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Moses, the most solitary and most powerful hero in Biblical history. The immensity of his task and the scope of his experience command our admiration, our reverence, our awe. Moses, the man who changed the course of history all by himself; his emergence became the decisive turning point. After him, nothing was the same again.

It is not surprising that he occupies a special place in Jewish tradition. His passion for social justice, his struggle for national liberation, his triumphs and disappointments, his poetic inspiration, his gifts as a strategist and his organizational genius, his complex relationship with God and His people, his requirements and promises, his condemnations and blessings, his bursts of anger, his silences, his efforts to reconcile the law with compassion, authority with integrity—no individual, ever, anywhere, accomplished so much for so many people in so many different domains. His influence is boundless, it reverberates beyond time. The Law bears his name, the Talmud is but its commentary and Kabbala communicates only its silence.

Moshe Rabbénu, our Master Moses, incomparable, unequaled. The only man ever to have seen God face to face. Guide and supreme legislator. The Talmudic expression “Such is the law that Moses received at Sinai” inevitably leads to the closing of any debate. He is both source of every answer and root of every question. Every question that will ever be posed to a teacher by his pupil, Moses already heard at Sinai, says the Talmud.

Nevertheless, his portrait as sketched by tradition is carefully balanced; we are shown his shortcomings as well as his virtues. Unlike the founders of other religions or great leaders in other traditions, Moses is depicted as human, both great and fallible. While every other religion tends to transform its founder into a semi-god, Judaism does everything to humanize Moses.

Occasionally one even gets the impression that the Talmud would like to convince us that the greatest of our leaders was not really qualified to fulfill his duties; none of his failings are concealed, nor are his abrupt changes of mood. He did not get along well with other men or even with the angels. He married the daughter of a pagan priest, lived far away from his people and once even went so far as to deny his origins. Moreover, he was a poor speaker—how could he hope to galvanize his public?

And yet. Were it not for him, Israel would have remained a tribe of slaves. Living in the darkness of fear, dreading light.

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His life began with tears, his own. Batya, the Pharaoh’s daughter, noticed a basket floating down the Nile and discovered in it a Jewish infant—she knew it was Jewish because it cried not like an infant but like an adult, like a community of adults—his entire people was crying in him, said one of the commentators.

Legend tells us that Moses did not wish to cry. On the contrary, he tried to hold back his tears, to remain calm and silent though he was afraid. But the angel Gabriel struck him hard to make him cry so as to arouse Batya’s pity. This may explain the tense relationships Moses was to have later with the angels.