Moses Lit Seventy Lamps From One Unspent Flame

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He Broke in Front of God

Moses did not break in front of the people. He broke in front of God, and the sentence he used named exactly what the camp was doing to him. "How can I bear alone your contentiousness, your heresy, and your caviling?"

It was not a speech about leadership. The complaints came at him from waking until sleeping, about meat, about water, about the shape of the bread, about Egypt, which the same mouths now remembered as a country full of cucumbers. The man the Torah calls more humble than anyone on the face of the earth is called very great in the same Torah, and the sages read that greatness as money. So he had money. He had hands that had cut the second tablets out of sapphire after he smashed the first pair on the mountain. None of it took a single quarrel off his back.

God did not tell him to be stronger. "What you have asked for," He said, "I have granted. Gather seventy men."

The Men Who Took the Blows in Egypt

Not seventy volunteers. Seventy out of the elders of Israel, men the camp already knew by name, picked for wisdom and strength and years and for knowing the hidden arts, and seventy exactly, because that is the count a court has to keep when it sits in judgment for Israel, and it has kept that count ever since.

Some of them Moses had seen before, in Egypt, still wearing what it cost. When the straw was cut off and the brick quota stayed where it was, the Hebrew officers were the men who stood between the taskmasters and their own crews, and they took the beating rather than give up the names. They had shared the hardship, so they would share the welfare. That was the whole of the reasoning, and it was not sentimental.

He went to them one at a time. "How fortunate you are to have been selected," he told each man, which was true and was also the easy half of the errand. Then, standing in front of somebody who had already carried another man's punishment once, he had to say the rest of it: that the office came with opposition, that there would be hostility in it, that the camp would turn on him the way camps turn, and that he was being asked to stand out in the noise on purpose.

The Fear That He Would Be Less

"And I will go down," God said, which He does not say often, ten times in the whole Torah, and every one of them at a place where somebody had run out of strength. "And I will speak with you." Not with them, only with him, so the thing that made Moses himself was not being handed around the camp.

Then came the sentence that can be read two ways. "I shall increase from the spirit which is upon you, and I will place it upon them." From. Taken off him and set on seventy other men, seventy portions out of something he had barely enough of already.

The answer to that fear is a lamp. Set one lamp on a menorah (the lampstand) and light seventy more from it, and all seventy of those lamps burn, and the flame they were lit from is unspent, exactly as bright as it was before anyone came near it with a wick. Spirit is not a jug with a level in it, so nothing at all came off Moses when the other lamps caught. "And they will bear with you," God said, which was the only clause Moses had asked for in the first place.

Into the Tent of Meeting

He brought them up through the front of the camp where everybody could watch, and he took them into the Tent of Meeting, because it was not enough that seventy men now had authority. The camp had to see them walk in. "How beloved are these," the people said, "who have gone in with Moses to hear the word of the Holy One."

Wherever the Torah puts elders in a room, God is doing them honor. Moses had gathered them in Egypt before there was a nation to gather. They had come partway up Sinai and stopped where they were told to stop. Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai carried the pattern all the way forward to the end of things: the moon will be shamed and the sun put out of countenance, and the Lord of hosts will reign on Zion, and He will accord His elders honor. Mistreat one of them and the injury goes onto the short list of things God does not overlook.

Seventy Backs

Nothing about the wilderness got easier. The water was still short, the meat still had not come, and the complaining started up again in the morning the way it always did.

What changed was where it landed. The noise reached seventy men before it reached the one man, and those seventy could answer it, since the whole camp had watched them walk into the tent. Moses stayed the lamp on the stand with exactly the light he had come in with. Outside, an elder who used to take a whip across the back for his brick crew in Egypt stood in the open and let the first quarrel of the day come at him, and he did not need to send it any further up.