Moses Grows Twice and Walks Out to the Brickfields

At five years old the boy already stood like a child of eleven.

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He grew up in Pharaoh's house, on palace food, under painted ceilings, and his body ran ahead of his years the whole time. Nobody in those rooms had any reason to ask why.

The Sister Whose Name Was the Bondage

He had a sister who had been born into the worst of it.

Israel had been in Egypt two hundred and ten years, the number the sages read out of the letters of the word RaDU. Inside that long winter sat a shorter and harder stretch, eighty-six years when the yoke pressed down hardest, and it began on the day Miriam was born.

Her parents named her for it. Miriam, from merur, bitterness, so that the cruelest portion of the servitude had a girl's name on it and could be spoken in an ordinary sentence. Every time somebody in that house called her, the years answered.

Moses grew up too far away to hear it.

He Went Out to His Brethren

Then one day he walked out.

Out of the corridors, past the gate, into the heat where the work was. The loads were bigger than the men carrying them. Somebody was coughing in the line and did not stop. An overseer's voice went out across the field and the pace picked up, and children who should have been chasing each other were dragging weight instead.

Moses stood in the dust and looked at them until he understood whose they were.

Nothing in the palace had required this of him. No decree sent him out. He went, and he looked, and the looking was the whole event.

The Second Growing

Rabbi Judah put his finger on the strange thing in the record. The boy is said to have grown twice.

Once as a child, and once again as Moses. Every child grows, and the Torah does not usually stop to mention it. Rabbi Judah's answer is that the two growings are not the same kind. The first one is stature, the height of the frame, the five-year-old with an eleven-year-old's shoulders. The second one is greatness, and greatness is not measured across the shoulders.

What was the greatness? That he went out to his brethren. Not the height. Not the years. The walk to the brickfields, and the refusal to look away once he got there.

The Witness the Brickfields Got

The sages took the proverb about a man diligent in his work and hung it on Moses (Proverbs 22:29), for a piece of work he took up in a field the court preferred not to look at.

A body can tower in a throne room and still be a child. Moses finished growing out in the open, in front of people carrying brick, somewhere in the eighty-six hard years that had started the day his sister was born.

Everything else came afterward. The killing, the flight, the sheep, the bush, the staff. Whatever he would eventually carry back into Pharaoh's court, he picked it up here first, in the heat, standing where nobody had told him to stand.