverted Hebrew letters, the “nun”s framing Num 10:35-36, after which everything starts to go wrong. The ship may not sink, but an entire generation will die in the desert and fail to complete their journey; here, the catastrophes are not natural, but man-made: a collective failure of character (see my discussion of this in HY I: Beha’alotkha, Shelah Lekha, Korah). In a very real sense, everything must start anew after these events.

The very last midrash on this portion appears in the context of the people’s disgust with the unrelieved diet of manna, and God‘s decision to feed them quail for an entire month to teach them a lesson. But before that He instructs Moses to gather seventy elders, to assist him in bearing the burden of leadership. Numbers Rabbah 15.25:

“And I shall descend and speak [with you there]…” [Num 11:17]. To inform you that the day of appointing the elders was as precious to the Holy One blessed be He as the day of giving the Torah, of which it is said, “for on the third day the Lord shall descend in the sight of all the people” [Exod 19:11]. So too regarding the appointment of elders “descending” is written.

Thus far, things are presented in a very positive light. The appointment of the elders, a body which simultaneously extends and diffuses Moses’ authority and leadership role, is interpreted here as a significant development. Interestingly, the other major event compared to the day of Giving the Torah was the day the Sanctuary was erected and dedicated (see, e.g., the midrash on Cant 3:11 at the end of b. Ta’anit). What is the common denominator of these two events? That both serve to institutionalize the presence of the Divine presence among the people. The one does so through the construction of a central building to serve as a locus of worship, of ritual, and as a fixed “home” for the Divine Presence, the Shekhinah; the other, through creating a human institution, a kind of forerunner of the Great Sanhedrin (originally located adjacent to the Temple, in the Chamber of Hewn Stone), a body composed of men of learning and authority, powerful and charismatic moral personalities to guided the people. As Rambam states in Mamrim 1.1-2, they embodied a combination of transmission of the tradition and their own innovative, creative power—by issuing edicts, interpreting the Torah using hermeneutic tools, etc. They were clearly a much more innovative element than the priesthood, containing within themselves the seeds for change, even radical change. To use a phrase from a much later age: Jerusalem and Yavneh.

To what may this be compared? To a king who had an orchard and hired a watchman, whom he paid to guard it. After a time the watchman said to him: I cannot guard it by myself; bring others to watch with me. The king said to him: I have asked you to watch all of the orchard, and given you all of the benefits of its watching, and now you tell me to bring others to watch with you. I will bring others to watch with you, but you must know that I am not giving them payment for their watching from my own money, but they shall take their wages from what I have given you.

Thus spoke the Holy One blessed be He to Moses when he said, “I cannot bear them alone” [Num 11:14]. The Holy One blessed be He said to him, I have given you spirit and knowledge to support my children. And I would not have asked any other, so that you alone may enjoy that greatness, and now you seek others. Know that they shall not take anything from Me, but “I shall take from the spirit that is upon you” [v. 17].

Here, the midrash takes a strange, unexpected direction: of concern with Moses’ ego, of the threat to his unique position presented by these new leadership figures, potential rivals with whom he must share his prestige. Yet strangely, we see, specifically from two separate places in this week’s parsha, Moses’ renowned humility. First, in Num 11:26-29, in the incident of Eldad and Medad, in which two otherwise unknown people suddenly start prophesying in the camp (Did this prophecy have some verbal content? Or was it ecstatic prophecy, like that of the “band of prophets” encountered by Saul in 1 Sam 10:5-6, 10-11?). Both the ”lad” and Joshua run to Moses, asking him to take some sort of action against them. Moses’ reply is magnanimous: “Are you so zealous on my behalf? Would that all the people of the Lord would prophesy, that God would give them His spirit!” Then, in 12:3, when Aaron and Miriam are called up on the carpet for talking against Moses, the Torah comments, “The man Moses was very humble, more so than any man on the face of the earth.”

My conclusion is that this is intended as a kind of rhetorical setup. The important point is not what the specific figure involved felt, whether he was jealous or humble, Rather, the point is that, unlike the watchman’s wages, the Divine Spirit is not diminished by being shared and spread around. Religion is not a zero-sum game. A teacher’s role is more like that of a lamp lighter. As the saying has it, “ a candle for one is like a candle for a hundred.”

Perhaps there is concern here with the issue of elitism vs. populism. In point of fact, the mainstream of Judaism has historically been very sober, anti-charismatic, opposed to popular prophecy. Such phenomena as speaking in tongues, ecstatic folk preachers of the type associated with the Evangelical and Southern Baptist churches, both black and white, or even the charismatic movement among Catholics, Pentecostalists and, more recently, some Greek Orthodox, are distinctly minority, non-mainstream manifestations in Judaism. (This is not to say that they did not or do not exist. Early Hasidism involved many exuberant, ecstatic expressions. There are descriptions of the Maggid of Mezhirech delivering his Shabbat table talk “as if the Shekhinah spoke from his throat,” i.e., engaged in automatic speech.) Even traditional Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, seems to have been largely a disciplined, sober, elite enterprise, involving text study and meditation on a certain scheme of the universe. (Again, notwithstanding certain important exceptions, which contemporary scholars such as Moshe Idel and Haviva Pedaya and others are bringing to our attention.) Democracy does exist in traditional Judaism, but only in the openness of the intellectual aristocracy to all, through knowledge. “Take care of the children of the poor, for from them shall come Torah.”

Nevertheless Moses was not lacking anything [of his own glory], for at the end of forty years He said to him: “Take Joshua ben Nun, and I shall place your glory upon him” [Num 27:18-20]. What is written? “And Joshua son of Nun was filled with the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands upon him” [Deut 34:9]. The Holy One blessed be He said: In this world only individuals prophesy, but in the World to Come all Israel shall be prophets, as is said, “Thereafter I shall pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters and elders shall prophesy” [Joel 3:1]. Thus preached R. Tanhuma b. Abba.

Our midrash concludes with an eschatological vision, painting a non-elitist, all-embracing, universal picture of prophecy—but all this in the distant future.