Strange Names
With the beginning of the second book of Torah, Shemot (Exodus), Moses enters the story. While he will be centrally important to the event of exodus, leading the Israelite slaves away from oppression in Egypt, the shemot or “names” in his life are also intriguing.
In chapter two, Moses is born into mysterious circumstances. None of his family members are named (except that they are from the tribe of Levi), he is hidden for three months to evade Pharaoh’s decree of death to male Israelite children, then he is set adrift on the river in a little ark of a basket. Pharoah’s daughter, also not named, finds him and compassionately adopts him.
Finally, she names him: Moshe, “because I drew him (mishitihi) out of the water” (Exodus 2:10). But grammatically, Moshe doesn’t mean “drawn out”, it means “one who draws out”. In being given this Egyptian name, its Hebrew resonance foreshadows his role in drawing the Israelites out of Egypt. The medieval commentator Sforno generalizes his role as “someone who saves and draws out others from their troubles (mitzarah, similar in sound to mitzrayim, “Egypt”).
Before Moses returns to save the Israelites however, he flees from Pharaoh and finds a refuge and a family among the people of Midian. He names his firstborn son Gershom, saying “I was a stranger (ger) in a foreign land” (Exodus 2:22). Apparently, he means to say he was a ger sham - a stranger there. But where exactly is “there”?
Is it his current residence Midian - where he was not born (Sforno)?
Or does it reflect a sense of involuntary alienation, that he is a refugee fleeing for his life (HaKtav v’HaKabbalah)?
Or perhaps even more poignantly, that he was fleeing because a fellow Israelite had slandered him and incited Pharaoh against him (Malbim)?
Malbim insists that he never lost his love for his people, which seems true given how the rest of the story unfolds, but nevertheless perhaps Moses felt an existential strangeness, not feeling fully at home among the Israelites, among the Egyptians, nor among the Midianites. Contemporary scholar Erica Brown writes: “Moses had no people, no tribe, no nation to call his own. Helper to all, he became friend to none.”
In naming his own first child, Moses exposes his tenuous connectedness to anyone at all. The one who draws others out of trouble (helper to all) felt no clear and simple pull to belonging.
The 18th century Moroccan sage Or HaChaim suggests there might be a deeper purpose to Moses’ feeling of isolation. “The words may be understood along the lines of Psalms 119:19, ‘I am a stranger on earth.’ Righteous people in this world are merely strangers, they have no permanent abode.”
The righteous are strangers on earth… Rabbi Rachel suggested to me that we might recognize in this teaching the way that those pursuing justice and righteousness often find themselves marginalized, sticking out uncomfortably from the multitudes who tend to the status quo.
But I also wonder if “being a stranger” might be a spiritual practice in its own right. Glancing at the world with strange eyes defamiliarizes our surroundings, helps us see marvels and possibilities where habit insisted we no longer needed to bother looking. In our normal mode of being, we only notice extraordinary events.
The French writer George Perec once described our inclination: “The daily newspapers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I ask or would like to ask. What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?”
For Perec, the infra-ordinary realm is one that we only see when we are out of our habit / habitat. When we are strangers in a foreign land, or manage to see our own neighborhoods with new eyes. And somehow, that ability to see the tiny, almost trivial, aspects of a place leads one to righteousness. Perhaps it is convenient to habituate ourselves so that injustice remains invisible…
Moses, though, has persistent stranger consciousness. The root of his righteousness lies in being unable to look away from things that others have trained themselves not to see. I think the significance of the burning bush points to the infra-ordinary, not the extraordinary. How long must you look to realize that the bush is not actually burning up, simply aflame? At that moment, when God sees that Moses pays attention to what others might pass by, God calls Moses into his mission of drawing the people out of Egypt.
Rabbi Jan LeVine
