But [Moses] said, “Please, Oh lord, make someone else your agent.” The Lord became angry with Moses, and said, “There is your brother, Aaron, the Levite. He, I know, speaks readily. And even now he is setting out to you and will be happy to see you. You shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth…” (Exodus 4:13-14)
“So when the orator is more convincing than the doctor, what happens is that an ignorant person is more convincing than the expert before an equally ignorant audience.” (Plato, Gorgias)
On a macro-level, the Torah has pre-ordained the separation of powers. Prophets and priests divide responsibility in the Five Books of Moses; prophets, priests, and kings split governance from the Book of Samuel onwards. Even in Mosaic times, the lawgiver doesn’t do it all by himself. Yet on a micro-level, the Torah hints that the separation of powers represents a divine concession to human need, not an ideal. Had Moses not said, “make someone else your agent,” perhaps he may have been the high priest, too, instead of his brother, Aaron. And even if not, Aaron would have received a more marginal role in the Exodus story, and thus in the life of the people. Perhaps the sin of the golden calf never would have happened.
What are we to make of the fact that the central prophet of the Torah, and its self-declared author, explicitly says that he doesn’t want to lead? What can we learn from this archetypal example about how the Torah views the role of the prophet and priest? Why is the prophet depicted as slow of speech, hesitant, and the priest as loquacious and eloquent?
Eventually, Moses will find his words, but let’s not downplay the fact that when he’s first summoned to lead, he demurs. Today, many feel a need to “speak out” every time something happens. A culture of “leadership” has imbued many with a desire to see themselves as prophets in the sense of activists speaking truth to power. And, yes, Moses has a sense of righteous anger that lives on in today’s morally outraged. But remember that what sets Moses running from Egypt, and towards Midian, where he discovers God at the burning bush, is his slaying of an Egyptian task-master, not a long Facebook post. Moses wasn’t posting his opinions anywhere. He didn’t have the words. His violent outburst is the kind of “acting out” we expect from those who haven’t yet learned to channel or sublimate their passion into civil discourse and polite company. Moses eventually wields the megaphone, but the prophet’s essence is an incapacity to speak, a resistance to, and suspicion of language. Moses is a drop-out.
Aaron, who has all the right words, is great at “reading the room,” and is the perfect counter-balance to Moses. While Moses understands the divine will, Aaron studies the earthly playbook. But, if Moses hadn’t been so self-deprecating (which paradoxically may be one of his qualifications), we wouldn’t need Aaron. God would have helped Moses find words without a mediating mouthpiece.
Are you someone who finds it easy to speak about what’s right and wrong with the world? Or are you someone who often finds that "there are no words?” Exodus opens with the idea that leadership comes primarily from those who are prosaically stumped. Moses is all substance, but he needs Aaron for marketing and communications, for persuasion. And this is one of the brute realities of life: the discourse isn’t won by those with good ideas, or passionate feelings, but those who know how to communicate with the common folk.
Aaron without Moses is all rhetoric, no philosophy; a beautiful logo and website, but no content; Moses without Aaron is a shepherd on a mountaintop unable to start a social movement. To be a Levite, as Aaron’s tribal apothegm suggests, is to be someone who “accompanies” others. The rhetorician-marketer, for and better and for worse, understands the world as it is. The justice people who are focused on what could be better, are often less practical, and less relatable. Radicals alienate. Prophecy is radical. Priesthood is “bougie.” Prophets don’t go to college, but have authentic “experience.” Priests have stellar resumes (which signal their capacity to follow orders and accept the powers that be). Many of us think we are prophet-types (speaking an uncomfortable truth) when we are closer to priests (rallying our base and preaching to the choir).
In the Gorgias, Plato’s dialogue on the conflict between philosophy and rhetoric, philosophers are portrayed as people who are willing to change their views in honor of truth. Rhetoricians, by contrast, seek to win the argument at all costs, but have no concern for truth itself. Thus, they will never change their minds (because their minds were empty, opportunistic, and performative, to begin with). Philosophers need rhetoric to persuade others to take up truth, but it’s a dangerous game—because in the process they may end up turning the means (persuasion) into the ends (truth). The difference between philosophy and rhetoric, or prophet and priest, then, comes down to ego.
We all have egos—but philosophers and prophets place their egos in service of something else. Rhetorician-priests can claim to be servants of the people, but as Socrates argues, they succeed more often than not by flattering their audience rather than by moving it or teaching it. The former, at its extreme, makes a hero of the martyr—who rejects all socialization. The latter, at its extreme, makes a hero of the populist—whose only sense of validation is the crowd.
As with many paradoxes in the Torah, the splitting of powers between Moses and Aaron can be read as both a Fall and a Destiny, a concession and an ideal. Of course, the consolidation of virtues in one person would be a better illustration of integrity than a division of labor between people. On the other hand, the collaboration and partnership between Moses and Aaron also highlights human fallibility and limitation. Recognizing that we are not God is a first step in the cultural fight against idolatry, and so the fact that Moses asks for Aaron to help him—even though it angers God—should also please God. Were Moses “the full package,” we might be more tempted to deify him. Prophets are human beings with deficiencies and biases like everyone else. The Torah eschews guru-worship.
Theocracy would be better than a hamstrung parliament—if only we could be guaranteed of human perfection. But we can’t be, and so any attempt becomes a Tower of Babel where conformity crowds out individuality. Liberalism emerges from the prophet’s self-aware realization that he can’t do it all, can’t know it all—from the human assertion that we aren’t God. For better and for worse, we have to specialize. This means that the moral genius needs the marketing genius and vice versa. To be impactful, the artist must focus on “distribution” and not only on “craft.” To avoid diluting focus, shared responsibility, at its best, allows everyone to excel at their unique passion. The rhetorician has an important role to play in the Exodus story, which is as much an “information war” as a battle with Pharaoh’s army.
The moral of the story is that we should be humble and proud: humble about our incapacities and proud of the positive contribution that we can make, no matter our temperament, to bettering the world. There is no single model offered by the Torah to which we must aspire. Most of us are not cut out to be prophets. Some of us are, but lack the priestly touch that makes us compelling and convincing.
Most of the Israelites never left Egypt when offered the chance. Typically, we chalk this up as a form of Stockholm’s Syndrome, a psychological tragedy: the people prefer certain oppression (the devil they know) to uncertainty (the devil they don’t know). But another way to think about it is that Moses and Aaron failed to persuade them, because even divine truth and infotainment have their limits. In not leaving, the people who remained likewise remind us of the diversity of human temperaments and needs, which, on a macro-level demonstrate human dignity even when we don’t like the result.
Confusion is not the end of leadership, but it is the beginning. Moses lacks words, because he intuits a reality more complex and more needy than what existing frames can describe.
You don’t have to rush to weigh in on every new iteration of the news cycle to be a leader or a moralist. There is a prophetic power and holy origin in simply being dumbstruck.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
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Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study based in NYC.
About the name: Deuteronomy 20:19 teaches that when one conquers territory, one should not cut down the trees, because trees, unlike people, cannot run way. Read spiritually, the image-concept of the “tree of the field” represents that which we must preserve in the face of great cultural, political, and technological upheaval and transformation. As the world becomes more and more modernized, it becomes even more necessary to secure our connection to the wisdom of the ancient past and to ways of being that give our lives irreducible meaning.
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Zohar, Did anyone in the Torah play the role of both the prophet and priest?
I love the way you write about separation of powers - while saying so little directly about it, you bring richness and perspective to the subject. I guess that’s how philosophers talk!