May 24, 2013 Behaalotcha

Street Heater

"Miriam and Aharon spoke against Moshe regarding the Cushite woman that he had married." (12:1)

Imagine a Native American who has spent all his life on the reserve in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, finding himself on the East Side of New York City around 29th and Lex. He walks down the street and stops. His attention is riveted on a nearby window. Straddling the window is a rectangular metal box about three feet long by eighteen inches high. It blasts out hot air, chugging away in a relentless mechanical symphony. He lifts his eyes. Brownstone apartments rear upwards to the sky. And in each and every window he sees the same metal boxes. Hundreds of them. All are belching out hot air into the humid Manhattan sky.

He thinks to himself, "These white men must sure love the heat. It must be 102° and they still put these contraptions in their windows to heat the street!"

Sometimes an air conditioner can look like a street heater.

When Miriam found out that Moshe had separated from his wife, she thought that he had become conceited. She thought that Moshe viewed himself as being so close to G-d that he had risen beyond a normal marital relationship. She thought that this self-imposed monasticism was a product of an inflated ego. Of course, what would be considered conceit in Moshe would to us appear humility beyond anything we have ever seen or experienced. We have no parameters to equate our concepts of conceit and humility to Moshe. But, on that exalted level, Miriam thought that Moshe had succumbed to pride.

But how could Miriam have thought that Moshe was acting out of pride? The Torah itself calls Moshe the "humblest of all men." Surely Miriam knew the Torah’s evaluation of Moshe. How could Miriam have even suspected his motives?

Moshe may have been the humblest of all men, but he wasn’t a shlepper. Being humble doesn’t mean walking around with a hunched back and a miserable look on your face. Moshe knew that he was the king. But he also knew that compared to G-d, he was nothing. His humility lay in understanding, like no man before or since, exactly how small he was compared to G-d. It was because Moshe worked on himself to this point that G-d concretized his awareness by speaking to him ‘face to face.’ Then Moshe’s humility became visceral. He could ‘see’ how small he was.

Humility is not something you can judge from the outside. Sometimes someone may seem very humble, but inside they are watching everyone watching them being humble. They are starring in their own mental movie called: "A Life of Total Humility." On the other hand, a king may appear to behave in a rather grand fashion, whereas inside he genuinely sees himself as totally unworthy.

Sometimes things aren’t quite the way they seem. Sometimes a cool air conditioner can look like a street heater blasting out its own hot air.