Shemot: Moshe Rabbenu, Our Teacher

We know him as Moshe Rabbenu, Moses our Master, Moses our Teacher, Moses our Master Teacher. Such a title certainly tells us a great deal about Moshe and qualifies him for the title “Person in the Parsha.”

But is it his name, given to him by an Egyptian princess, that grants him the role of this week’s central personality? I think not.

Do the titles “master” and “teacher” themselves affirm that he is larger than life, an individual forever of central importance, beginning with the events described in this week’s Torah portion, Shemot (Exodus 1:1-6:1), and continuing to this very day?

I prefer to believe that it is the suffix of the word “Rabbenu,” the “nu” which means “our,” that makes Moshe special. He is “our” master, “our” teacher, the outstanding personage of the Jewish people. In a sense, he is the property of the faith of Judaism, to the exclusion of other faiths and other nations.

True, he is revered by our “sister” religions and is honorably mentioned in their sacred writings. For other faiths, he is a prophet, a hero, perhaps even a “saint.” But he is not their teacher, not their masterful authority figure. The Torah, the comprehensive guide to every aspect of our lives as Jews, is Torat Moshe. The Torah is our guide in life, and Moshe is our shepherd.

Many of us are not aware of the fact that Moshe has been claimed by non-Jews besides the other Abrahamic religions. His very identity as a Jew, an Israelite, has been challenged from many directions. It has been maintained by many who argue that he was an Egyptian, a prince of Egypt, who sought further power and a loftier position of leadership by aligning himself with the enslaved Israelites.

Such arguments were advanced in ancient times and persisted in recent generations in German literature and in Hollywood productions.

One fascinating argument for Moshe’s non-Jewish origins was advanced by a famous Jew who had his own bone to pick with religion in general and with Jewish religion in particular. I refer to Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and the author of Moses and Monotheism.

Freud published this work later in his life, when his influence and fame were at their peak, and it met with approval from many quarters. It also met with a cascade of criticism and vociferous opposition from defenders of the Jewish faith, those who insisted that Moshe was Rabbenu, “our” teacher.

One such critic was a mid-twentieth century writer named Chaim Greenberg (1889-1953). Greenberg was a Labor Zionist activist and prolific writer who was among the most severe critics of the American Jewish community’s response to news of the Holocaust. Although some of his many writings have been translated into English, I possess a multi-volume collection of his Yiddish essays that I find very perceptive, and that express many traditional Jewish values in a manner which only the Yiddish language can fully capture.

Greenberg wrote a searing rebuttal to Freud’s thesis in 1939, going so far as to mock it as nonsense. I do not know whether his rebuttal had any great impact upon the rest of the world, which was then distracted, to say the least, by the rise of Nazism. But I do know that many Jews were grateful to Greenberg for demolishing Freud’s contention that not only was Moshe an Egyptian, but that monotheism itself had its origins in ancient Egyptian culture.

I imagine that many Jews were then quite pleased that Greenberg’s rebuttal issued from a distinctly non-rabbinic source, from a Labor Zionist publicist with impeccable secular credentials. I should add that my readings of Greenberg’s many works have led me to admire his Yiddishe neshama and thorough familiarity with a wide range of traditional Torah sources.

The rebuttal to which I refer is included in Greenberg’s collection of essays entitled Yid un Velt (“The Jew and the World”). The title of the essay is “Moshe Rabbenu Foon Der Gantzer Velt” (“Moses Our Teacher of the Entire World”). Note the implication that although Moshe had universal impact, he remained Rabbenu, “our” teacher.

But the essay’s title comes from a long-forgotten Yiddish nursery rhyme, which translates as follows:

Moshe Rabbenu of the entire world (velt),

Throw me down a small sack of money (gelt).

What will you do with the small sack of money?

I will buy myself a little wagon.

What will you do with the little wagon?

I will load it with little pebbles.

What will you do with little pebbles?

I will build myself a little shul.

What will you do in the little shul?

I will daven Mincha and Maariv!

The meaning of this childlike poem is quite clear. The child conceives of Moshe as simultaneously “our” Teacher and the Teacher of the entire universe. But he carries within his pure and innocent soul the conviction that the ultimate “universe” is the little shul and the Jewish evening prayers!

My experience as a child psychologist has led me to take children’s songs, nursery rhymes, and fairy tales quite seriously. But the long-forgotten song I just shared with you is merely the opening of Greenberg’s long-forgotten essay.

After commenting with his own sense of pride in the Jewish Moshe Rabbenu, he shares this comment from the works of the greatest of all Jewish poets, Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi. Here is what he writes, in my own inadequate translation from his lucid and vibrant Yiddish:

“How did Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi put it so many centuries ago? He insisted that Israel received its place in world history not thanks to Moshe Rabbenu. Quite the contrary—Moshe Rabbenu became great because of Israel! Therefore, Jews refer to themselves not as Moshe’s people, but as God’s people.

“Moshe alone, without a people prepared to accept the Torah and travel with him to Mount Sinai, would never have become Moshe Rabbenu! His teachings would have been neglected and forgotten by world history.”

Moshe owed his glory to the Jewish people who followed him into the desert and who follow him to this day. Therefore, the Jewish people “own” him. He was, and remains, Rabbenu— “our” teacher.

Indeed, “Torah tziva lanu Moshe, morasha Kehilat Yaakov. The Torah Moshe commanded us is the heritage of the Congregation of Yaakov”. (Deuteronomy 33).