This was my D’var Torah for Parashat Chukkat on July 13, 2024.
The comedian Karen Morgan has a bit called “Every Generation Explained.” She goes from the Silent Generation through the Boomers, Gen X, Millenials etc., and jokes about what it is about each generation that infuriates the other generations. So about the millenials, she says the problem is that “they invented avocado toast, and the word ‘artisanal’, and they are putting pumpkin spice in way too many beverages.”
It’s possible that at the time of Parashat Chukkat, Moshe Rabbenu needed a jester with a bit like Karen Morgan’s, because of two main things that happen. One is a leadership situation, which results in the end of his generation of leaders. Miryam dies. Moshe and Aharon face a crisis with the people and don’t know what to do, and when Hashem tells them what to do they mess it up, and then they find out that their term of office is going to end sooner than they expected.
Sound like anything going on in a country or two that is near and dear to you?
The other thing is very hard to spot in the Torah, which is the passing of an entire generation. Last week we had the Korach revolt in Year 2 in the wilderness, and now it’s close to the end of the 40 years. There is no verse in the Torah that says this time passed. If you look for it, it’s kind of disorienting because it happens but you can find it. It’s almost like the change of generations is something the Torah wants us to work extra hard to notice — it says Miryam died in the first month but the Torah doesn’t say what year it’s the first month of. Maybe we’re supposed to slow down and figure out what the significance of the generational change is. Or maybe we’re supposed to wonder if it matters at all — perhaps all the generations are actually the same?
Which makes me think it’s supposed to be some of both, and that’s the thing we have to figure out: What do we need to learn from the distinction between generations, and when are we supposed to actually draw lessons from an earlier generation’s experience into our own?
In the Torah these two things are linked, the change of generations and the crisis of leadership.
This is how it’s described for us: Moshe and Aharon are confronted with a water shortage, which has happened before. In fact it happened right after the people crossed the Sea. In Sefer Shmot they left a place called Midbar Sin and complained that they had no water for themselves or their herds. Hashem told Moshe about a special rock that he was supposed to go up to and strike with his staff, and water would come out.
Now fast-forward to this parasha, and the people are in a place called Midbar Tzin, which sounds a lot like Midbar Sin — and Moshe gets the same complaint about not enough water for the people or their herds, and the answer is again going to be a miracle with a rock. And Moshe figures: I was supposed to hit the rock back then, a generation ago, so I’ll hit the rock now. Except no — Hashem was trying to tell him to do it differently, just speak toward the rock. Moshe gets it all mixed up; he hits this rock, twice, and he does speak but what comes out is this kind of mocking insult of the people, “Listen you rebels, shim’u na hamorim, do we gotta get water for you out of this rock, hamin hasela hazah notzi lachem mayim, like again?”
So Hashem tells Moshe and Aharon that as a result of what they did they will not be the ones leading the people into the land. Somehow, the picture is that Moshe is not aligned for his leadership role anymore, and one way to see it is that what worked as a leadership style or mode of communicating for one generation doesn’t work for the next.
Different generations experience leadership and authority differently, and different generations experience crisis differently. Karen Morgan the comedian says: “Gen Z doesn’t know how to write a check, they don’t know how to address an envelope, they don’t know how to read cursive, they don’t know how to read a paper map.” She says if Gen Z ever takes over the world it will be really easy to get it back — “We’ll just write our battle plans in cursive on a piece of paper, and mail it to ourselves in envelopes.”
The serious point in the comedian’s bit is that in difficult times, different generations communicate differently or expect to be communicated to differently. One generation might appreciate a show of strength in a crisis, and another might find that even more alarming and appreciate instead some thoughtful and reassuring and convincing words.
Here’s a test you can do, the next time you’re talking about the election or Israel or anti-semitism or racism in a group. Listen to how much people say something that’s about what actually just happened, and how much people talk about something similar that was formative for their generation. Mostly we do that — we go back and center on our generation’s experience. We talk about the first time we were thirsty, so to speak, and use that to describe this time. That doesn’t always help us describe what’s actually happening now and needed now.
That is what Moshe did at this particular time, in his role as a leader. And I don’t think it was a sin; it just meant a new generation needed something new.
Ditto for Aharon, because different generations have different ways of approaching spiritual needs or even of describing them.
And I would say it was the same even for Miryam, who is my favorite of the three leaders of that generation. MIryam was the one who knew how to make clear pronouncements about right and wrong, about the certainty of change and redemption. She was the first motivator of the early changemakers, the midwives, the women. She was the song leader.
But you can’t just keep repeating the same statements, even about justice and peace. And it’s not enough to sing the protest songs of the earlier generation. Just as we need to consider anew what to do when it’s thirsty everywhere and there’s a rock that might hold the answer — so too we need to develop new clear pronoucements, and add new songs to our repertoire.
Sometimes we overromanticize the past: the moral courage and clarity of previous generations or of our own when we were young; the great leaders of before — we measure every leader against MLK, every cause against the civil rights movement of the ‘60s or the Soviet Jewry movement.
I am not saying that leaders from a prior generation can’t lead us, or that perspectives from the past can’t help us see the present. What I want are leaders who can access the experiences and modes of communicating of different generations, because unlike in the Torah our different generations are still here at the same time.
In the Torah, there were Yehoshua and Kalev who led both generations. Kalev is described as having ruach acheret, another soul in addition to the one he was born with, the soul of his generation and the next one.
And I want us to be citizens, followers, who can take from the crisis responses of previous generations and the moral terminology of previous generations, but aren’t limited to them. It’s hard — we tend to frame the big issues of our day, in America or for Jews, the way we first learned to frame them, and to see mainly the problems or the possibilities that we were first taught to see.
Look at us here, this amazing intergenerational community by intention, which is rare and precious. Each of our own generations has had its heydey, has its signature triumphs. How can we help each other extract the best of that, and tell it to each other, and share it all with the next generation? How can we be alive to the moral discoveries of the generation that is coming into its own right now? What role do we have in making possible the new leaders this nation and Am Yisrael need?
There is a thirst right now, and there is a hard boulder between that thirst and our relief. We ourselves can be that boulder. Some leader, I pray, will learn from those who struck such rocks before, and from those who spoke to them — and then do something entirely different, something that’s just what we need.
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