Moses Looked for Someone Who Cared and Found No One

The Verse That Is Too Simple

The verse is spare. Moses goes out to his brothers, sees an Egyptian striking a Hebrew, looks this way and that, sees no man, and strikes the Egyptian dead (Exodus 2:11-12). Most readers take this as Moses checking for witnesses. He is about to commit an act that Egypt will call murder. He wants to know if anyone is watching.

The Tikkunei Zohar, compiled c. 1300 CE in Castile, Spain, refuses this reading. It finds it too small, too tactical. Moses was not scanning for informants. He was looking for something else entirely: a single person in all of Egypt who, seeing what he saw, felt compelled to do something about it.

What Moses Actually Saw When He Looked Around

The Tikkunei Zohar's reading of Exodus 2:12 is a social analysis disguised as a cosmological one. When Moses turned this way and that and saw no man, the text is not reporting an absence of people. Egypt was a populous empire. There were people everywhere. What Moses found absent was something different: a person who, seeing injustice, felt the compulsion to act against it.

He saw men absorbed in their own affairs. Each one turned toward his own profit, his own journey, his own calculations. Not necessarily evil men. Just men who had decided that someone else's suffering was not their business. The Tikkunei Zohar presents this as the deepest diagnosis of what was wrong with Egypt and, by extension, with any society that tolerates what it could prevent: it was not a society of villains. It was a society of bystanders.

Moses Argued With God About Leaving

The Tikkunei Zohar's portrait of Moses as the man who could not look away from injustice runs through the entire arc of his life. It does not stop at the striking of the Egyptian taskmaster. It extends to his confrontation with God at the end of his life, when the decree of death had been issued and Moses argued against it.

Rabbi Abbahu offered a parable about Moses's argument. A nobleman found a magnificent sword and brought it to the king as a gift. The king admired the sword and kept it, and the nobleman said: since you find it beautiful, let it serve you. This was Moses's position. He had given his life to the service of the covenant. He had argued for the people against God more than once. He had stood in the breach when the decree against them was as final as any decree could be (Exodus 32:11-14). Could not the same advocacy, the same refusal to accept that the situation could not be changed, work one more time in his own case?

God said no. The decree stood. But the midrashic tradition preserves Moses's argument not as a failure but as an extension of who he was. He was not able to see injustice without speaking. He did this when there was no man in Egypt who cared. He did it to God on behalf of the people. He did it on behalf of himself. He lost the last argument, but he made it.

The Failure of the Bystanders

The Tikkunei Zohar places Moses's scan of Egypt in a chain of moral analysis that begins with the absence of any just person in Sodom and runs forward through the Hebrew Bible to the despairing question of Isaiah: I looked for someone to intervene, for anyone to uphold justice, and there was no one (Isaiah 59:16). The same diagnostic structure appears in each case. Not an absence of people. An absence of people who cannot be bystanders.

Moses was made of something different. He could not look this way and that and see men absorbed in their own affairs and turn back to his own affairs in turn. The moment he saw the taskmaster's blow, the question of who else cared became irrelevant to whether he would act. He looked around to find someone who had already acted or was about to act, so he would not have to act alone. He found no one. So he acted alone. That is the Tikkunei Zohar's Moses: the man whose threshold for intervention was zero, and whose scan of the crowd was not self-protection but the last hope that somebody else might have the same threshold.