Shemot 5768: What Manner of Man is the Prophet?

This week we start the book of Exodus and are introduced to the setup for the rest of the Torah. A Pharaoh who does not know Joseph arises and appealing to national security, has the Israelites enslaved. Things get worse. Pharaoh has the midwives try to kill all the newborn boys but they do not heed him. In response Pharaoh then decides to kill all male newborns by drowning, though one baby escapes this by being sent down the river, ending up living in the palace, until he murders an Egyptian task master. The slave who this guy saves rewards him by ratting him out. To escape Pharaoh’s anger, this man flees to Midian where he finds a bride, becomes a shepherd and has a rather interesting conversation with a burning bush. This man is of course Moses. And this week is really his story.

This week has been a challenge to write this. I had an idea and yet I have not been able to figure out what to do with it. So let me start with the idea.

The synagogue I attend is in a northern suburb of Chicago, but I live in downtown Chicago. On the many occasions I go from one to the other, I travel along Lake Shore Drive and turn off at Bryn Mawr Avenue. As I get to the first traffic light, there is a big pink stone building on the corner. My first recollections of this building were of my dad’s former boss and mentor living there. I learned less than a year ago about the time a boss and mentor of one of my teachers gave an address there and made a friend which arguably would change all of American history.

In January 1963, Abraham Joshua Heschel began a speech at the Edgewater Beach Hotel at the opening of the first conference of race and relations, quoting this week’s Parsha.

At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses. Moses’ words were: “Thus says the Lord the God of Israel, let My people go that they my celebrate a feast to Me” While Pharaoh retorted: “Who is the Lord, that I should heed their voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, And moreover I will not let Israel go.”

The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The exodus began, but is far from being completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses. [The Insecurity of Freedom p.85]

Closing the conference was a speech by Martin Luther King. Heschel and King left the conference as friends.

Passing Bryn Mawr and Sheridan so often, I don’t always pay attention to the building. Yet this week as I passed the building early Friday morning to attend a class I had the strangest feeling, and a question would not leave me: “What manner of Man is the prophet?” This was the first sentence in Heschel’s Doctoral dissertation which eventually would be translated from German into English by Heschel as The Prophets.

I didn’t understand why this was going around in my head. It seemed like I found what my Shlomo’s Drash would be for the week. Yet this has been very difficult to write without writing another graduate level paper. So most of this week I’ve spent at Spertus’ Asher Library trying to figure out what I wanted to write. I’ve been failing badly at it.

On a fluke I checked the Encyclopedia Judaica on Heschel, and found a rather startling surprise. I was on my way to class on the 12^th of Tevet. Heschel’s 35^th yartzeit was the 11^th.

My original idea was to figure out is Moses was a prophet. However, it pretty definitive since we read in Deuteronomy:

Deut. 34:10. And there has not arisen since in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.

Moses standing in front of Pharaoh makes him the first prophet of the biblical text to approach a king. As I wrote last year, his story parallels Jeremiah, including his reluctance to take on the role of prophet.

A few days before his death, in an NBC television interview with Carl Stern, Heschel summarized his view of the prophet:

The idea of a prophet is complex and consists above all of two things.

Of the message or the substance of what the prophet has to say from some extraordinary claim to an experience which is not given to other men.

In other words there are two parts to the prophet: the message the Prophet gives and the unique way the prophet receives that message, what some might call divine revelation. Heschel continued (bold mine):

Let us ignore the second, let us take the first.

What's so great about the message of the prophet, about the prophet as a character? I would say the prophet is a man who is able to hold God and man in one thought, at one time, at all times. This is so great and this is so marvelous. Which means that whatever I do to man, I do to God. When I hurt a human being, I injure God.

Moses was not one of the prophets that Heschel described in his book. Yet I wonder: how does Moses fit the Heschel’s model of the prophet? How, in this week’s portion, does Moses act the prophet? Does he act the prophet more now than he does in later encounters with Pharaoh? How given Heschel’s model do we become better people?

Those are a lot of questions for which I have no answers. Finding such answers, I could write a dissertation. But I’m not going to.

Instead, I’m going to make an invitation. You give me your answers.

For those of you in the Chicago Area who can get there, I will be leading the Torah Study portion of the service during the Kahal Shabbat Morning services this Saturday at Beth Emet the Free Synagogue in Evanston. Services start at 9:30. Come with your thoughts and your answers. Let’s discuss these questions together.

If you are not able to attend, then go over to my blog at shlomosdrash.blogspot.com and write down your thoughts as a comment on this weeks entry.