Thirty-Eight Years God Would Not Speak to Moses

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May the Lord Look on You and Judge

The foremen came out of Pharaoh's house with their backs opened and found Moses and Aaron standing in the road, waiting to hear how it had gone.

Datan and Aviram reached them first. "May the Lord look on you and judge. You have made us stink in front of Pharaoh and in front of his servants. You have put a sword in their hand to kill us."

The straw was gone. The count of bricks had not moved.

Moses turned and said the same thing upward. "Lord, why have You done evil to this people? Why did You ever send me? From the hour I went in to Pharaoh to speak in Your name he has done worse to them, and You have not delivered Your people at all."

The Wise Man Turned Into a Fool

Rabbi Yehuda bar Simon said the line about oppression turning a wise man into a fool was written for that hour, and he did not mean Pharaoh's oppression. He meant theirs. Datan and Aviram worked on Moses until his own judgment came apart in his hands.

It happens to smaller men all the time. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said that Rabbi Yehuda ben Pedaya once taught him sixty rulings on one narrow question, a grave that had been plowed over and scattered through a field, and he lost all sixty because he spent his days on the needs of the community.

Moses had a nation for a community, and two men inside it who knew exactly which sentence to use on him.

Justice Came for Him

"I wrote it down about you that you were humble," God said. "And here you stand, angry, arguing with what I told you. By your life, you will find out. The end of a thing is better than its beginning."

Then Justice moved on him. She had just heard a man accuse heaven of doing evil, and she came to collect, and her fingerprints stayed on the sentence, because the verse does not say the Lord spoke to Moses. It says God spoke to Moses, and God is the name He wears when He judges.

He turned her back with a question. "Am I flesh and blood, that I hold to My own measure and show no mercy?"

Then the other name. I am the Lord. Rabbi Yosei bar Rabbi Hanina said the two names sort themselves by who is standing in the room. God, toward the Egyptians. The Lord, toward Israel.

All of Egypt Is Filthy With Our Idols

Later Moses came into the camp with a month in his mouth. This month is the beginning of the months for you. In this month you are going out.

Nobody cheered. "Our master. How are we going to be redeemed? The whole of Egypt is contaminated with our idol worship, and so are we."

"Because He wants you," Moses said. "He is not looking at your idols. He leaps over the mountains."

Mountains meaning the high places, the tops where they slaughter and the hills where they burn incense. He does not go around them and He does not stop at them. He goes over.

The Rain Is Over and Gone

Then the wilderness, and the winter inside it.

Rabbi Azarya refused to read "my beloved answered and said to me" as one act. He answered me by means of Moses, and He said to me by means of Aaron. Two mouths for one voice, and what the voice said was rise up, my love, my fair one, for the winter is past.

The winter is the forty years. The rain that is over and gone is the thirty-eight of them when Israel lay under a ban and the divine speech did not come to Moses at all, not once, until that whole generation was finished.

Deuteronomy keeps the count. The days from Kadesh Barnea until they crossed the brook Zered were thirty-eight years, and the hand of the Lord was against them until all the men of war were used up out of the middle of the camp. And then, with the last of them in the ground: the Lord spoke to me, saying.

He had led them the entire time. He set the camp and struck the camp and set it again, and the men who had walked out of Egypt went into the sand a year at a time, and the Voice that had argued with him out of a burning bush did not come.

The Blossoms Have Appeared

The thaw arrives as a list of small green things.

The blossoms have appeared in the land, and the sages hear administrators in the word, the princes, one out of every tribe, appointed to divide up what was coming. The time of the nightingale has arrived, and the word is a word for cutting. Time for the foreskin to be cut. Time for the Canaanites to be cut down. Time for the land itself to be cut into portions.

The voice of the turtledove is heard in our land, and Rabbi Yochanan heard a scout in it, a good one, and the scout is Joshua going through the middle of the camp telling them to get their food ready, because in three days they cross the Jordan.

The figs are the baskets of first fruits. The vines in blossom are the wine going onto the altar.

Moses heard the Voice come back, and he heard Joshua's carrying across the tents at the same hour. Thirty-eight years of silence, and the first thing the thaw handed him was the sound of the next man.