Moses was the greatest leader of our history, and arguably the greatest leader of any people’s history. But he had a very unusual backstory: He was raised not amongst his Jewish brethren, but in the king’s palace as the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, reared on the lap of one of our people’s most heinous enemies. How did Moses become the leader and savior of the Jewish people despite being raised in a completely Egyptian environment? More specifically, what was the pivotal moment that made Moses the person he became?

Here’s my speculation.

The very first episode that the Torah relates to us about Moses is that he went out and saw the suffering of his brethren and he saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man. The verse (Ex. 2:12) describes how Moses reacted: “he turned to and fro and saw that there was no man and he struck the Egyptian and buried him in the sand.” On a simple level this means that Moses killed the Egyptian man who was perpetrating a crime against the defenseless Hebrew slave after ascertaining that there were no witnesses to the crime.

Many years ago I heard a novel interpretation of this verse:

Moses was a conflicted man. His pedigree was Jewish, he was, after all, the grandson of Levi and the great-grandson of Jacob. But his upbringing was entirely Egyptian. Moses had dual identities. He was half Hebrew and half Egyptian and he straddled these two worlds.

The first thing the Torah tells us about Moses is the time where he has to choose between these two identities: He turned to the right and he turned to the left, he looked at his Jewish identity and he looked at his Egyptian identity, and he saw that there is no man. You cannot be both an Egyptian and a Hebrew. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You must make a choice.

What did Moses do? He struck the Egyptian and buried him in the sand. He slayed his internal Egyptian identity and buried it in the sand. And he paid a heavy price: He had to face trial, he had to flee, and he forfeited the trappings of luxury and power as a prince in Pharaoh’s court. Moses made a choice. He chose to forever be a Hebrew come what may. He vacillated no longer.

There are many aspects of Moses’s storyline that can be informative and relevant to us. But this first episode of Moses’s life, this pivotal inflection point where he had to make a choice which identity to embrace, is something that all of us must make.

We all live at the crossroads of our existing self and our idealized self. Each one of us knows how great we can become; how powerful our latent abilities are, and how vast our potential is. That idealized self is something that we theoretically want and really hope we could get one day.

Moses shows us how to actually get it. You look to and fro, you look at your dual conflicting identities and you make a choice. It’s only if we seize our destiny and make that tough choice that we can unlock our greatness. Wanting it is wonderful but wanting something will not actualize it. You have to choose which version of yourself you want and then you slay the Egyptian, bury it in the sand, and forget about it forever.

With that choice Moses began a trajectory that led him to the top of Mount Sinai and to the greatest heights ever reached by a man. If we want to access our own Sinai and achieve our own potential we must make the choice.