We stand here on the shoulders of giants such as Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Job. This year's High Holyday sermons will explore what they continue to say to us.

This evening we explore lessons our ancestor Moses taught us.

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Of all the giants of our past on whose shoulders we stand, no one is more crucial, more central than Moses. I don't need to tell you who he was. You know. I don't need to tell you that he was raised in Pharaoh's palace. You know. I don't need to tell you about his bringing the Ten Commandments from the top of Mount Sinai. You know. What you may not know are some of the other, critically important things Moses teaches us.

11… when Moses had grown up, he went out to his kinsfolk and witnessed their labors. [Exodus 2:11]

That's what the text says. A deceptively simple statement. Our Sages ascribe great merit to him because of this. How unusual for a prince of Pharaoh's court to go out among the common folk and identify the Hebrew slaves as his own people.

The Midrash tells us that on that day Moses saw strong men carrying light burdens and weak men straining under heavy loads; old men performing the tasks of young men and young men doing work suited for old men; men assigned to do women's chores and women carrying out men's work. So shocked was Moses by this sight that he decided to intercede on their behalf and arrange that from that time on, everyone was assigned work according to his or her ability. [Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God, pg. 198]

He becomes their protector:

He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsmen. 12 He turned this way and that and, seeing no one about, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. [Exodus 2:11b-12]

Was he a sneak, looking around to make sure no one could see him before doing the right thing? Not at all. He looked everywhere to see if any other Hebrew was coming to his comrade's aid. Sadly, there was not, so it was up to Moses to help.

In this little vignette is one of Moses' greatest lessons, a message that reverberates as strongly today as it did then: Tikkun Olam, Social Justice, repairing the brokenness of our oh so imperfect world. When we support our Temple generously because it is the one institution in the Jewish world that creates Jews without selfishly worrying about whether we are getting our money's worth, we do tikkun olam. When we give to Israel, when we work in a soup kitchen, when we visit the elderly, the sick, when we do any and all of those things, we are doing tikkun olam. We can even do Moses one better. He looked to see if anyone else was coming to help. Let us not look. Let us just go ahead and do it, and if anyone else joins in, so much the better.

Moses was good, but not perfect. He was often solitary, often took everything upon himself. He brought the Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery and into the wilderness on their way to Canaan and was so busy he had no time for his family, his wife and two sons. He left them with his wife's father in Midian. Then,

Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, took Zipporah, Moses' wife, after she had been sent home, 3 and her two sons… [and] brought Moses' sons and wife to him in the wilderness, where he was encamped at the mountain of God. [Exodus 18:2-3]

It took a non-Hebrew to remind Moses of how important it was for the family to be together.

As you know, the Torah portions have names, and this one is named Yitro, after Moses' father-in-law. Do you know what else is found in this portion? The Ten Commandments! Our tradition wants to know why a portion that contains something so central, so crucial for our Judaism is named after Yitro, a non-Jew. The answer is, because Yitro re-united Moses with his family. More than anything, the family is the core of our being and our purpose. Because he did this, Yitro merits having this important portion named in his honor.

So this is the second thing we learn from Moses, this time from his shortcomings as a father and husband: earning a living, being important, is important, but not at the expense of our families. They must come first.

Next, we learn a crucial message from Moses' curiosity:

12 Moses said to the Lord… "if I have truly gained Your favor, pray let me know Your ways, that I may know You…"

17 And the Lord said to Moses, "I will also do this thing that you have asked;" 18 [Moses] said, "Oh, let me behold Your Presence!" 19 And [God] answered, "I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you the name Lord, and the grace that I grant and the compassion that I show. 20 But," He said, "you cannot see My face, for man may not see Me and live." 21 And the Lord said, "See, there is a place near Me. Station yourself on the rock 22 and, as My Presence passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock and shield you with My hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will take My hand away and you will see My back; but My face must not be seen." [Exodus 33:12-23]

Moses wants to see God. Don't we all? Moses wants to experience God, which is the root meaning of spirituality. But he cannot see God, cannot experience God directly, only indirectly. No human being can do otherwise, not even Moses, without being something other than human: "No one can see me and continue to live as a human being," is one understanding of the passage.

Like Moses getting a glimpse of God only after God had passed by, we can experience some of what God has done after God has done it. We can gain some understanding of God's ways in the everyday miracles of love and birth, of dedication and commitment. To see any of this and to feel any of this - to experience any of this - is to step onto the path of spiritual quest. This, too we have learned from Moses: to be a spiritual seeker, always.

Finally, a short word about those Ten Commandments. There were two sets, you know, both given on Mount Sinai:

18 When He finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, He gave Moses the two tablets of the Pact, stone tablets inscribed with the finger of God. [Genesis 31:18]

That's the first set, the ones that were shattered when Moses saw the people worshipping the Golden Calf. So he had to trudge back up the mountain for another set:

The Lord said to Moses: "Carve two tablets of stone like the first, and I will inscribe upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you shattered.

28 And he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he ate no bread and drank no water; and he wrote down on the tablets the terms of the covenant, the Ten Commandments. [Genesis 34:1,38]

Do you hear the difference? God made the first set of tablets and inscribed the commandments on them. Moses had to carve out the second set and cut the letters into the stone himself. And if you've ever worked with stone, you know what backbreaking work this is. I tried once to chisel out a cracked part of the pavement on our front walk. It was awful. I once used a jackhammer to try and break up a cement floor. That was even worse. I lasted about ten minutes.

You see? For the first set, God did all the work. For the second, Moses did. And which one lasted? The one Moses made. What we sweat for and struggle for ourselves is what lasts, just as it was with Moses.

There is a joke that suggests that there were originally five commandments. When they were offered to us we asked how much they cost. When told that they were free, we replied, "In that case, we'll take ten."

But you know as well as I do they were never free and certainly aren't now. To be a Jew, and especially a Reform Jew, is to pay the "cost" of learning, to understand what we are asked and sometimes commanded to do. A Jew, Reform or otherwise, who doesn't act out of knowledge, is simply a tattered sail twisting in the wind.

We must be able, based on our learning, on our knowledge, to make changes, to adapt our Judaism to the needs of our time. That is why one of our legends has Moses visit a Talmudic academy over a thousand years after Sinai. He sits quietly in the back and doesn't understand a thing. He is truly amazed when the teacher tells the class that all of this is derived from the teachings of Moshe Rabbenu, Moses our teacher. His message grows and changes. It must. That is its purpose.

Yes, Moses teaches us to embrace social justice. Yes, his human foibles remind us of how sacred the family is. Yes, his quest to experience God sets us on the path of spirituality. Yes, his example shows us how crucial it is to struggle with life's lessons for ourselves. All of this, and so much more, is part and parcel of who Moses really was: Moshe Rabbenu, Moses our teacher. To learn from him is to be a Jew.