Va-eira (last Shabbat's d'var)

[cellio]

"God spoke to Moshe, saying: Go, speak to Paro king of Egypt [...] And Moshe spoke before God, saying: Even the Israelites will not listen to me; why should Paro? I have a speech defect. God then spoke to Moshe and Aharon..." (Sh'mot 6:11-13)

It is early in Moshe's career as God's spokesman and it isn't going well so far. God told Moshe to give Israel an encouraging talk and they ignored him. Now God is telling him to go talk to the king, who would seem to be even more intimidating. And Moshe balks.

Moshe gives two responses. The first boils down to "this proposition is doomed", and God seems to ignore that protest. The second is "I have a problem", which could just be making an excuse, but it sounds like it's a real problem because God responds. Moshe has a speech impediment? Ok, God will send Aharon along to be his spokesman -- problem solved, go do your mission. And he does. I think this teaches us something about how we respond to commands.

When we're told to do something we don't want to do, it's natural to try to find some way out of it. Assuming you can't just say "no" (saying no to God doesn't work well; just ask Yonah), a common reaction is to predict failure. It's not going to work anyway; why go through the trouble just to fail? It's doomed; just give up. Often this can be spun to make it not really about us; the whole idea is doomed, so it's not my fault when it fails and I couldn't have done anything about it, so let's just cut to the chase and skip it. "It's doomed" is often just "I don't wanna" wrapped up in excuses.

Sometimes we don't want to do something for a specific reason. Moshe has a speech impediment and he believes that will prevent success. That's a valid concern. Now look what happens when he expresses the concern: God fixes the problem. This doesn't mean God will necessarily fix our problems, but the key lesson here is to be honest with ourselves about what our reasons really are. Who knows -- maybe God will fix them? And if not, by naming a problem and, by extension, knowing what is not the problem, we're on the way to fixing it.

This doesn't mean everything has a root problem; sometimes it really is just "I don't wanna", and we have to decide what to do about that. But if there is a root problem, we do ourselves a disservice if we hide beyond "I don't wanna". Instead, may God grant us the strength to surpress the gut reaction and dig a little deeper. Maybe we'll even find that, once we solve the specific problem, we actually wanna.

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[cellio]

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