Beha'alotecha: The Hazards of Hubris

I’ve always considered it to be the ugliest word in the Hebrew language. The word is gaavah, generally translated as arrogance, haughtiness, or even insolence. And yet, it sometimes carries the opposite meaning: greatness, loftiness, or even grandeur.

So it is with the English word pride. One can associate that word with pride in accomplishment, as in the parent who is proud of his child’s good grades in school. Or, on the other hand, the expression “as proud as a peacock” is a phrase used to denigrate a boastful person, especially one who has no claim at all to accomplishment.

In this week’s Torah portion, Beha’aloscha (Numbers 8:1-12:16), we find a reference to gaavah as a vile moral defect, which is how most of us generally understand it. The reference is not explicit in the biblical text but is highlighted by the greatest of all traditional commentators, Rashi.

The verse in question is preceded by the detailed narrative of the Israelites’ dissatisfaction with the food they felt forced to eat while in the wilderness. Here are some excerpts of that narrative, all as rendered by the Jewish Publication Society translation:

“The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, ‘If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish that we used to eat in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Now our gullets are shriveled. There is nothing at all! Nothing but this manna to look to!’”

Moshe reacts strongly, as does the Lord. Now follows the crucial verse: “The Lord will give you meat and you shall eat. You shall eat not one day, not two, not even five days or ten or twenty, but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you. For you have rejected the Lord who is among you, by whining before Him and saying, ‘Oh, why did we ever leave Egypt.’”

The entire narrative, dramatic and potent as it is, leaves Rashi puzzled by the one brief phrase— “who is among you, b’kirbichem, in your midst”.

Here is the lesson he takes, and shares with us, from this emphasis upon “the Lord who is among you”.

Rashi: “If not for the fact that I implanted My Shechinah, My Divine Presence, among you, you would never have had the audacity, the haughtiness of heart, to have descended to such pathetic complaints.” (My free translation.)

Somehow, Rashi attributes these despicable complaints to the fact that the Lord had implanted his Divine Presence, the Shechinah, among them.

Rav Chaim Zeitchik zt”l, one of the inspirational survivors of the Holocaust, who spent years in Siberia before eventually escaping to Israel where he left us with volumes of his profoundly moral teachings, and whom I’ve frequently cited in this column in the past, wonders:

“Would we not assume that the Lord’s Divine Presence would have imbued the Israelites with faith in Him, faith sufficient to avoid sinking to ungrateful whining and complaint? How can Rashi understand the text to mean that, quite the contrary, it was the Divine Presence itself that fueled the frustration and fury of the people to the extent that it did?”

His answer is insightful, revealing, and of great contemporary significance.

He writes: “We see from here that occasionally, great privilege and success result in self-satisfaction, smugness, and arrogance. Achievement and favorable circumstances often cause the development of moral defects and spiritual pitfalls. The proximity of Divine Presence, instead of humbling us, becomes cause for hubris, for excessive pride, for blind egoism, which allow to blur the thin lines of gratitude and proper behavior.”

He continues: “An individual who succeeds in life must be especially careful not only in matters of natural events and material affairs which will often ‘go to one’s head’ and lead to selfishness and a false sense of greatness, but careful reflection is all the more necessary. When one is successful in spiritual matters, is outstanding in piety and Torah wisdom, he must not permit himself to fall into the snare of gaavah. He must not develop a ‘swollen head’. He dare not take all the credit for his achievements and thereby consider others inferior to him.”

There is much more to be said about gaavah, about arrogance. Some list it as one of the 613 commandments, as something we must diligently avoid because the Torah says so. Others are convinced that it so apparent a moral defect that it did not necessitate an explicit proscriptive commandment.

Still others, quoted by the medieval commentator Meiri, are confident that the prohibition to avoid arrogance/gaavah is implicit in the verse in Vayikra/Leviticus 19:17, “You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart.” After all, they maintain, hatred stems from arrogance; the source of sinat halev originates in gaavah.