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Orchard of Delights
The answer to this question may lie in Moses’ role in the future.
After the people sinned by worshipping the Golden Calf, God initially
said to Moses, “I have seen this people and behold, it is a stiff-necked
people. And now leave Me be and My anger will burn against them
and I shall consume them and I will make you a great nation”
(Exodus 32:9-10). Moses responded by pleading for the people and
succeeding in eliciting God’s mercy. As part of his plea, Moses even
audaciously tells God that if He will not forgive the people, he should
“erase me from Your book that You have written” (Exodus 32:32).
Rashi explains that when God commanded Moses to “leave Me be”
so that He could destroy the people, He wanted Moses to correctly
infer that he should, in fact, not “let God be”; rather, he should pray
so that God would not destroy the people.
Had God not softened His rebuke at the beginning of Moses’
career, He would have dissuaded Moses from ever questioning him,
and, ultimately, from defending the Jewish people after the sin of the
Golden Calf. Furthermore, He recognized that Moses’ questioning
Him was actually motivated by the right reason – he sought God’s
compassion for His people. Indeed, right from the beginning of his
appearance on the biblical stage, Moses manifested this compassion
as he killed an Egyptian in order to save a Jew and by doing so
sacrificed his life of comfort, privilege, and power. Moses’ compassion
for the Jewish people was one of the reasons God chose him to be
the redeemer, for this was in God’s eyes an indispensable leadership
quality.
The Jewish tradition of challenging, as it were, God’s decrees goes
back to Abraham’s plea for the people of Sodom. Significantly, both
Abraham and Moses combine tremendous audacity with profound
humility. Both confront God directly and speak what is in their
hearts, but both demonstrate humility as Abraham adds that he is
but “dust and ashes” (Genesis 18:27) and Moses is characterized later
in the Torah as “exceedingly humble, more than any person on the
face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 12:3).
From Abraham and Moses, we learn an important lesson: God
demands our obedience and loyalty, but ultimately He does not
want “yes men” who will fail to stand up to Him when the moment
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While a cursory reading of the Torah might lead the reader to assume
that the plagues were intended solely to punish the Egyptians or to
force them to free the children of Israel, the Ishbitzer Rebbe clearly
states that they were also intended to purify the Jewish people,
to smelt out the negative dross of Egypt that had been integrated
within the Jewish psyche. According to a Midrash cited by Rashi,
four-fifths of the Jews actually died in the plague of darkness as
they were too entrenched psychologically to be able to leave Egypt
(Mechilta cited by Rashi on Exodus 13:18). The ten plagues symbolize
the spiritual purification and growth the children of Israel had to
undergo to realize their potential. In this case, human potential had
to go through the crucible of the ten plagues before it could receive
the refined will of God as revealed in the Ten Commandments.
£Patterns in the Torah: £Patterns in the Torah: Patterns in the Torah:
£
Ten = Seven + ThreeTen = Seven + Three
Ten = Seven + Three
In addition to the rich number of associations revealed by the Torah’s
repetition of the number ten as a whole number, the number ten
can also be interpreted as the sum of seven and three. According to
Kabbalah and Chassidut such an interpretive approach is warranted
by the frequent division of ten into seven and three in many different
Jewish contexts. In the case of the ten plagues, the portion of Va’eira
contains seven plagues and the next portion, Bo, has three, so this
division is supported by the text itself.
Although the ten sefirot can be divided according to a number of
different schemes, the most natural division is that of the three higher
and the seven lower sefirot. In general the number seven indicates
complete cycles and inherent unity. This is manifest in scores of
concepts and contexts: the Shabbat; the seven weeks between the
holidays of Pesach and Shavuot; the Sabbatical year; the seven fruits
of the Land of Israel; the seven lamps of the menorah (the Temple
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