Attached is a devar torah based on an oral derashah of Rav Bigman about the leadership qualities of Mosheh Rabbenu.
The Torah highlights three characteristics in Mosheh Rabbenu before God calls him to service: ethical sensitivity, intellectual curiosity, and readiness to hear and to respond to the voice of God. The first characteristic, ethical sensitivity, emerges in the lone story of Mosheh's life in Egypt, in chapter 2, verses 11-16. Mosheh, living as an Egyptian insider, but aware of his roots as a Hebrew outsider, sees an Egyptian-the strong-persecuting a Hebrew-the vulnerable. Mosheh acts swiftly and powerfully to protect the vulnerable from the oppression of the strong. The next day, he tries to break up a fight between two Israelites, showing the same moral sensitivity even when the aggressor is a kinsman. Finally, after he has exiled himself to Midian, he saves an unknown Midianite shepherdess from a band of harassing shepherds, manifesting his moral sensitivity even when both parties are strangers.
The second characteristic, intellectual curiosity, emerges a bit later, at the beginning of chapter three. Mosheh, tending the sheep as usual, notices something unusual. "He gazed, and there was a bush, all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. Mosheh said, 'I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn't the bush burn up?'" (Shemot 3:2-3). This is a man with a desire to know, to understand his world. We see unusual things all the time, but how often do we really pay attention to them and seek to understand them? More often, we either explain them away or shrug our shoulders indifferently. Mosheh, however, needs to know.
The third characteristic is readiness to hear the voice of God and to respond. "When Hashem saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: 'Mosheh, Mosheh!' He answered, 'Here I am'" (verse 4). Immediately following this call comes the long, powerful dialogue between Hashem and Mosheh. One can easily understand why ethical sensitivity and readiness to hear and respond to God's voice are essential for a spiritual leader, but why is intellectual curiosity so important? Note the language of the verse: "When Hashem saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him", suggesting that it is Mosheh's expression of intellectual curiosity itself that justifies calling him and giving him the job. Why is curiosity so important? What has it got to do with spiritual sensitivity? I would like to suggest that readiness to hear and respond to the voice of God meaningfully is possible only if it is generated out of intellectual curiosity. Without a deep, burning "need" to perceive truth and to understand one's world, readiness to hear the word of God can be a deceptively hollow shell. When we seek out a "spiritual experience", are we seeking to hear God's voice and to respond, or are we looking for a feeling, a "fix" for our own exaltation? The pursuit of the spiritual must be a component of the pursuit for truth and understanding. What is important in the word of God is the consequence, what happens in the long term; the personal experience is merely what's trendy, and dissolves when certain, idealized modes of "experience" are not readily available. (Perhaps this was part of the downfall leading up to the Golden Calf tragedy-the people were too caught up in the ecstasy of revelation to process and work to understand what it demanded of them.)
Intellectual curiosity, though, is not sufficient. Intellectual curiosity without spiritual sensitivity is worthless to the religious individual. We are challenged not only to ask why things are the way they are but to what they lead, what consequences they bring about. The test for Mosheh was to see if he had moral sensitivity and intellectual curiosity and to see *what kind* of intellectual curiosity it was-detached curiosity that wants to know provided that it doesn't cost anything, or invested curiosity that understands that knowledge and recognition necessarily demand a response. By telling us so little about Mosheh before his assumption of the role as leader, the Torah calls heightened attention to the stories it does bring, emphasizing that these stories are really all that matters if we want to understand what was significant. We would do well to emulate Mosheh by embodying a morally-driven, burning desire to know, a curiosity that seeks familiarity with the foreign and yearns to respond to its charge of responsibility.
This dvar torah was written by Aryeh Bernstein, a kollel student at Yeshivat Ma'ale Gilboa.