[Avodah] The Offer Is No Longer On The Table

[Joseph Kaplan]

Jay Schachter’s interesting analysis of Moshe’s interaction with Paroh leaves one possible answer open: that Moshe lied when he said he would return in three days and he had no intention of doing so. Jay says if Paroh had accepted the original offer and not gone back on his word, he (Jay) would have brought the people back because his obligation is to keep his word. I don’t know if Hay would actually have done so. But I certainly hope that I would not. 

We all have the obligation to keep our words. But we have other obligations as well, and the difficult decision to make is what to do when those obligations come into conflict. Take this simple situation. Someone is holding innocent people hostage. The hostage taker asks for free passage out of the country and when he gets to the new country he will release the hostages  The authorities agree to this demand and promise him what he asks. As a moral issue (not a practical one) are the authorities obligated to give him free passage just because “they gave their word”? Are they prohibited from capturing him before he gets to the plane just because “they gave their word”? I don’t think so. I think other values — to name a few, protecting these hostages, making sure others won’t take hostages, doing Justice by capturing and then having the ability to mete out punishment to evil doers — trumps the value of honesty in this situation. 

Putting “God’s plan aside,” if Moshe would have been able to free the Jewish people from slavery at the cost of “going back on his word,” I think he would have been a very poor leader had he not done so. Just imagine if Abraham Lincoln had been able to free the US slaves without a civil war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives at the cost of going back on his word. In my view, he would not have been one of our greatest presidents had he not done so. Sadly he didn’t have that choice. But the obligation to keep his word seems a very small price to pay to obtain these results — a price that moral people should gladly pay. As I would hope Moshe would have done had Paroh not gone back on his word. 
Joseph