Isaiah Cox

25 January 2009

Moshe Rabbeinu had a very peculiar marriage.

Raised as a prince in Pharoah’s house, Moshe “in-exile” finds and marries the daughter
of a chieftain, Yisro. She has one child, and is just about to have a second, when her
husband comes home, announces that he has had a revelation, and he must go and save
the Jewish people. Now. And Tzipporah, his beloved wife, packs up and off they go.

A woman who is just about to have a baby, or has just had a baby, is in no mood for
other adventure. Labor tends to be quite enough, thank you. She puts up with it, until,
when she is finally off the camel’s back, Moshe goes and provides the final straw
anyway.

Tzipporah finds herself giving bris milah to her son (which could easily have been
understood as mutilation), in order to save Moshe’s life. She is seriously unhappy about
it, as any woman in that situation would be; Tzipporah’s outburst is hardly the model of
domestic tranquility, to say the least.

Aharon, the understanding older brother, has just met Tzipporah for the first time. She
may not have worried about making a good impression, and Aharon proposes a way to
defuse the tension. After all, the priority is clear: Moshe has been sent, by G-d, on
perhaps the most challenging quest in history. Is it really a job for women and children?
Wouldn’t they be safer back home? What is unsaid is: does Moshe really need an
unhappy wife in tow, considering everything else he has to be dealing with?

Neither Moshe nor Tzipporah object. She gets to go back home and recover, raise her
family. And Moshe is free to do his job. This is, after all, Moshe’s adventure. Tzipporah
never bought into it; where in the job description for princess does it read: “Risk your life
by picking a fight with the most powerful man and nation in the world?”

So Moshe is entirely separate from his wife and sons from that point on. He goes through
all ten plagues, the pursuit to the Reed Sea, the crossing of the Sea – indeed, the pivotal
experience between G-d and the Jewish people “I am the Lord who brought you out of
the Land of Egypt.” Tzipporah and their sons have no part in any of it. They have no
direct contact with Moshe at all.

When Yisro brings Tzipporah and his grandchildren to the Jewish people, Tzipporah’s
reunification with Moshe is not described to us, but it could not have been easy. They had
separated under extremely trying conditions, and from that point, Moshe has grown from
sheepherder to the greatest prophet who ever lived –and Tzipporah stayed just where she
was the day Moshe went out to tend the sheep.

Is it really a marriage? Do we need to ask?

This perspective allows us to understand something that has always bothered me; Miriam
is punished for speaking about Moshe; we are told Miriam criticized him for separating
from his wife. The crime is loshon hora, and the punishment is tzaraas. But I think the
crime is not, really, loshon hora. We can learn something much more profound from this
incident.

Miriam did two things wrong: the first was to criticize someone else’s marriage without
first making the effort to fully understand it. Moshe and Tzipporah were, NOT ONCE,
really husband and wife from the day of the sneh1 until they reunified – and not even
then! Theirs was an abnormal marriage indeed, but we can learn from Miriam’s
punishment that we do not even criticize the outliers. This example is really a kol
v’chomer warning to us all: if a separate and celibate2 marriage of many years is off
limits, then we should be exceptionally careful about anything even slightly more
normal!

A marriage is the way in which an individual has the means to reunify the world, to add
to G-d’s work of creation. It is not something on which one may kibbitz without first
seeing it from the perspective of the couple themselves.

And Miriam’s second error was in speaking of her concerns out loud. Miriam did not go
to Moshe or Tzipporah with her thoughts; instead, she talked to Aharon. That was the
worst kind of loshon hora, because it served no constructive purpose. Anyone who
engages in marriage counseling knows to never breathe a solitary word to anyone besides
the married couple, or the worst happens. That Moshe and Tzipporah stayed married
through the disagreements, and the separation, and the growing apart, and even the
loshon hora, shows us that any couple can, if they are committed enough, make their
marriage a success.

1
After writing this sentence, prefaced with “It is conceivable”, I came across the
following midrash, speaking to G-d from the voice of Moshe’s sould: “But the son of
Amram from the day Thou didst reveal Thyself unto him at the sneh has had no marital
relations with his wife,” (Devarim Rabbah XL:10)
2
The common answer for why Moshe was celibate is that he effectively gave up his
human relationship to have a relationship with Hashem. While this is so, we can suggest
a parallel answer; Tzipporah was so far removed from Moshe’s level of kedushah that
their marriage could never again be intimate. Perhaps if Tzipporah had grown alongside
Moshe, and shared his experiences, they could have retained a physical relationship even
after Har Sinai.