Mortality
In the whole of Midrash there is nothing to match, for drama and tragic depth, the extraordinary cycle of rabbinic comments on the death of Moses. Here, as nowhere else, rabbinic Judaism comes close to the great tragedies of ancient Greece, or the powerful prose of the book of Job.
In the Torah itself, the account of Moses’ death is marked more by what is left unsaid than by what is said. Early in the book of Deuteronomy there is a brief reference to Moses’ anguish that he would not be allowed to enter the land:
I pleaded with the Lord at that time, saying, “O Lord God…let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan….” But the Lord was angry with me on your account and would not listen to me. The Lord said to me, “Enough! Never speak to Me of this matter again.” (Deut. 3:23–26)
So Moses inducted Joshua as his successor. Then came his final moments, as God showed him the land across the Jordan while he stood on Mount Nebo, close yet heartbreakingly distant. Finally we read his obituary: “So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab as the Lord had said. He buried him…in the valley…to this day no one knows his burial place” (Deut. 34:5–6).
The poignancy is almost unbearable, all the more so for being so understated. Even the greatest of human beings is mortal. All people have a Jordan they will not cross, a future they may glimpse from afar but will not live to see. Moses does not, like Abraham, grow old gracefully. He is still full of energy, his “strength unabated” (Deut. 34:7). God Himself attends to the funeral. We see God here as we saw Him at the beginning of the human story – tender, close, intimate, gentle. Yet the decree is inexorable. To be human is one day to die. Eternity belongs to God alone.
This simple narrative became high drama in the rabbinic literature. It is impossible here to give more than a taste of the long narrative told by the sages in various midrashim, eventually turned into an entire book known as Petirat Moshe, “The Death of Moses.” Here, though, are some fragments from Deuteronomy Rabba:
Ten times it was decreed that Moses should not enter the land of Israel.... Moses, however, made light of this, saying: “Israel committed great sins many times, but whenever I prayed for them, God immediately answered my prayer...seeing that I have not sinned from my youth, does it not stand to reason that when I pray on my own behalf, God should answer my prayer?”
When God saw that Moses was making light of the matter...He swore by His great name that Moses should not enter the land of Israel...
When Moses saw that the decree against him had been sealed, he began to fast and drew a circle and stood within it and said, “I will not move from here until You annul the decree…”
What did God do? At that moment He had it proclaimed in every gate of every heaven and in every court that they should not receive Moses’ prayer, nor bring it before Him, because the decree against him had been sealed...
Moses said to God, “Master of the universe, You know the labour and the pains I devoted to making Israel believe Your name...” [but his prayer was not answered]...
Then Moses said to God, “Master of the universe, if You will not bring me into the land of Israel, leave me in this world so that I may live and not die.” God replied to Moses, “If I do not make you die in this world, how can I bring you back to life in the World to Come?”...
At that hour God said to [the angel] Gabriel, “Gabriel, go forth and bring Moses’ soul.” Gabriel however replied, “Master of the universe, how can I witness the death of him who is equal to sixty myriads, and how can I behave harshly to one who possesses such qualities?”
Then God said to [the angel] Michael, “Go forth and bring Moses’ soul.” Michael however replied, “Master of the universe, I was his teacher and he was my pupil, and I cannot therefore witness his death...”
Then God kissed Moses and took away his soul with a kiss of the mouth, and God (as it were) wept, saying, “Who will rise up for Me against the evildoers? Who will stand up for Me against the workers of iniquity?”... The heavens wept, saying, “The godly man is perished out of the earth.”1An extensive selection and translation can be found in Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Ravnitzky, The Book of Legends, trans. William Braude (New York: Schocken, 1992), 101–5.
These are fragments of an anguished drama. Moses begs to be allowed to live – if not across the Jordan, then in the desert; if not as a teacher, then as a disciple; if not as a human being then “as one of the beasts of the field.” The heavens shake and the earth trembles with the force of his prayer, but to no avail. Moses is human, and even the greatest human must die. Yet the very angels refuse God’s request that they bring Him Moses’ soul. Eventually God knows that it must be He who does it – and He does it “with a kiss,” the rabbinic phrase for a serene death. Even God weeps that such a man must die, yet such is the condition of life under the heavens. All that is physical must decline and decay; life on earth is transitory. To wish it otherwise is to will the impossible.
The midrash does not underplay the tragedy of death, despite the eternity of the soul and its life in the World to Come. The sages knew that death is part of life and what makes us human.
If we lived forever, life itself would have no shape, no edge, no urgency, no compelling purpose. We would not act. For anything we wished to do, there would always be time in the future. We would leave our children, and be left by our parents, no space to be ourselves, to write our own chapter in the human story. The very fact of our mortality means that we have our moment on the stage of history, when everything depends on us. Our parents are already old or middle-aged; our children are too young. That is when we give to both, our parents by our care, our children by our nurture, for it is our turn to achieve full strength, to exercise the range and scope of our powers and make our unique contribution. Space is what our parents give us and what we give our children – and space is a product of time. If we did not vacate our place, what would we confer on our children but an endless sense of belatedness, of arriving on the scene too late?
If we lived forever, would we not know love, for the very power of love – like a tree in blossom, a flower in bloom – is tied to the knowledge that its moment is all too brief and that soon it too will perish. Love lives in its vulnerability. It is our deepest longing for timelessness in the midst of time. It transfigures us precisely because we know we cannot hold on to it. Lover and beloved will age; first one then the other will die. So we hold on to one another, hoping that the intensity of our longing and belonging will still the moment, knowing that even if it does not, at least we will have known that “love is as strong as death” (Song 8:6).
If we lived forever, we would not create – for the deepest source of the creative urge is the desire to make something that will live on after us, that will have the immortality we lack. Hence those great lines of Shakespeare where he speaks of the power of poetry to defeat death and the loss of beauty and love:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.2Shakespeare, Sonnet 18.
Death gives meaning to life as a frame gives shape to a picture, as the last page gives structure to a story, as the closing chord gives form to the symphony. The very knowledge that we will not live forever, that we are here for all too short a time, that the world will continue after us, charges us with our most compelling energies. We have dreams but we know they will not all be fulfilled. Therefore we must choose and plan and act. We become creators of the single most consequential work of art we will ever execute – our life itself. We are the co-author and central character of our story – and because it is finite, life is capable of having a story-like structure. A novel that never ends is not a story. The ending itself – happy, tragic, serene, unfulfilled – is what gives the whole its colour and tone. That is why we read stories, watch films and plays. They allow us momentarily to experience life as art, to step out of time the better to understand time.
We are mortal. But we have immortal longings. That is the tension resolved by R. Tarfon’s great imperative: “It is not for you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it” (Mishna Avot 2:16).
We live on because the story of which we are a part is itself immortal. The world did not begin with us, nor will it end with our departure. We belong to a larger narrative, the story of a people who, long ago in the days of Abraham and Sarah, set out on a journey to a land of promise and a distantly glimpsed, not-yet-reached, vision of redemption.
The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges has a poem, “Limits,” in which he reflects on the poignancy of finitude, of the knowledge that we do not know when our life will end:
Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
there must be one (which, I am not sure)
that I by now have walked for the last time
without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone
who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
woven into the texture of this life.
If there is a limit to all things and a measure
and a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
who will tell us to whom in this house
we without knowing it have said farewell?3Jorge Luis Borges, “Limits” (trans. Alastair Reid; see The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Cecilia Vicuňa and Ernesto Livon-Grosman [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 205).
All this is by way of prelude to one of the most paradoxical statements about death, given by the early-second-century sage R. Meir. To understand it, we must recall that in ancient Hebrew, dalet [=d] and tav [=t] were not hard consonants as they are for most speakers today. They were soft sounds – something like th. Hence the words me’od (“very”) and mavet (“death”) sounded far more alike than they do now. Playing on this similarity, R. Meir made a wordplay of far-reaching significance: “And God saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good [tov me’od]. This means, ‘And behold death was good [tov mavet].’”4Genesis Rabba 9:5.
This brief comment transforms our understanding of the Torah’s account of humanity. Death was not a punishment brought about by the sin of the first human beings. It is, as Maimonides says in Guide for the Perplexed, the very condition of our existence as physical beings in a material world. To be physical means to be subject to decay and eventual oblivion.
To be sure, death is not the end. Something of us – the soul – endures. There is eternal life. But life in the World to Come, without a body, without wants, needs, desires, dreams, hopes, fears, is so unlike the one we experience here on earth that we cannot imagine it, nor even in any straightforward sense look forward to it. Though we know all the pain of bodily existence and though we know that one day our souls will be “bound in the bond of eternal life,” yet we cling to this life as if it were all, and we are not wrong to do so. Eternity, serenity, being bathed in the radiance of God transcend all we know or can ever know this side of the grave. Yet we sense that the very transience of this life gives it its vividness, the fragility of beauty which is the beauty of fragility.
So the Torah begins and ends with death. It begins with the decree of death when, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve chose the pleasures of sight and touch and taste over those of the soul. It ends with the actuality of death when Moses, the hero of the Torah’s central narrative, dies without crossing the Jordan and setting foot in the land to which he spent his life as a leader leading others.
In both cases we are conscious of the beyond: the beyond of Eden, paradise lost, and the beyond of the Promised Land, paradise not yet reached. These two define the human condition for us as individuals, and for Homo sapiens as a species. We live in the between, the liminal space between two eternities, the world of harmony that once was and the age of harmony that will be but is not yet. The world we inhabit is fissured and fractured by pain, conflict, violence, evil, hopes dashed, dreams unfulfilled, ideals disappointed, desires unsatisfied. Yet it remains glorious because it is never uneventful or predictable, transfiguring because of the power of love and art and goodness to capture within its finite frame signals of transcendence. No theistic religion has argued as consistently as Judaism for the presence of God and truth and beauty here, in this world, not just the next; in time, not just eternity; in life, not death and the World to Come.
That is why Moses must fight death and prefer life on earth to life among the ministering angels amid the deathless glory of heaven. The Moses we know – the man who fought injustice and slavery, who stood up against the most powerful empire of the ancient world, who more than any other “wrestled with God and with men” (Gen. 32:29) – was the figure who gave ultimate dignity to this world, not the next. Moses was not a man prepared to make his peace with the wrongs of his time in the knowledge that somewhere else, in some other order of existence, there is a world of perfect justice. “Do not go gentle into that dark night,” wrote Dylan Thomas. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”5“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” in The Poems of Dylan Thomas, ed. John Goodby (New York: New Directions, 2003), 239.
Those words could not have been said of Abraham or Isaac or Jacob. But they epitomise Moses. And to be a Jew is to be a disciple of Moses.
Yet Moses must lose the fight, his life an unfinished symphony. For R. Tarfon was right – “It is not for you to complete the task.” Just as we did not begin the story we inherit, so we will leave it in God’s time to those who are our heirs. To have had a part in it, to spend our hour on the stage, faithful to those who came before us and preparing those who will follow us to play their role in moving humanity one more step closer to redemption – that is life at its highest, knowing that we will not see the full fruits of our labours but knowing that what we have planted, others will reap, and what we have begun others will complete.
That bond of the generations we call covenant – the ethical connection between past and future – is what rescues life from tragedy, death from having the final word.