The Torah makes it quite clear: while Moses is one of the great activists of human history, he begins as a reluctant one. When God first calls to him from the burning bush, Moses does not leap forward with confidence or conviction; he hesitates and protests. And yet this reluctant shepherd becomes the person who confronts Pharaoh, challenges an empire, speaks truth to power, and spends forty years carrying a difficult, frightened, often angry community through the wilderness.

This week, in Parashat Chukat, we encounter Moses at one of the most painful and morally complicated moments in his leadership journey. The people are once again unhappy; and Moses is told by God to speak to a rock so that water may come forth. We might imagine Moses asking himself: Seriously, now God wants me to speak to a rock?

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Instead of speaking to the rock, Moses turns to the people and says, “Listen now, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” and then he strikes the rock twice with his staff. Water flows, the crisis seems averted, and yet the Torah tells us that because of this incident Moses will not lead the people into the Promised Land.

It feels almost unbearably disproportionate. After everything Moses has given, is this really the moment that disqualifies him? Rashi, the great medieval commentator, gives the classic explanation: Moses was commanded to speak to the rock, but instead he hit it, and had he spoken, the people would have learned a powerful lesson — if even a rock responds to God’s word, how much more should human beings respond.

But my friend, the Israeli poet Professor Moshe Lavee imagines the scene differently. In his poem, Moses does speak. He speaks and speaks and speaks. He pleads with the rock, cajoles it, grows frustrated with it, and again and again the Hebrew word sela — rock — beats through the poem like a pulse, or perhaps like a fist not yet formed: rock, are you listening; rock, move already; rock, answer me; I am speaking to you, rock. And then, in Lavee’s imagination, Moses begins to negotiate with his own capacity for force: I have a stick, rock; I can also hit; I do not like to hit, rock; I do not believe in it; I am a man of words, rock, are you listening?

There is something extraordinary about this line, because Moses, of course, never thought of himself as a man of words. At the burning bush, when God first called him, Moses said, “I am not a man of words” — lo ish devarim anochi — “I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue.”

And yet, after forty years of leading, pleading, teaching, warning, blessing, judging, praying, arguing with God and arguing with the people, perhaps Moses has become what he once believed he was not. He has become a man of words. And still, the rock does not answer.

That, perhaps, is the terrible honesty of this parashah: sometimes words are sacred, sometimes words open seas and hold communities together and change hearts and call justice into being, but sometimes words fall against stone and return to us unanswered. Those of us who care about justice know something of this desperation. We write letters, sign petitions, preach sermons, hold meetings, choose our words carefully and then more urgently and then with less patience than before; we explain and explain again, because we believe that human beings can be summoned by conscience, and yet there are moments when we come up against hardness: bureaucracy that does not feel, cruelty dressed up as policy, indifference so polished that it almost looks respectable, the silence of those who could act and choose not to.

The Jewish feminist poet Adrienne Rich gives voice to this kind of moral exhaustion without ever allowing it to become resignation. In her poem “Natural Resources,” she writes of being moved by what she cannot save, and then of casting her lot with those who, generation after generation, “reconstitute the world.” I find that phrase so powerful here, because Rich does not imagine the work of justice as clean, heroic victory; she imagines it as the stubborn work of making and making again in a world where so much has been unmade. Perhaps that is precisely where Moses stands before the rock: not as a flawless hero, not as a serene prophet, but as someone exhausted by the endless labour of reconstituting a people who are always thirsty, always afraid, always on the edge of losing faith.

And so the question arises: what do we do when words are not enough? The Torah does not give us an easy answer. It does not simply say that Moses was wrong because he acted, because after all the people needed water, the rock yielded and the community survived. But neither does the Torah allow us to romanticise force, because Moses may save the people in that moment, but he also loses something of himself; the water flows, but the Promised Land recedes.

Perhaps the sin of Moses was not anger alone, and not action alone, but the moment when the staff became the only language left to him, when the leader who had spent a lifetime mediating between heaven and earth could no longer distinguish between necessary urgency and the violence of despair.

That is a warning to all of us: there are times when words must become action. Judaism has never believed in prayer as a substitute for responsibility: we do not merely ask God to feed the hungry; we are commanded to leave the corners of our fields. We do not merely pray for safety; we are commanded to build a parapet around the roof. We do not merely dream of justice; we are told, tzedek, tzedek tirdof — justice, justice shall you pursue. But the repetition matters: justice, justice. Not only the goal, but the means; not only the urgency of the thirst, but the danger of becoming what we oppose.

Lavee’s poem ends with a brilliant and painful wordplay. The rock, sela, becomes selah — that mysterious biblical word we often understand as a call to pause, to listen, to let the words reverberate before we continue. The poem ends in impact — trach! blast! — and then, Amen, selah.

The rock that would not listen becomes, in the final instant, a command to us to listen. Perhaps that is what Parashat Chukat asks of us this Shabbat: not to retreat from action, not to mistake gentleness for passivity, but also not to lose the pause, not to lose the capacity to ask, even in moments of urgency, what kind of person am I becoming as I try to bring water into the world?

Moses stands before the rock as both warning and teacher. He reminds us that leadership is costly, that justice work is wearying, that frustration can make even the most faithful hands tremble with anger; but he also reminds us that the task remains: to bring water where there is thirst, to speak where speech is still possible, to act where action is required, and to pause long enough to ensure that our pursuit of justice does not harden us into stone. Shabbat, perhaps, is our weekly selah — a pause not from responsibility, but within responsibility; a moment to lay down the staff, unclench the fist, listen again for the water beneath the rock, and remember that the world still needs us, not only strong, not only right, but still tender enough to hear.

Ken yehi ratzon.

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