The Big one

The incident of Moses hitting the rock is one of the most popular and most memorable incidents on all of the torah. The Jewish people have been wandering the desert for forty years, they start to get exhausted and very thirsty. G-d tells Moses to speak to the rock and water will pour out before him to supply the Jewish people with their needs. G-d’s specific instructions were to speak to the rock this time, rather than hitting it like he was commanded to do by G-d forty years earlier to provide water for the Jewish people. Moses ends up hitting the rock this time too, going against what G-d commanded for him to do, and the water doesn’t come out. He hits the rock a second time, and the water ends up coming out. G-d’s response to Moses was “Since you HIT the rock rather than speaking to it, you will not lead the Jewish people into the Land of Israel (Rabbi Simmons)” Moses is considered one of the greatest prophets of all time in Jewish history. He stood up to Pharaoh, brought the ten plagues upon the nation of Mitzrayim, split the Red sea, led the Jewish people to Israel, brought the ten commandments and the holy Torah down to them, and does a single mistake by hitting the rock and gets his chance of entering Israel taken away. This punishment is said to be more than Moses truly deserved.

According to Rabbi Shraga Simmons, the Jewish people were changing their lifestyles from life as slaves in Mitrayim, to life in the desert. When they come upon a rock in the desert for the first time, Rabbi Simmons says that hitting the rock was a language they understood after coming out of slavery. Now after forty years Rabbi Simmons states that G-d told Moses to speak to the rock because Moses had led a generation in freedom, and a generation that needed a ‘softer’ approach by speaking rather than hitting. This shows that G-d wanted the new generation to be less brutal and soften up before they enter the land of Israel.

In this incident, Moses hits the rock twice. He had the chance to stop and think about what he was doing, and instead he just hit it again. Rabbi Shraga Simmons says that. "Moses' punishment is not harsh; it is simply a consequence of his relationship to the new generation and their needs in entering Israel (Rabbi Simmons.)" This incident is also a little bit after the death of Moses’ beloved sister who saved his life when he was only an infant. Some people say that he is still grieving from the loss and because of this his functioning was impaired. According to Rashi, Moses really did try to speak to the rock, but was speaking to the wrong one the whole time. He was speaking to the wrong rock because when he did speak to it, no water sprang forth, and he thought that maybe it should