Parashat Vaeira – 5786

A D’var Torah for Parashat Vaeira
Rabbi Wendy Love Anderson

Just A Number

At the beginning of Parashat Vaeira, the Torah detours from its ongoing Exodus narrative to provide genealogies for Moses and Aaron and recapitulate their divine appointment to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. At the very end of this digression, though, there’s an unexpected piece of information: “Moses was eighty years old and Aaron eighty-three, when they made their demand on Pharaoh” (Exod. 7:7).

What do Moses and Aaron’s ages have to do with the Exodus? A plausible academic theory is that this information was inserted in an effort to harmonize the details of Moses’ biography: while he has a wife and young children when God commissions him in Exodus 3-4, in the later books of the Torah it’s established that the Israelites have been wandering for forty years before Moses dies at age 120. But more traditional Jewish commentators assume that this verse comes to teach us something important about age and action.

One possible lesson from this verse is to emphasize how unusually youthful Moses and Aaron were at their advanced ages. Abraham ibn Ezra (on Exod. 7:7) notes that no other Biblical prophets are described as prophesying in old age, so this must be a sign of Moses and Aaron’s unique prophetic charisma (and perhaps also their excellent health). Ovadiah Sforno (ibid.) makes a more down-to-earth observation: most elderly men don’t want to get up early in the morning, yet Moses and Aaron do exactly that a few verses later in order to intercept Pharaoh at the Nile! And the Malbim (ibid.) sums everything up when he comments that Moses and Aaron performed God’s bidding “even though they were elders.” The idea is that Moses and Aaron are acting with the vigor of much younger men, and this is to their credit.

A different strand of Jewish tradition uses this verse to celebrate old age itself. Although Psalm 90, attributed to Moses himself, refers to eighty as an age we might be lucky to reach im bi-gevurah, “if we are given the strength,” Pirke Avot (5:21) turns this on its head when it refers to eighty as an age of gevurah, and later midrashic sources (e.g., Midrash Sekhel Tov on Ex. 7:7) explicitly link this “strength” to Moses’ advanced age in this verse. Sifrei Devarim (357:33) compares Moses’ leadership of Israel beginning at age eighty to the (supposedly) identical trajectories of Hillel the Elder, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, and Rabbi Akiva.

Some later commentators offered a more realistic perspective on the rabbinic praise of eighty-plus-year-olds. Isaac Abravanel, writing from a lifetime of experience in the late medieval Spanish court, explains that the best people to enter the king’s court are not impulsive youths but “elders, who have acquired wisdom” (Abravanel to Exod. 7:7).  At eighty and eighty-three, he explained, Moses and Aaron were just the right age for the divinely appointed job of representing Israel before Pharaoh. Modern and contemporary commentators from across the Jewish denominational spectrum have expressed similar ideas: without the wisdom and experience of age, Moses and Aaron’s mission could easily have failed.

I’d like to suggest that these strands of tradition – seeing Moses and Aaron in Parashat Va’eira as youthfully active and as wise elders – can also teach us something when we view them side by side. Many Jewish institutions offer programs and classes that segregate people by age: Birthright cohorts, young professionals groups, senior activities, and Tot Shabbats all exist for good reasons. But Moses and Aaron, who still have four decades to go at their youthfully active advanced ages, aren’t so easily pigeonholed. (Their Israel trip turns out to be pretty unique as well!) The ways in which this pair of siblings who don’t quite fit with either the elders or the youngsters find themselves shaping the Jewish future teaches us an important lesson: sometimes age is just a number. And because we can’t all be Moses and Aaron, our own Jewish leadership needs to encompass a diversity of age: we shouldn’t find ourselves led exclusively by eighty-year-olds, forty-year-olds, or twenty-year-olds. Just like our redemption from Egypt, Jewish life has always been – and will continue to be – an intergenerational project.