Why did he do it?
Moshe is put on trial in Caldwell for killing that Egyptian
Some time after that, when Moshe had grown up, he went out to his kinsfolk and witnessed their labors. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsmen. He turns this way and that, and seeing no one about, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. When he went out the next day, he found two Hebrews fighting, so he said to the offender, “Why do you strike your fellow?” He retorted, “Who made you chief and ruler over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Moshe was frightened, and thought: Then the matter is known! When Pharaoh learned of the matter, he sought to kill Moshe, but Moshe fled from Pharoah. He arrived in the land of Midian, and sat down beside a well. (Exodus 1:11-15; Parashat Shemot)
We know that the Torah is written tersely. It tells a dramatic story in as few words as possible, leaving gaps that modern writers would fill in, inviting us to make the connections ourselves. It exerts a pull on our imaginations as it rewards us for the combination of close textual reading and creative understanding that is the hallmark of Jewish scholarship.
On January 25, after Shabbat services and kiddush, the community of Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell will form itself into a court to hear the case against Moshe, and to decide if he is guilty of any of the three charges he faces. Those charges are murder, justifiable homicide, or involuntary manslaughter.
The judge will be the only outsider to Agudath Israel involved in this trial. Rachel Wainer Apter is an associate justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Jean Alter will be Moshe, her lawyer and the prosecutor will be played by Joshua Kipnees and Jonathan Mehl, and Merisa Fink will be one of the two Israelites who will testify. The other is choosing anonymity, which makes a kind of poetic sense, given that this character is known only generically.
So — why hold this trial?
This is the third such hearing the shul has held in the last three years, its creator and organizer, Debbie Miller of Caldwell, said. Ms. Miller is a “retired Jewish educator,” but educators never really retire. She was the head of the Solomon Schechter school in East Brunswick, ran the national Bible curriculum for all the Schechter schools, and taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Davidson School of Education. Now she has turned her attention to working with the shul’s education director, Susan Werk, in creating programs like this one.
Okay. So how will Moshe be judged?
The first case Agudath Israel tried was against defendants Rebecca and Jacob, for stealing Esau’s birthright. The judge sitting on that case was Stuart Rabner, the chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court; he’s a member of Agudath. The shul’s second case was about Joseph’s brothers throwing their annoying younger sibling into a pit and then selling him into slavery in Egypt. Was that human trafficking? The judge then was Justice Perry W. Schulman of Winnipeg, whose son, lawyer Brendan Schulman, and daughter-in-law, writer Dara Horn, are members of Agudath; Justice Apter, who lives in Englewood, has an aunt and uncle in the shul.
The first two trials took place on the Shabbat when the parshat containing its story was read; this third one will be the week after Shemot, when Parashat Va-era is read.
Under which law will Moshe be judged? “The judge said that we could decide,” Ms. Miller said; it seems most likely that the choice will be New Jersey law. That is not a law under which Moshe lived, but we know less about the intricacies of ancient Egyptian jurisprudence. Still, there are options.
“And if the lawyers want to, they can draw from the Torah,” Ms. Miller said. “There’s the law about the rodef.” That’s a pursuer, going after someone else with murder in mind. It’s Torah law that the rodef can be stopped; the problem, for this trial, is that the law was given well after Moshe killed the Egyptian. “But it is part of a New Jersey statute,” she added.
Now the crime. “We know that Moshe killed the Egyptian, but why?” Ms. Miller said. “It has to do with motive and circumstances.”
To figure it out, “first, all our participants read the text very carefully.
“The lawyers will confer in advance, and we will have a practice on Zoom. Unlike in a real case, we want everybody to know in advance exactly what everyone else is going to say.”
The congregation is the jury. “I pick a few people in advance to speak,” as jurors, to get the conversation started; after that, experience has shown Ms. Miller that there will be no problem getting a discussion going, and that will ensure that there will be enthusiastic participation in reaching a verdict.
The whole thing takes “not more than an hour from start to finish,” she added. “This is after kiddish.”
Jean Alter of North Caldwell will play Moshe. She’s an about-to-retire licensed clinical social worker; she’s also a storyteller who tells stories at Lester Senior Living in Whippany and to children at a special-needs school, and is a cofounder of the New Jersey Storytelling Guild.
She’s particularly well prepared to tell Moshe’s story.
She has not yet fully prepared her defense. “I haven’t spoken to my defense lawyer yet,” she said. But she thinks she’ll start by saying, “I am not a good speaker, because I am heavy of speech, but my plea is that I never meant to kill anyone. But I desperately needed to stop the brutality that I saw.
“I always knew that I was a stepchild, part of the royal family but not really part of the royal family. I gradually figured out that I was a Hebrew. I had heard about the lives of the Hebrew slaves, and I realized that I needed to see my people. I wanted to belong.
“So, as the text tells us, I went to see them, but I was shocked. The first thing that I saw was an Egyptian, beating one of them. I cried out, ‘Stop!’ but he would not listen.
“I looked both ways to find an Egyptian taskmaster, but there was none there. So at that point I understood that any Egyptian could do whatever he wanted to any Hebrew.”
The understanding we all seem to have is that the Egyptian beating the Israelite was a taskmaster. The text doesn’t say that, Ms. Alter said. It implies that any random Egyptian could do whatever violence he chose against any Hebrew.
“And I knew immediately that if the body was found, I would be punished, or, worse, other slaves would be blamed for the death and be killed. So I buried the body.
“I wanted to speak to the Pharaoh, my step-grandfather, about the mistreatment. Surely he didn’t know. But I couldn’t. So I had no option but to run away.
“My conclusion is that I was trying to protect my people and prevent another senseless killing of a slave. It was an accident! I was naïve! And only now, I am beginning to think that slavery itself will have to end.”
Have you ever been violent before, Moshe, um, Ms. Alter? “No. I do have a temper, but this was not done out of rage. I was just trying to stop the violence. Two days in a row.”
One of the many advantages of putting on a trial like this — of encouraging close reading of Torah stories, and of thinking about them in detail — is that “it really humanizes the Bible stories,” Ms. Alter said. “A short piece of Torah text has a lot of material in it. To understand what makes the story interesting, what makes it come alive, what makes it more than a superficial, pediatric kind of story, is to look at the text carefully and consider what would motivate someone to do what the character in the story does. To see how that makes sense.”
The trial, at Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell, will give the community a chance to consider those motivations.
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