This week, Jews around the world read and study parshat B’ha’alotcha. The name of the parsha literally means “when you raise up,” and it leads into instructions on how Aaron should light the menorah in the holy temple. Like last week, the name of the parsha draws our attention to the concept of uplifting, in this case the lifting up of light.
One of the things I try to regularly bring into the light here at MWJDS is a focus on midot, positive character traits. In the musar movement, midot are seen not as inherent parts a person’s being, but as dynamic elements of a personality that can be developed and brought into balance with one another through reflection and practice.
Each month, at school, we bring a different midah into the light to reflect on as a community and to aim to develop as a positive part of our identity as a school. Clearly a month is not enough to perfect a virtue in a person’s personality. We refine our character constantly over a lifetime, never actually perfecting ourselves, but hopefully growing closer. We know this inherently about ourselves and our lives. Sometimes it is harder to remember when we think of others.
One of the virtues of the Torah, and about the way Judaism interprets the Torah, is that it openly acknowledges the imperfection of the midot of our heroes and role models. We are not presented with the example of perfect ancestors, or even with the image of God as always perfectly balanced.
In this week’s parsha, we see our ancestors in a kvetchy ungrateful light. Despite everything that God has done for them, freeing them from slavery, leading them through the desert, providing them with manna, food that reliably appears from heaven every morning, they complain that they want meat. Observing them with a critical eye, they are lacking in hakarat hatov, gratitude and acknowledging the good in life.
Later in the parsha, we find Moses’ siblings Aaron, the high priest, and Miriam, a prophet in her own right, speaking unkindly about Moses and his wife. These two should know better than the rest of the community, but in this moment, they give in to their less virtuous instincts and we all these generations later are here to read about it.
This view of our ancestors and heroes as imperfect, as struggling to balance their midot, is a gift the Torah gives us. It helps us understand that we, and our children, are not simply a collection of traits that direct what we do. We have the opportunity, like the heroes of the Torah to balance those traits, to develop those that need work, and learn to use them at the right time in the right way.
God responds to the kvetching people, and the gossiping siblings in anger. In a parenting move like we’ve all been tempted to make, God tells the people, “you want meat, I’ll give you meat until it’s coming out of your noses” and then sends so many quail the people can’t stand it. Miriam, in retribution for talking about Moses, is struck with a skin disease and needs to be isolated for a week. In each of these cases, we might wonder if the retribution was really to scale with the transgression.
I’d like to look at, each of these troubling reactions as another gift from the Torah especially to parents. God, in the rabbinic understanding, based on the Torah, isn’t purely compassionate or purely vengeful. God, too, possesses a collection of virtues, and uses them in a delicate balance depending on the situation, sometimes going overboard in one direction or another.
There is a midrash in which God is imagined to spend part of God’s day in prayer. What does God pray for? The midrash tells us God prays, “May my midah of compassion, overrule, my midah of anger.” God too, if such a thing is possible, struggles to balance and perfect the midot, and in that struggle provides us as parents with a role model we can not only look up to, but One whose image we can imagine ourselves to reflect.