[Avodah] How the Torah portrays our great men

[Eli Turkel]

In a continuation of my previous remarks I think there are numerous places
in Tanakh where the commentaries have faulted our great men.
As stressed many times this is not to say they are not great men/women
but only to point out that they too struggled

Interestingly Shnayer Leiman has a fascinating article in Tradition
(many years ago)
in which he discusses a Tifereth Yisrael that brings a "story" that
Moshe Rabbenu
found a magic mirror that showed one's inner personality. This showed that Moshe
was intrinsically evil and reached his heights by overcoming his
natutal tendencies.
The Tifereth Ysirael praises this story. He was attacked for this by
several other
gedolim who objected to the idea that Moshe Rabbenu was anything other then
perfect from birth.
Shnayer also shows that this story has nonJewish origins.
Nevertheless these two approaches of a perfect tzaddik one who works on himself
is argued over the generations
RYBS claims that in fact this is the basis of the machloket whether
Avraham recognized
his creator at the age of 40 (various versions) - Rambam - and so struggled for
many years or else at the age of 3 - Raavad - and so from infancy knew
about G-d.
Others try and combine the two shitot.

Anyway back to Tanach
Besides the story of Avraham going to Egypt which we have discussed there is the
story of Sarah's treatment of Hagar which both the Ramban and Radak
seem to condemn.
There is also the question of the sending away of Ketura's children
instead of somehow
handling them.
In is interesting that Avraham could convert all these people from
Haran but had trouble with
7 of his 8 children that needed to be sent away although Ishmael seems
to have returned
at some stage.
I previously quoted RSRH (thank you Toby) for Isaac and Rivkah not
dealing properly with
the behavior of Esau and the Malbim who seems to say that Isaac and Rivkah were
not properly communicating with each other
All of this without starting on the relationship of Yosef to his brothers.

As many have noted the first brothers in Chumash to have gotten along together
are Moshe and Aharon in sefer shemot

-- 
Eli Turkel