Of Sticks & Stones - Part II

A while back I posted about the episode in this week's Parsha when Moshe hits the rock to draw water, and is barred from entering ארץ ישראל as a punishment.  At the time I promised a more serious theory "later", and with a large stack of finals that need to be graded in front of me, this seems as good a time as any.

Most מפרשים have ideas on this, and many of them are different, because the text itself is so unclear and raises so many questions.  First, what exactly did Moshe do wrong?  Why was it so bad that it merited losing the opportunity to lead the people into Israel?  How could hitting the rock be so bad, if that was how he was instructed to draw water from it back in פרשת בשלח?  If he wasn't supposed to hit the rock, why did Hashem tell him to take his staff?  What is the significance of him hitting the rock twice?  Finally, why is Aharon punished?  I'll save that last question for a later date (now that I came back to this, you can believe me), but will try to address the other questions.  (See Art Scroll's Stone Chumash for a summary of some of the classical interpretations.)

The symbolism of water and a rock is familiar to us from the famous story of Rabbi Akiva:

Once, while shepherding his flocks, he gazed into a pool, where he saw a hollowed-out rock resting under a waterfall. He wondered how the rock, one of Nature's hardest substances, had been hollowed out. When he was told that the water had, over a long period of time, made the drastic change in the rock, he reasoned as follows:
"If a rock, though extremely hard, can be hollowed out by water, how much more so should it be possible for Torah, which is compared to water, to change my heart, which is soft. I will begin to study it, and try to become a Torah scholar."

So, water is Torah (which we kind of knew anyway), and the rock is the heart that is resistant to Torah's influence.  So when Hashem (and by extension Moshe) deals with the question of how do we get water from a rock, what they are really trying to do is get Torah compliance (or trust in Hashem) from a difficult and stubborn nation.  At first in בשלח, immediately after leaving Mitzrayim the nation was immature, even infantile (as many of you have heard me discuss many times ואכמ"ל).  When you have a child and you are trying to teach them not to touch the stove or run into the street, persuasion is not called for, you must physically and forcefully remove them from the danger.  This was the model of discipline for the דור המדבר, and we find it repeated in practice over & over - the Jews sin, and are punished swiftly and strongly. 

Here in פרשת חקת, we fast forward 38 years, and now find Moshe leading the generation that will ultimately enter Israel.  Once again, the people complain for water, but now it is time for them to grow up.  The new mission for the nation is no longer to enforce compliance by threat of immediate force, but by teaching them the right thing to do, so that when they get to Israel, and live in a natural world without punitive miracles regularly frightening them into submission.  That doesn't mean that there is no room for the threat of punishment  - the memories of past retribution is a valuable tool in teaching them to act properly.  Therefore, take the stick to the rock ("speak softly, but carry a big stick"), but this time don't hit the rock, speak to it, gently.  Demonstrate to the people how the new reality differs from the old one. 

But Moshe missed the chance.  By hitting the rock, he showed himself to be a מדבר leader, who was so used to the people disappointing him, being true "stones", that he couldn't adjust to them as actually being able to take some responsibility for their own behavior.  Worse, when after striking the rock once, no (or not much) water emerged, instead of reevaluating his approach and trying a new model, he hit the rock again, symbolizing an inability to evolve into the type of leader that בני ישראל would need in ארץ ישראל.

While this explanation is a little more critical of Moshe Rabeinu than I would normally be comfortable with, in this context I think it is appropriate.  The Torah tells us that he committed a grave sin, it then becomes our responsibility to try to figure out what it was.