This was my D’var Torah for Parashiyot Mattot-Mas’ei on August 3, 2019. As you’ll quickly see, it’s a monologue in the voice of Moshe.
Sam Waterston. In the role of New York City Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy on Law and Order.
That’s who would play me, Moshe, and that’s exactly how he would play me.
Uncompromising. Jack knows he is right all the time, and he never offers a plea bargain unless he absolutely has to. He doesn’t worry about how the case will play in the papers, that’s his boss’s job. And he’s always astonished when he goes to trial and the jury acquits. He looks at them with this are-you-kidding? look, and he loses plenty.
When people ask what it’s like being Moshe, I say — watch that. God lets me see things from the future, you know that from the Talmud. I don’t think I look like Sam Waterston, but the sound of my voice, if I spoke English that’s how I sound. He once played Abraham Lincoln too, debating against Douglas about slavery. Nailed it, just like me.
The Talmud, I just mentioned that — the Talmud has this description of me — יקוב הדין את ההר. Yikkov hadin et haha, let justice pierce the mountain — meaning I don’t care what’s in front of me, I’m not going around it or changing my path, but right through it. That’s uncompromising.
That’s not my brother Aharon. When we were together, him and Miryam and me, he was the compromiser, just like Jack McCoy had all a series of assistants on Law and Order. Anyway, the same page of the Talmud says that my brother is אוהב שלום ורודף שלום, he loves peace and pursues peace. He was like, that, I should say. He’s gone now.
You might wonder how this part of me, No-compromise Mo, goes with this other thing — the Torah says I am the humblest man on earth. Wouldn’t a humble person be more willing to give the other side the benefit of the doubt?
I used to think about it this way — I can be uncompromising, because I know it’s not about me. I don’t worry what other people think, because I don’t really have other people.
I’ve never really known how to talk, to people — just to God, who has patience with my stammer, who knows what I mean anyway. If I compromised, I’d be letting God down, and anyway I usually don’t know how you talk about a compromise, because I don’t know the words you say for that.
Compromsing, Aharon said you have to do that sometimes.
He went a bit overboard. Golden calf? Bad compromise.
But even God compromises sometimes. Why else do we have this Mishkan with all the animal sacrifices. You have to know when, and how.
Aharon knew how. With the littler, non-calf things. It takes so many words to explore a compromise and formulate one that’s right and not just a sell-out.
Aharon knew so many words and how to say them, how to help two people figure something out together, or not — Aharon knew an impasse when he saw it, don’t think he didn’t.
First he would say his words, his loving words, and maybe even make up something to get the first guy to listen, then as soon as he had them together, they would talk and listen and figure out a way that would be okay for both of them.
I never knew how to do that. Any of it — not all of that talking, not the first thing to say.
I miss him, Aharon.
I can tell the people do too.
And after he died, I noticed something. Sometimes, I was talking more like him.
You know I said when they said I was humble, it’s that I don’t talk about myself. And I’m sure you thought — Golden Calf again — if you’re going to kill them God, take me too. But that wasn’t really about me.
But lately I’ve been talking more about me. How hard this job is sometimes, and how I really do want to do it well — me, that I did it the right way.
And when the people of Reuven and Gad and Menashe came to me, and asked if they could stay in this great land for pasture east of the Jordan, and give up their land in Israel to the other tribes — yeh, I started off with my usual thing.
“You’re going to let all the other tribes, your brothers, fight for this thing that is so important and you’re going to sit back and eat bonbons, and everyone’s going to ask to stay over here too, your thing will rub off on them, and we’ll never have it? I mean don’t you remember why we’ve been out here for forty years?”
But then they actually kept talking to me about it, and I found myself just a little bit like my big brother. They said, “No, we will go out and fight with everyone for this land, and in fact we’ll go out in front of the army, first fighters. Let our children and wives stay behind and only if we finish the job, we’ll go and do what we’re asking.”
Aharon would have had something to say to that. And I said to myself — I was so surprised — well, maybe these kids will lose something, not seeing the land with that first excitement, not getting to live there, but if we can keep them out of the war….. And maybe these tribes will be such motivated fighters — maybe that’s what will rub off on everyone else. Something for you and something for the bigger whole.
I didn’t like it. I hate it, really, from start to finish. But I kept talking. I said: Do I understand you to be saying you will go out first, and only if….. and they said: Yes, that’s what we’re saying, and I said it again and we talked a lot. It’s probably the longest conversation I ever had, other than with God — till we really knew what was at stake for each other, and I could really know.
It was a compromise, and I didn’t take it to God this time, I did it myself.
I don’t know! A little later, some others from Menashe said: If our cousins the five women from the family of Tzelophechad get married, they will take our family’s land to a new tribe forever, and that’s not fair. And I said: How about if they can only marry in your own clan. That was a compromise. I’m not sure it was the right compromise. We should have talked more, I should have involved Machlah and Milkah and Noah and Tirtzah and Choglah too. Maybe I wouldn’t have said yes; maybe we would have come up with something different.
It was easier just to be uncompromising.
I just love watching Law and Order when God shows it to me. It was easier when there was more than one of us — me to stand on principle all the time, Aharon to be really good at talking and listening until he had all the issues clarified, Miryam to help us see really deep down, beyond all the words. I don’t know that I can do all three of our parts.
Jack McCoy had a boss to know how it would play in public, and an assistant to make him think about other possibilities, compromises even.
I hate it when what’s right isn’t what happens. I’ll never stop hating that. But I’m grateful that some of Aharon stuck to me. I’m surprised. It’s different. I wish I had more time to get good at it all — to know when not to compromise, and when you have to, and how to live with it when you do.
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