There is a moment coming this Shabbat that I want you to listen for.

Devarim always falls on the Shabbat right before Tisha B’Av. The baal koreh will be moving along in the normal tune, and then he will hit one pasuk and drop into the trope of Eichah. That low tune we save for sitting on the floor in the dark. One sentence. Then he climbs back out and keeps going like nothing happened.

And Moshe is saying it about himself.

What he actually said

The line is איכה אשא לבדי, how can I carry you alone.

And here is what he says he cannot carry. Not the mission. Not the covenant. Not the weight of history. He says טרחכם ומשאכם וריבכם. Your bother. Your baggage. Your arguing.

That is not a noble speech about the burden of leadership. That is a man saying you people are exhausting me.

And he says it to their faces. In his last address. Forty years in, with the finish line in sight, the first thing he wants to go back and tell them about is the time he could not do it anymore.

He was not being humble

We like to soften this into modesty. Moshe the humble leader, gently noting that he needed a little support.

No. Read what he chose to say. Pharaoh’s palace, the sea, the mountain, forty years of manna and complaints and rebellion. He handled all of it. And the thing that broke him was not any of the big stuff.

It was the daily grind of people. The bickering. The small stuff that never stops coming.

Which, if we are being honest, is what actually breaks most of us too. Not the tragedy. The Tuesday. The pile of ordinary things that individually are nothing and together are too much.

איכה is the first word of Eichah, the book we read on Tisha B’Av. איכה ישבה בדד. How does she........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)