Raise Your Hands: Leadership and Power
11 Shevat 5772 / 4 February 2012
Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg
I remember, quite vividly, sitting in shul as a child on the High Holidays, eagerly anticipating the moment when my rabbi, Victor Weissberg, would stand and bless the congregation. It was a glorious moment. The rabbi would stand, his arms raised, his long white robe billowing beneath his outstretched palms. And in his deeply resonant voice would call out, “yivarechacha Hashem v’yishmerecha, may the Lord bless thee and keep thee.” Now, I was raised in a Reform congregation where, in those days, each important prayer was to be done in Hebrew and English, with time for the choir to repeat (protractedly) each word - sometimes multiple times. So we would stand to receive our blessing for a full ten to twelve minutes while Rabbi Weissberg and the choir enacted a call and response ritual worthy of Sophocles or Isaiah with his heavenly chorus. Now, it is a feat of strength, to hold one’s arms out for such a long time. Try it sometime and you’ll likely find it quite difficult, if not impossible. And I, as a child, was always left wondering: how did he do it?
In this week’s Torah portion (Ex. 17:8-13) Amalek, perennial enemy of the Jewish people, comes to make war. The Israelites respond to the threat and Moses, Aaron and Hur go up to a hilltop, Moses with his staff in hand. Picture the scene, Moses is standing on the heights as the battles rages in the valley below. Whenever Moses raises his hand, the Israelites win, but when he lowers it, they begin to lose. After a while, Moses gets tired. So, Aaron and Hur sit Moses down on a rock, stand on either side of him and support his arms. And through their actions, by nightfall Joshua is able to rout the enemy. Perhaps this was Rabbi Weissberg’s secret. Perhaps he felt his arms supported by his ancestors, his God or his congregation. (Or perhaps, as the rumors said, he would practice with dumbbells for weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah.)
Today, I want to talk to you about power. Moses professes to be “lo ish d’varim anochi” (Ex. 4:10), a man of few words. What, then, might we learn - not from his words but from his posture? What might this teach us about leadership and power? The image of Moses with his hand held aloft is a familiar one, of course, but more often from the scene at the Sea of Reeds which we read just a little while ago. Perhaps, like me, the picture in your head is that of Charleton Heston with his eyes blazing and his beard blowing in the wind. Or, perhaps, you remember one of the many satirical cartoons on the subject: Moses parting his soup or the cars on an LA freeway. I just got a new one with Moses joshing his friend as they’re fishing. Whatever the picture in your head, there is no doubt that the image of Moses with his arm raised is one of the more potent in pop culture iconography.
What then, might we ask, is the power of raising one’s hands? How can this grant anyone, even a great prophet, the ability to win battles and part seas? The Mishnah (Rosh Hashanah 3:8), the great 2nd Century compendium of Jewish law and lore, is concerned about exactly this: that we might be led to believe that the victory over the Amalekites was an act of sympathetic magic. “Did the hands of Moses,” the Mishnah asks, “really grant victory to Israel and inflict defeat upon Amalek?” The response: “As long as Moses’s hands were raised heavenward, the Israelites looked up and trusted in their heavenly Father and they triumphed.” In other words, the hands of Moses acted as a spiritual directive: trust in God and the Almighty will deliver you from the hands of your enemy. Spurn that trust, and you will suffer defeat. As the Psalmist writes: “I lift my eyes toward the heavens, from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth” (Psalms 121:1). Look up and enjoy the grace of heaven. Look down, and downcast you will be.
Rabbi Harold Kushner points out (Etz Hayim, p. 421) that the motif of “raised hands” appears elsewhere in Torah. God’s “outstretched arm” smites the Egyptians. And Israel is described as leaving Egypt “b’yad ramah,” with arms raised high. Moreover, the lifting of hands is a common maneuver in later Jewish law and practice. At hagba’ah, we lift the sefer Torah to be seen before the eyes of the congregation. We lift our hands as we recite the blessing netilat yadayim, ritual hand washing. Even getting married is a sort of “lifting.” The Hebrew word for marriage is nissuin, which literally means carrying or elevation. Incidentally, hagba’ah is also a legal term which depicts a manner in which one can take possession of something. Two people who wish to go into business together, for example, will lift something above their heads to symbolize their mutual shared interest.
And there is one more act of “hand-lifting” that is significant in our tradition - that of nisiyat kapayim or duchanen. This is the ancient ritual, enacted in some more traditional congregations, in which the cohanim, the priests, their tallasim over their heads and their arms outstretched, lift their hands to bless the community through the ancient words of the Priestly Benediction. Where do you think Leonard Nimoy got it from? This is, of course, the custom that my childhood rabbi was evoking on Yom Kippur. For those of you who were raised with duchanen, you may recall that one is not permitted to look at the cohanim as they offer their benison. Bubbemeisahs about going blind notwithstanding, I think there’s something more serious going on here. Our tradition is quite sensitive to the human tendency toward idolatry. Just as the Mishnah does not want us to mistake Moses for God as he sits atop the hill, with arms raised in victory, we are cautioned against viewing the priestly class as anything more than God’s emissaries.
Indeed, I want to suggest that each of these cases of “lifting” is infused with the same general sensitivity to this issue. We lift the Torah so that the community might see the sacred words contained therein – there’s nothing sacred about the scroll itself but that it is an authentic transmission of those words. We lift our hands as we wash them to remind ourselves that, ultimately, it is not our hands that enable us to eat. We get married under a chuppah, in the presence of family and friends so that we might bring the presence of God into that sacred relationship. Even taking possession of objects by lifting them may be a subtle acknowledgment that we do not really own the things of this world; they are merely bestowed upon us for a time. And, lastly, blessing, though it can (and should) be invoked by God’s creatures, is best assigned to the Kadosh Baruch Hu, the Holy one of Blessing from whom blessing originates. In other words, each instance of lifting is meant to draw our eyes heavenward (even if, in the ironic case of duchanen, we must do so by looking down).
To lift up is to have God-consciousness if you will, a capacity for awe, awareness that there is something greater, wiser and more powerful in the Universe. And how many of us do? Indeed, how many of us feel utterly powerless when confronting the world’s myriad injustices? How often does the work before us leave us feeling awful rather than full of awe? Abraham Joshua Heschel says (Who is God?, ch. 5), “Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking.” Rather, “Awe,” he adds elsewhere, “is a sense for the transcendent, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us… to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal” (Ibid. pg. 88-89). In other words, to raise our hands is to acknowledge that so much is out of our hands. Paradoxically, according to Heschel, we are most empowered through accepting our many limitations.
So what, then, is instructive about the case of Amalek in which our victory is so contingent upon Moses and his raised arms? Amalek, it seems, may not be merely an external force. In his book, Amalek: The Enemy Within (1991, Mimetav Press), Dr. Elijah Schochet makes the claim that the archetypal enemy of the Jewish people is primarily an internal force. In Kabbalistic and Hassidic sources, Amalek becomes haSatan - the adversary, yetzer hara - the evil inclination, or sitra achra - the other side (or “the dark side”). In other words, Amalek is our primary obstacle as we struggle to become better and more impactful human beings.
Whether the enemy is internal, external, or likely a little of both, I think we can learn several things here about power as a response to injustice. Remember that book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? Well, consider this to be, “All I really need to know I learned from Moses fighting the Amalekites at Rephidim.” Sort of: Life’s Little Instruction Book meets the Exorcist meets War of the Worlds.
First, victory over Amalek requires humility. Da lifnei mi ata omed, we are taught, “know before whom you stand.” If we can maintain humility even as we are fighting injustice or intolerance, we may just be blessed with the ability to defeat it. But, remember, Moses had not just divine help but human assistance as well. His arms grow tired and he has to call on Aaron and Hur, not to mention Joshua’s soldiers on the battlefield. None of us can do it alone. We need others to hold us up when we are weary, to encourage us when we falter, to lift us up if we fall.
Which leads us to another important lesson: Moses’s actions have implications for the entire people. We need good leaders – those who will help our larger community to continually examine its moral compass, to aid in our continuing endeavor to defeat injustice, to champion the good. Hillel teaches us (Pirkei Avot 2:6) u’vmakom sh’ain anashim, hishtadel l’hiyot ish, “in a place where there are no worthy people, strive to be worthy.” Moses is described as anav meod, deeply humble. But humility does not mean impotence. And lifting our eyes or our hands heavenward does not mean we sit around and wait for God to solve the problems of the world. Remember, in our parasha, when Moses says to the people gathered at the Sea: “The Lord will battle for you,” God responds, Mah titzak aylei?! “What are you kvetching at me for? Tell the Israelites to go forward. And you lift up your staff and hold up your arm over the sea and split it…” (Ex. 14:15-16). And lest we think this charge was one directed to Moses alone, the Torah reminds us that the battle against Amalek and all he represents is an enduring one: “The Lord will be at war with Amalek throughout the ages” (Ex. 17:15-16).
So now the task falls to us. There is a battle raging in Annapolis the stakes of which are quite high - nothing less than the happiness and, in some cases, the lives of hundreds of thousands of gays and lesbians in the State of Maryland. This afternoon, Pastor Connors and I will have the opportunity to offer some specific suggestions. Together we will attempt to make a religious case for inclusion, justice and civil rights. I ask you: Will you raise your hands with us? Will we combat injustice and inequity in this world? We must do so with a deep sense of humility, of course. We must ask ourselves as Moses did before us, are we increasing God’s presence or just feeding our own ambition? Are we looking to the heavens or have we lost sight of the goal, glorifying the battle at the expense of the war? And what about our inner struggle? Are we endeavoring to become better people and achieve our highest potential?
Where does power reside? It resides in the healthy nexus of creation and the Creator, in the lifting of spirits through the elevation of consciousness. We, all of us, are called upon in our lives to lift up our hands. We, all of us, must strive to be worthy of such a calling. “Ma titzak aylei?” God says to us, our power lies within. And yet, as Moses learns, we are nothing without support from above and from our comrades below. Heschel said, “It takes three things to attain a sense of significant being: God, a Soul and a Moment. And the three are always here.” My friends, this is the moment. Now is the time. And we must ask ourselves: do our souls stand ready? Are our bodies too weary or can we muster the strength that it takes to create modern miracles, to defeat a timeless foe and to ensure that our collective power creates the sort of change this state, this country and I dare say the world so desperately needs?