Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed – Executive Director, FJMC International
When I became a father for the first time, like many men, I had no idea what I was doing. Short of helping create an actual human being, I had no real understanding of how to care for that life. I relied on instinct, love, anxiety, and whatever competence I could gather in the moment. But it takes time to grow into fatherhood. And while the title “father” has always been associated with masculinity, I am not sure that the actual work of being a father begins with masculinity at all. It begins with need. And somehow the dependence starts to change you. That is part of what makes Moses so interesting.
The Torah gives Moses many roles. He is a: prophet, teacher, liberator, lawgiver, and reluctant leader. He confronts Pharaoh, brings Israel through the sea, climbs Sinai to receive Torah-twice! And carries a nation of people who complain, panic, regress, and test him almost every step of the way. He is also a father to Gershom and Eliezer. And yet the Torah shows almost no interest in Moses’ fatherhood as a lived relationship. The few scenes involving his sons are remarkably passive: they are named, placed on a donkey, circumcised by Zipporah, and later returned to him by Jethro. We are not shown Moses raising them, comforting them, instructing them, or even greeting them. So when Moses, in book of Numbers, chapter 11, suddenly describes his leadership through the language of pregnancy, birth, nursing, and carrying an infant, the image lands with unexpected force.
In this week’s Torah reading, Moses reaches for a different image of himself. Exhausted by the Israelites’ rejection of manna and their demand for meat, he turns to God and asks: “Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do You tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant?” (Numbers 11:12).
That is not the usual language of male leadership that usually involves commands and sports imagery. It is the language of pregnancy, birth, nursing, holding, feeding, and carrying. Moses, the greatest male leader in the Torah, suddenly sounds like someone whose leadership has become maternal in function, if not in biology. In a recent JTS Torah commentary on Parashat Beha’alotekha, Rabbi Emmanuel Bloch names this directly. Moses, he argues, becomes associated with both milk and manna.
The manna, according to rabbinic tradition, descends through Moses’ merit; when Moses dies, the manna ceases. Bloch also notes that Numbers 11 introduces Eldad and Medad, whose names echo the Hebrew word dad, meaning “nipple” or “breast.” The point is not subtle. The Torah places Moses in a field of images connected to nursing and nourishment. He becomes, in Bloch’s formulation, a man of milk and manna.
This is more than a clever literary observation. It opens a serious question about men and nurture.
For a long time, both culture and science assumed that women care for babies and men protect and provide. Men lead from a distance. Women hold, soothe, feed, and attend to need. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies challenges that division. Hrdy does not argue that men and women are identical, or that pregnancy and lactation are irrelevant. Her claim is more interesting: men have ancient, biologically available capacities for nurture that can be awakened through repeated, intimate, hands-on responsibility for the young. This claim helps us read Moses more carefully.
Moses does not begin his career imagining himself as a nurturer. At the burning bush, he doubts his speech, his authority, and his capacity. He does not say, “I am ready to carry these people!” He says humbly, in effect, “I am not the man for this.” Yet the needs of Israel change him. Their hunger, fear and dependency all challenge and change Moses. By this point in the narrative, he is not merely managing a liberated nation. He is carrying a nation of people who still require daily nourishment. That is where manna matters.
Manna is not a feast or even a full meal. And it’s not meat, the food the people demand when they want something solid and real. Manna is daily, repetitive, humble, and necessary. It appears each morning. It cannot be hoarded. It provides for need more than appetite. And like milk, it sustains life before maturity. Bloch’s reading sharpens the point: milk and manna are both foods for those still becoming. For those who need the necessary basics before they are ready for the complexities of the real world.
Hrdy gives us a scientific vocabulary for what the Torah renders through metaphor. In Father Time, she argues that male caregiving is not merely a social role men may choose to perform, but a capacity that can reshape them through practice. Close, repeated, hands-on care for infants and children can alter how men respond biologically, emotionally, and neurologically. Hrdy’s point is not that fathers become mothers, or that male and female bodies are the same. It is that men are not outside the world of nurture. When they are near enough, responsible enough, and responsive enough, caregiving can awaken capacities in men that older stories about masculinity often ignored.
The overlap with Moses is striking. The Torah does not say Moses suddenly becomes nurturing because he adopts a softer ideology of leadership. It portrays him as transformed by responsibility. He is not a distant provider. He is with the people every day. He hears their cries. He absorbs their dependence. He becomes the human figure through whom nourishment is mediated. This is the process by which Moses becomes an embodied caregiver. That’s an important distinction to remember.
While a distant provider can still imagine himself as separate from the people he serves, and can give resources without being changed by need, an embodied caregiver cannot. Whether the infant’s cry or the people’s panic — these do something to the one who has accepted responsibility for them. Hrdy’s work suggests that this is not merely emotional language. Men’s bodies and brains are responsive to care when care becomes close, repeated, and necessary.
Seen this way, Moses’ complaint in Numbers 11 is not a rejection of nurture. It is the honest cry of a man who has discovered that nurture costs more than he expected.“Did I give birth to them?” is not only a protest. It is also a confession. Moses knows that the people experience him as the one who carries them. They reject manna, and he feels it as a rejection of himself. And that is a very normal thing to happen in a nurturing relationship. Ask any parent who’s trying their best to meet their child’s needs.
This is also why the milk imagery is so powerful. Moses does not lactate. The Torah knows that. But the Torah is willing to place a male leader inside nursing imagery because nurture is not reducible to female biology. Milk is biological, but it is also symbolic. It represents responsive care, bodily availability, and the willingness to sustain another life before that life can sustain itself.
Hrdy’s argument belongs in this conversation because she makes a parallel claim about men: nurture is not foreign to the male body. Men may not gestate or nurse, but they are not biologically outside the world of care. When they are close enough, responsible enough, and present enough, they can become deeply attuned to the young. Their caregiving is not an imitation of motherhood. It is a human capacity expressed through male bodies. Moses becomes that kind of man. And he is not less of a leader because he feeds. He is not diminished because the Torah imagines him as a nurse. He is enlarged by it. His greatness is not only that he brings Torah down from the mountain. It is that he carries his people who are not yet ready to carry themselves.
That may be one of the overlooked lessons of milk and manna. Men do not always begin as nurturers. Many of us begin, like Moses, with doubt, resistance, awkwardness, or a narrow idea of what leadership requires. But need has a way of calling forth capacities we did not know we had. A hungry child can change a man. A dependent nation can change a leader. A daily act of care can become the path by which masculinity grows beyond provision and becomes presence.
Moses thought he was being asked to lead Israel out of Egypt. In the wilderness, he learned that he was also being asked to nurture them into becoming. That is not a lesser form of leadership. It may be the form that makes all the others possible.