What God Asked From Moses Aaron and Abraham in Shemot Rabbah

The New Moon Moses Could Not See on His Own

God said to Moses: this month shall be for you. The first commandment given to the whole people was not about food or worship or forbidden acts. It was about time. Mark when the month begins. Count the days from when the crescent appears. Take possession of the calendar.

Moses stood there and could not see what was being shown to him. The moon was there. The crescent was there. But the connection between the sliver of light and the obligation to hallow the month was not arriving in his mind with the clarity he needed to teach it to the people. So God pointed. With a finger, the midrash says, four times. The anointing oil. The shape of the menorah. The list of impure swarming creatures. And finally, the exact crescent that opens Nissan.

The rabbis of Shemot Rabbah described God shaking the sea to show Moses the crocodile hidden below the surface. God shaking the wilderness to show him the salamander born of fire. The same God who arranged the constellations stopped to hold a fingernail of moon in the air so that a man standing on the ground could tell his people when to begin. This is not a story about Moses's limitations. It is a story about what God is willing to do in order to be understood.

The Lamp God Did Not Need

Build me a Tabernacle, God told Moses, and inside it place a menorah, and keep the lamps burning. The rabbis looked at this instruction and asked the obvious question: the same God who is described as a consuming fire, the same God whose presence fills heaven and earth, needs a seven-branched lamp in a tent in the desert?

Shemot Rabbah gave a pointed answer. God does not need the light. God gives the light. The menorah was not for God's benefit. It was for Israel's. The light in the Tabernacle was Israel's contribution to a relationship that did not require their contribution in any technical sense. God asked for the lamp not because the lamp served a divine purpose but because the act of tending it served a human one. A people who keep the fire burning are a people who know they are expected. The lamp was an argument about presence, and the argument needed to be made from the human side.

Why Aaron Was the One God Asked For

After the Golden Calf, Aaron had made excuses. He told Moses the people had brought him the gold and he had thrown it in the fire and the calf had come out. The midrash did not find this persuasive. Aaron was the High Priest. He was the one who had been designated to stand in the gap between the people's worst impulses and the consequences of those impulses. He had not stood in that gap. He had stood beside it.

God forgave him. Then God asked for him specifically. Not for a more reliable priest, not for someone with a cleaner record, but for Aaron, the man who had failed in the most public way available. The rabbis in Shemot Rabbah read this request as its own kind of statement. The person God asks for is often not the person who deserves the honor on a clean accounting. It is the person whose restoration changes the meaning of the role. Aaron entering the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur carried the weight of what he had done and been forgiven for. That weight was not a deduction from his priestly worth. It was the ground of it.

What Abraham Decided About Gehenna

Shemot Rabbah preserved a tradition in which Abraham was asked to weigh in on a theological problem: should Gehenna exist? The creation was not going to produce only righteous souls. Some people would die having used their lives to harm others. What was to be done with those lives?

Abraham did not refuse the question or defer it to heaven. He considered it. He brought his understanding of justice and his understanding of mercy into contact with each other in the way the tradition trusted the patriarchs to do. His answer accepted the necessity of Gehenna while placing conditions around its application. The patriarch's verdict was not binding on God. But God asked for it, and the asking mattered. A God who needed nothing asked the ancestor of the people to think through a hard question and tell him what he thought. This was not consultation for its own sake. It was the invitation to participation that runs through everything Shemot Rabbah builds: the calendar, the lamp, the priest, the patriarch's vote. God keeps asking Israel to do things that God could do without them. The asking is the whole point.