(Delivered July 13, 2024)

Shabbat shalom! 

There’s a phrase that people often use in times of sorrow or challenge. Perhaps you’ve heard it yourself, or even said it. “God never gives us more than we can handle.” 

I hate that phrase.

Because when I’m feeling grief-stricken or brokenhearted, when it seems like all is lost, the least helpful thing is the idea that God has this particular challenge in mind for me, and it’s all just some kind of sadistic vote of confidence in my capacity to handle hard things. Thanks a lot. The idea that God never gives us more than we can handle bothers me, because it suggests a theology in which God is both individually emotionally involved in people’s lives AND sometimes uses that emotional involvement in manipulative ways.

As I studied the parsha this week, I found myself coming back to that smarmy phrase quite a bit. Looking at the way this parsha plays out for Moses, I kept thinking, Poor guy. He really deserves a break.

Think of it: two weeks ago was the incident with the scouts, in which ten of the twelve folks he sent to scout the Promised Land came back discouraged and without faith, saying this is too hard, we can’t settle this land. 

Dayeinu—that would have been enough to cause Moses immense frustration. And then came Parshat Korach from last week, in which Moses and the Israelites had to deal with rebellions that cost many lives and created a huge amount of trauma. Even though it all turned out correctly, and the rebels were defeated, that good outcome carried a price. Watching the earth open up and swallow Korach’s gang must have made a strong and hard impression on all of the Israelites. But for Moses and Aaron especially, it must have reawakened the trauma of the deaths of Nadav and Avihu from Parshat Shemini. Plus there was a plague in last week’s parsha. 

Then this week, in the fifth aliyah of Chukat, when the Israelites have set out into the Wilderness of Tzin and settled at Kadesh, Miriam dies. Suddenly, the water supply is gone, and the Israelites are once again in a panic—this time not so much from their sense of entitlement or weariness for how hard it is to be moving toward a goal that they didn’t entirely choose and don’t understand and can’t picture, and which they won’t actually get to enjoy because of their behavior in Shelach L’cha. 

This panic is actually life or death. They are wandering in the wilderness—in the desert!—and there is no water. When they go to Moses to complain, it’s with good reason, but it still probably sounds to him like more ungrateful kvetching from this fractious people he’s been reluctantly called to lead.

So Moses is already pretty wound up when he goes to God to ask (again) what to do about the water problem. God gives fairly clear instructions: Take your staff and gather the community, you and Aaron, 

וְדִבַּרְתֶּם אֶל־הַסֶּלַע לְעֵינֵיהֶם וְנָתַן מֵימָיו וְהוֹצֵאתָ לָהֶם מַיִם מִן־הַסֶּלַע 

And speak to the rock in sight of the community, and it will yield its water, 
and you will bring out water for them from the rock.

And this is where Moses starts to lose it, where the adage that God never gives us more than we can handle is exposed as untenable. This—the loss of his sister, the community tensions he is constantly managing, the horrific memories of the loss of his two nephews—this actually is more than he can handle. And instead of following instruction and coaxing the rock to give water, he scolds the gathered Israelites, 

שִׁמְעוּ־נָא הַמֹּרִים הֲמִן־הַסֶּלַע הַזֶּה נוֹצִיא לָכֶם מָיִם׃

Listen, you rebels! Can we get water for you out of this rock?!

And then Moses lifts his hand and hits the rock with his staff. Twice. 

Whereas God had told him that words would draw out the rock’s water, Moses was past his breaking point and he both defied the practical instruction about what to do and demonstrated by his words that he didn’t even believe in God’s instructions.

Moses had absorbed all he could absorb, and he snapped. It’s painful to watch him decompensate, this person who has overcome his own limitations and hesitations to become a truly capable leader. And yet if we look at the circumstances, it adds up. It seems God really did give him more than he could handle. 

As someone pointed out in Torah Study on Thursday, this task of leading the Israelites into the Promised Land, a task that he didn’t even want in the first place, should have been mostly finished by now. But because of the incident with the scouts, this two-year gig turned into a forty-year one and it’s already determined he won’t get the reward. To me, it’s amazing he continued to lead given all this. Even before striking the rock, he already knew from Shelach L’cha that he was part of דוֹר הָמִדְבַּר—the Wilderness Generation, none of whom would enter the land, save Joshua and Caleb.

In the text, Miriam’s death and burial together get only half a verse; it’s almost cursory, kind of seems like an afterthought that it was included at all. Immediately after her death and burial is when the water crisis arises, leading the Rabbis of the Midrash to posit that Miriam had her own private, portable well, which the Israelites lost access to after her death. But this quick chain of events also means that Moses did not have any time or space to mourn his sister, to integrate the loss of her physical presence into his being. 

Miriam’s importance to Moses—and, not for nothing, to us—is hard to overstate. When their mother gave Moses up as a baby under the sharp Egyptian order to murder all male Jewish babies, it was Miriam who watched after him and bravely approached Pharaoh’s daughter to offer to find her a nursemaid for the baby she drew out of the Nile—a nursemaid who of course turned out to be his own mother. The point is, from the beginning, Miriam was looking out for Moses’s needs in ways that had far-reaching consequences. If Moses had not had those extra borrowed years with his own mother, in his own Israelite culture, he might not have known who he was…and without that identity formation, all that followed—his rage resulting in the death of the Egyptian taskmaster, his being chosen by God to lead the Israelites to freedom, and so on—might not have occurred. 

So Moses having to go into crisis mode right after this foundational loss? Well, it’s understandable why it was so hard for him and why the pressure built up the way it did. 

By contrast, when Aaron dies shortly thereafter, Moses has prior notice directly from God that loss is imminent. And when it does happen, he has both time to absorb the loss and company with whom to absorb it. In chapter 20, verse 29, we read: 

וַיִּבְכּוּ אֶת־אַהֲרֹן שְׁלֹשִׁים יוֹם כֹּל בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל

The entire House of Israel mourned Aaron for 30 days.

Later still, we get a glimpse of what Moses is really made of—again, just a half of a verse. In this passage, which we don’t read this year, the Israelites rear up again with complaints and God sends fiery snakes to punish them. In chapter 21, verse 7, the people come to Moses to ask him to intervene, and even after everything that has happened, 

וַיִּתְפַּלֵּל מֹשֶׁה בְּעַד הָעָם

And Moses prayed on behalf of the people. 

This person who has been through the wringer and who would’ve had every right to give up on the Israelites still somehow manages to find enough compassion for this unruly bunch, to lend his voice to their plight. Looking at Moses’s actions from a wider angle makes me think a little differently about the notion of God only giving us what we can handle. Although Moses lost his composure spectacularly in the incident with the rock, with time he managed to right himself and regain the dignity and sense of responsibility that we expect of him. It turns out, he did handle all of the troubles that came his way, and eventually composted them into even more profound leadership. May we all meet our hardest moments with such fortitude and overcome our most shameful ones with such dignity.

Shabbat shalom!