“Now go, I am sending you [Moshe] to Pharoah and you will bring my people, the Children of Yisrael out of Egypt.” (Shemos 3:10)

This past Shabbos, I was discussing with my daughter a statement of our Sages that if the Torah was not given through Moshe, it would have been given through Ezra Ha’Sofer, who led the Jews back to Eretz Yisrael after the Babylonian exile and built the second Beis HaMikdash. My daughter had a question – what about all of the other great leaders we had? There were many hundreds of years between these two. What about Aharon? Yehoshua? Dovid HaMelech?

To answer, I asked my daughter who her teachers were. She has a teacher for Jewish subjects (Chumash, Halacha, Navi, etc.). She also has different English studies teachers – one for history, one for math, one for computers, one for science, etc. Let’s imagine if the math teacher taught Halacha or the science teacher taught history. How much would you learn in that class? Probably not very much. A person might argue though that all of these people are “teachers” so why can’t one teach a different subject? The answer is because different people have different skills.

Aharon was great. Yehoshua was great. Dovid HaMelech was great. But they were not the same type of leader as Moshe. The person who was the same type of teacher as Moshe was Ezra. The others were great but they led in different ways. It is like having numerous teachers – each one has their specialty.

My son recently said to me, “It is unfair. We are never going to have a person as great as Moshe.” I disagreed with him. We will never have another leader like Moshe, but another person we can have. Moshe worked hard during his lifetime to reach his potential. He became as great as he could be. Other people can do this also. There might not be ever another leader like Moshe, but other people can grow to be as great as he was.

Each person is different and Hashem looks at them differently. Just like in baseball, a pitcher and right fielder are not compared to each other (pitcher focuses on throwing strikes while the right fielder focuses on throwing the ball long distances and hitting home runs), so too, two people are not compared to each other, even if they are on the same team. We are compared to ourselves. We are compared to our own potential. If we reach our potential, then we are as great as Moshe.

Good Shabbos
-yes
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