Well it’s Parashat Vaera and the story is starting to heat up. Like the producers of a really good television drama, the authors of our previous parsha started by introducing us to our main characters and built us up to a tense cliffhanger of an ending, with Pharaoh casually disregarding the message Moses brings him from God and only increasing the harshness of the burdens upon the Israelites. As this parsha opens, even the Israelite leaders seem to have given up their initial hopefulness that salvation is attainable and we are left wondering what assistance God will provide to ensure Moses’s success.

Now that the story of Moses is starting to really get underway, I thought it might be interesting to draw back from the action for a moment and take some time to look at what happens to him after the Bible is through with him. Those of you who know your Chumash will be able to tell me pretty flatly that, in a narrative sense, the answer to this question is nothing, because by the time we get to the end of Deuteronomy, Moses has died, having shepherded the people through forty years of wilderness wandering and brought them almost, but not quite, to the land promised to them by God.

But even though in a certain sense the story of Moses is over by the time we get to the first chapter of the book of Joshua, in another sense it has only just begun. That’s because in the Jewish tradition the way in which later generations re-imagine the stories and characters depicted in the Bible is often just as important as the “official version”–sometimes even more so.

As an example of this, I thought it might be interesting to look at a discussion that takes place in masechet Berachot of the Talmud. The conversation begins by quoting a saying  of Rabbi Haninah: “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except for the fear of Heaven, as it is said: “And now, Israel, what does Ha Shem ask from you but to fear (Ha Shem your god)?” The biblical passage rabbi Haninah quotes to back up his saying is from Deuteronomy chapter 10, in which Moses is reminding the Israelites of their responsibility to fear God, to love God and to walk in God’s ways. By quoting this passage Rabbi Hanina seems to be saying that because God asks for fear “from you,” we can infer that fear of Heaven–by which is meant a sense of awe and respect for God–is special in that God cannot simply cause it to happen but must receive it from us.

But the Talmud has a problem with what Rabbi Haninah is saying. “Do you mean to say,” it asks, “that fear of Heaven is a small thing?” The Torah passage Rabbi Hanina quotes asks us “what does God ask of you, except to fear God?” The question seems to imply that fear of God is an easy thing to ask of us, and even to carry with it a note of exasperation that it had to ask us in the first place. We can imagine the tone of this passage to be almost like that of a mother surveying her children’s messy rooms and saying, “All I ask you to do is clean up after yourselves. Is that so hard?”

But fear of Heaven is hard. To carry ourselves at all times and in all circumstances with an awareness of the divine and the responsibilities it has placed on us is incredibly difficult. What then are we to make of this passage? Rabbi Hanina responds with a clever point: Fear of Heaven is an easy thing, he says–for Moses. And in fact, it is Moses who is speaking the words of this passage, speaking of the fear of Heaven as the easy thing it is for him, and not as the hard thing it is for us. As Rabbi Hanina says, it is as if you asked a person for something big and he happened to have it–to him, it would seem like a small thing. But if you asked someone for something quite small, and he didn’t have it, it would seem to him as if you’d asked for something big.

But is fear of Heaven really such a small thing for Moses? From what we see of him in this week’s parsha, it would be quite hard to make such a claim. Far from carrying himself with a constant awareness of God’s power, Moses seems much more concerned with the power of Pharaoh. “I am the LORD,” says God, “Speak to the king of Egypt all that I will tell you.” And Moses responds with nervousness and lack of confidence: “See, I am of impeded speech! How then should Pharaoh heed me?” It isn’t until God agrees to send Aaron with him to act as his spokesman that Moses agrees to go.

Is Rabbi Hanina wrong about Moses? We might say so, but I can’t help but feel that this would be overly simplistic. The truth of the matter is that we are all complicated human beings, and none of us is ever completely consistent, either in our virtues or our flaws. By choosing to focus on one aspect of Moses’s character and ignore others, Rabbi Hanina is making a point to help us better understand ourselves and our place in the world. In a way, part of what fear of Heaven implies is the awareness that our own perspective is limited, and there is always some new way to see a subject or a person. This awareness is one of the strengths of our tradition, because it helps us grow and adapt to a changing world. And so, as we continue to read again the ancient tale of our people’s redemption from slavery, may we blessed with the ability to look upon it with new eyes and find new ways of making it speak in our lives.