Efrat, Israel --- What is the test of true maturity – and how many of us (if indeed there are any at all) can truly be considered to be mature? I am certain that all of us have had the feeling at times that we are called upon to act as nursery school teachers – with the supposed adults among us comporting themselves like tots in a pre-school setting.

I believe the answer can be found in a difficult halakhah in the writings of Maimonides, a legal formulation the depth of which is illustrated by a careful study of our Torah reading. Maimonides begins his Laws of Repentance:

Now, it is Maimonides who formulates the necessity of internal concentration and direction (kavannah) especially with “commandments of the heart” such as prayer, the recitation of the Sh’ma, mourning over the death of a loved one and rejoicing during a Festival. Certainly I would expect to find repentance in this category; if so, the essence of the commandment of repentance ought be a “turning or re-turning of the heart” rather than a mere verbal formula of admission of guilt. I would even have thought the Biblical proof-text to have been the more obvious, “… And you shall return to your heart from amongst all the nations where the Lord your G-d has scattered you there. And you shall return to the Lord your G-d and listen to His voice…. With all your heart and with all your soul” (Deuteronomy 30:1,2), rather than “And they shall confess their guilt” (Numbers 5:7).

Perhaps we shall be better equipped to understand Maimonides’ position on repentance if we ponder a fascinating aspect of this week’s Torah reading, Hukkat: the tragic episode in Hukkat is Moses’ transgression. According to the simple reading of the text, once again the Jews find themselves without water, and they decry Moses for having “made us to come out of Egypt to bring us into this evil place, not a place of seed or of figs or of vines or of pomegranates and without water to drink” (Numbers 20:6). Moses and Aaron “fell on their faces” before G-d in prayer; G-d tells them “to take the staff, assemble the congregation and speak to the rock before their eyes that it give forth water.” Moses and Aaron “assemble the assemblage before the rock and say to them, ‘Listen now you rebels’….

And Moses raised his hand, smote the rock with his staff twice and water came forth abundantly. And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, ‘Because you had no faith in Me to sanctify Me in the eyes of the children of Israel; therefore you shall not bring this assemblage into the land which I shall give them’” (ibid, 7-12).

Apparently, Moses has lost his patience with this nation. After all the miracles of Egypt and the desert, they still “kvetch” when there is no water and they blame him, Moses, for their stubborn refusal to conquer the land promised by G-d; and all of this at the heels of the humiliating rebellion of Korah, Datan, Aviram and their cohorts. And so Moses calls all of them rebels and strikes the rock instead of speaking to it – perhaps in an act of displacement of anger, because he really wants to strike them! G-d blames Moses for missing an opportunity to sanctify the Divine Name - and punishes Moses by preventing his entry to his beloved Promised Land. Moses does not respond, and the Bible continues with the next incident with the King of Edom.

Moses doesn’t respond here; but he does respond in his farewell speech and summary of the desert experience as recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy. And indeed, it seems as though Moses is re-writing history – or at least giving it a rather subjective spin. He begins his interpretation of the incident of his sin by harking back to the sin of the scouts – which we have previously read to have been initiated by G-d “to send forth men to look over the land of Canaan” and which was executed by Moses as a reconnaissance mission (Numbers 13). Ten of the twelve described a most difficult situation, claimed the land to be impossible to conquer – and convinced the Israelites of their position. Now Moses retells the story saying, “you came near to me, all of you, requesting that we send men to search out the land for us…. The matter was good in my eyes…. The (men) brought back the word saying ‘the land which the Lord our G-d is giving to us is good’… but you (the assemblage) did not want to go up, but you rebelled against the word of G-d…” And when G-d punished you by not enabling your entire generation to enter the Promised Land, “the Lord also became angry with me because of you saying that ‘You also shall not come there’” (Dt. 1:22-37).

Apparently, the most difficult thing to do is to express one’s guilt without reservations, and to beg forgiveness. What is the test of true maturity? When one stops blaming one’s parents, one’s sibling, one’s teachers, one’s environment, one’s society for one’s transgressions, and shamefacedly blames oneself. Because this act of unqualified confession is so hard to do, Maimonides makes it the essence of repentance.

Shabbat Shalom