by Rabbi Dr Jeffrey M. Cohen

Why Moses’ Name is (almost) Absent from the Haggadah

by Rabbi Dr Jeffrey M. Cohen

The birth of the Israelite nation, and the slavery in Egypt that would be its precursor, were disclosed to Abraham at the םירתבה ןיב תירב (‘the covenant between the pieces’: Gen. Ch. 15). The sacrifices were hewn in pieces, but the pieces are made whole again, like Ezekiel’s dry bones when God passed between them. This was a symbolic foretelling of the fact that Israel would be history’s sacrifice, but God would ultimately make her whole, to achieve her destiny as the nation that would bring the greatest of benefits to mankind — וכרבתהו ץראה ייוג לכ ךערזב (‘And all the nations of the earth shall be blessed through you’: Gen 22:18).

Curiously, Abraham is made to fall into a deep sleep before being told the fate of his offspring: שמשה יהיו םהרבא לע הלפנ המדרתו אובל (‘…and, as the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abraham’: v.12). What, we may ask, was the purpose and significance of that sleep?

I would suggest that it is not coincidental that that same somnolescent experience happened in the case of Adam, with the identical word, המדרת, being used to describe his sleepy experience when God removed his rib in order to create Eve: לע המדרת םיקלא ’ה לפיו םדאה (Gen 2:21)—literally, ‘God hurled a deep sleep on Adam.’ Surely, God could have extracted it painlessly from a conscious Adam! So the sleep has to be understood symbolically as an essential element of the dramatic narrative.

I view it as a divine softening or cushioning of man from the traumas that suffering humanity would be heir to. If Adam had been fully conscious, and able to contemplate humanity’s eternity of toil and trouble, he might, arguably, have pleaded with God to set aside His plan to provide him with a partner for procreation!

When Jonah gave in to despair, and slept—not in order to replenish his reserves of faith, but, to the contrary, in order to give himself a respite from the exhaustion of his flight

from his mission—he was rudely awakened by the boat’s captain with the words םדרנ ךל המ, which can be translated, ‘how has your deep sleep availed you?’ Note the irony here: Jonah’s םדרנ is the same word as Abraham’s המדרת. But, whereas, for Adam and Abraham, their sleep served to cushion them from the traumas of two great creative enterprises—for the former, the birth of suffering humanity; for the latter, contemplation of the traumas of Israel’s future destiny—Jonah’s sleep was purely self-serving, to refresh him and embolden him to persevere in his act of fear and rebellion.

So, why, then, when Moses received his mission to lead a nation that was destined to suffer an arduous 40 years of desert life—with no compensating Promised Land at the end for his generation— was it not conveyed within, and cushioned by, a similarly induced sleep? We can but speculate that the answer lies in the fact that he was not one of the Avot ha-umah, the fathers of the nation. He was its leader, Commander-in-Chief and lawgiver—not its father. A father has dreams for, and nightmares about, his children. They are an extension of him, and he wants them to aspire to

and attain to even greater things than he himself has achieved. A father makes sacrifices for his offspring; he gives his life for them; and that is why God set up that bizarre Brit bein ha-b’tarim with its sacrifices all hewn in pieces and then made whole. A father is in an accessible and intimate relationship with his child. Moses, however, was ever a figure of distance and detachment, who even pitched his tent at a distance from the camp (See Ex.33:7). If we seek explanations for why Moses’ name does not appear directly ‘I don’t even know Your name, God, so, if they ask it of me, how can I speak confidently in Your name?’ in the Haggadah, one might be that he was not credited with those same depths of parental feeling for his people. When God told him at the burning bush to go to Pharaoh and rescue Israel, he made all sorts of excuses: ‘Who am I to negotiate with kings?’ (Ex. 3:11); ‘I don’t even know Your name, God, so, if they ask it of me, how can I speak confidently in Your name?’ (3:13). And even after God tells him what to say, and assures him that the redemption would be successful, culminating in the promise םירצמ תא םתלצנו (‘You

will strip Egypt bare’: 3:22), Moses retorts יל ונימאי אל ןהו (‘But what if they won’t believe me or listen to your voice?’: 4:1). So, God had to give him some miraculous signs to convince him. And, even then, that reluctant liberator feebly says ינדא יב יכנא םירבד שיא אל (‘But I entreat You, Lord, I am not an orator, and never have been’: v. 10). And, finally, with a curious, almost callous, disregard of his people’s plight –חלשת דיב אנ חלש (‘Send someone else, please!’: v.12).

A father, on the other hand, goes to the ends of the earth to rescue his child in trouble. He certainly doesn’t turn his back when someone offers help to rescue that child, especially when that someone is God Himself! But Moses was a reluctant, diffident, leader, lacking in self-confidence or the assertiveness and passion of a father for the success of his child.

For this critical assessment of Moses’ feelings for Israel we have the support of the Midrash (Shemot Rabb. 1(35)), quoted with approbation by Rashi (See on Ex. 2:14), which states:

AND MOSES FEARED:- for the

nation; as he saw among them many wicked people prepared to inform on their brethren. He thought, ‘that being the situation, perhaps they don’t deserve to be redeemed!’ SURELY THE MATTER IS KNOWN: What I originally found perplexing is now ‘known’ to me, namely in what way Israel was more sinful than the other 70 nations to have deserved to be subjugated by such hard labour. Now, however, I understand how much they deserved it! Abraham, however, was the very embodiment of those paternalistic emotions, a quality that his name AND MOSES FEARED for the nation; as he saw among them many wicked people prepared to inform on their brethren. He thought, ‘that being the situation, perhaps they don’t deserve to be redeemed!’ Av-ram (‘exalted father’), and its extension, Avraham (‘father of a multitude of nations’), embodied, and with which he was invested even before he became a biological father. This was well demonstrated when God tells him that his offspring, at the end of their enslavement, would inherit the Promised Land (15:7). He immediately demands of God, המב

הנשריא יכ עדא (‘How can I be sure that I’ll inherit it?’). Note the employment of the first person: ‘How will I know that I shall inherit it?’ Not, הושריי יכ (‘that they shall inherit it!’). Abraham so identifies existentially with his offspring of 600 years in the future that he is overwhelmed by the anguish of their servitude and later by the exhilaration of their deliverance.

Significantly, that particular Abraham-God encounter began with a הזחמ, a mere ‘vision’ (15:1), wherein God told him that he would be blessed with offspring who would become numerous and inherit the land. But when Abraham probes, and, in that semi-conscious state, betrays anxiety and demands clarity regarding their fate and destiny— ‘How can I be sure?’—God increases the anaesthetic, to enable him to bear the next disclosure, that of the slavery and oppression. Hence, from communicating to him הזחמב (‘in a dream’), God proceeds to plunge Abraham into המדרת, a much deeper level of oblivion, to enable him to cope with his תלפונ הלודג הכשח המיא וילע (‘dread and deep darkness’), or, as we would dub it, profound depression. And, because Abraham was authentically able to sense the anguish and horrors of the slavery and trials suffered by his offspring, he remains, throughout our history, our first and foremost patriarch.

Although at the individual level, Moses, when he first ‘went out to his brethren’ (2:11), was quick to intervene to resolve an Israelite dispute, and, subsequently, to forcefully protect a defenceless Hebrew; yet he did not possess Abraham’s depth of compassion or trans-generational concern. For Moses, the Israelites were his ‘brethren’; for Abraham, they were his ‘children.’ Brothers exhibit rivalry and jealousy—as the book of Bereshit continually demonstrates; parents, to the contrary, personify the truth of proverbial truism, ‘love covers all transgressions’ (Pro. 10:12).

From a historical point of view, it should not be forgotten that Moses did not, in fact, experience, together with his people, the horrors of the servitude. He was cocooned in the royal palace of Egypt, and then among the idyllic pastures of Midian. As an ambassador and negotiator for a God, he was granted freedom of movement, with ready access to the royal palace.

There was no reason, therefore, for God to have anaesthetised Moses, for, though he sympathised with what was happening to his brethren, he never felt anything approaching Abraham’s emotional trauma. Moses’ first thought, when summoned to God’s ministry, was not for them, but