Moses the Man
“And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab as the Lord had said. He buried him in Moab, in the valley opposite Beth Peor, but to this day no one knows his burial place” (Deut. 34:5–6). With these words the life of the greatest leader Israel ever had draws to a close.
The Torah ends as it began, with an act of tenderness on the part of God. Just as, at the beginning, He had breathed the breath of life into the first man, so now at the close of the Mosaic books He buries the greatest of men as the breath of life departs from him. There is a kind of closure, a redemption, a tikkun: Adam and Eve had been prevented from eating from the Tree of Life, but Moses gave the Torah – “a tree of life to all who hold fast to it” (Prov. 3:18) – to Israel, granting them their taste of eternity. But there is also a sense of exile and incompletion: just as Adam and Eve had been forced to leave Eden, so Moses was prevented from entering the Promised Land.
Both stories are essentially about what it is to be human. The name Adam itself comes from the word adama, “the earth.” The same play on words appears in both cases. In that of Adam, “the Lord God formed the man [haadam] from the dust of the ground [haadama] and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7). In the case of Moses, “the man Moses was very humble, more humble than any man [haadam] on the face of the earth [haadama]” (Num. 12:3).
The parallel is striking. Though we are each in the “image and likeness” of God, we are also “dust of the earth,” embodied souls, part of the natural universe with its inexorable laws of growth, decay, and decline. We cannot live forever, and neither the first man, fashioned by God Himself, nor the greatest man, who saw God “face-to-face,” is an exception to the rule. For each of us there is a Jordan we will not cross, a journey we will not finish, a paradise we will not reach this side of the grave.
Each age has had its own image of Moses. For the more mystically inclined sages Moses was the man who ascended to heaven at the time of the giving of the Torah, where he had to contend with the angels who opposed the idea that this precious gift be given to mere mortals. God told Moses to answer them, which he did decisively: “Do angels work that they need a day of rest? Do they have parents that they need to be commanded to honour them? Do they have an evil inclination that they need to be told, ‘Do not commit adultery’?” (Shabbat 88a). This is the Moses who out-argues angels.
Other sages saw Moses as Rabbenu, “our teacher” – a scholar and master of the law, a role which they invested with astonishing authority. They went so far as to say that when Moses prayed for God to forgive the people for the Golden Calf, God replied, “I cannot, for I have already vowed, ‘One who sacrifices to any god shall be destroyed’ (Ex. 22:19), and I cannot revoke My vow.” Moses replied, “Master of the universe, have You not taught me the laws of annulling vows? One may not annul his own vow, but a sage may do so.” Moses thereupon annulled God’s vow.1Exodus Rabba 43:4.
For Philo, the first-century Jewish philosopher from Alexandria, Moses was a philosopher-king of the type depicted in Plato’s Republic.2Philo, The Life of Moses.
He governs the nation, organises its laws, institutes its rites, and conducts himself with dignity and honour. He is wise, stoical, and self-controlled. This is the Greek Moses, looking not unlike Michelangelo’s famous sculpture.
Yet what is so moving about the portrayal of Moses in the Torah is none of these. Rather, it is that he appears before us as quintessentially human. No religion has more deeply and systemically insisted on the absolute otherness of God and man, heaven and earth, the Infinite and finite. Other cultures have blurred the boundary, making some human beings seem godlike, perfect, infallible. There is such a tendency – marginal to be sure, but never entirely absent – within Jewish life itself: to see sages as saints, great scholars as angels, to gloss over their doubts and shortcomings and turn them into superhuman emblems of perfection. Tanakh, however, is greater than that. It tells us that God, who is never less than God, never asks us to be more than simply human.
Moses is a human being. We see him despair and want to die. We see him lose his temper. We see him on the brink of losing his faith in the people he has been called on to lead. We see him beg to be allowed to cross the Jordan and enter the land. Moses is the hero of those who wrestle with the world as it is and with people as they are, knowing that “it is not for you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it” (Mishna Avot 2:16).
The Torah insists that “to this day no one knows his burial place” (Deut. 34:6), to avoid his grave being made a place of pilgrimage or worship. It is all too easy to turn human beings, after their death, into saints and demigods. Moses does not exist in Judaism as an object of worship but as a role model for each of us to aspire to. He is the eternal symbol of a human being made great by what he strove for, not by what he actually achieved. The titles conferred by him in the Torah – “the man Moses” (Num. 12:3), “servant of the Lord” (Deut. 34:6), “a man of God” (Deut. 33:1) – are all the more impressive for their modesty. Moses continues to inspire.
The power of Moses’ story is precisely that it affirms our mortality. There are many explanations of why Moses was not allowed to enter the Promised Land, but one of the most persuasive is that of Franz Kafka:
He is on the track of Canaan all his life; it is incredible that he should see the land only when on the verge of death. This dying vision of it can only be intended to illustrate how incomplete a moment is human life; incomplete because a life like this could last for ever and still be nothing but a moment. Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life was too short but because it is a human life.3Franz Kafka, Diaries 1914–1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1965), 195–96.
Moses was not Abraham, irenic, serene, composed, a man who lived far from the clamour of politics, private in his relationship with God. He belonged to a later stage of history, when Israel was no longer a family clan but a people, with all that implies in terms of potential conflict and strife. He was a man poised between earth and heaven, bringing God’s word to the people and the people’s word to God, often wrestling with both, trying to persuade the people to obey and God to forgive.
Not only did Moses encounter God in a burning bush; he was a burning bush, aflame with a passion for justice, who (unlike Aaron, his brother) preferred principle to compromise. Rashi notes that the mourning for Aaron was more widespread than for Moses (of Aaron it says, “The entire house of Israel grieved” [Num. 20:29]; in the case of Moses the word “entire” is missing [Deut. 34:8]). The reason is that Aaron was a man of peace; Moses was a man of truth. We love peace, but truth is sometimes hard to bear. People of truth have enemies as well as friends.
Moses was the greatest Jew who ever lived, but he was and remained a human being. This is an unmistakable theme of these closing chapters. The Torah is intimating an axiom fundamental to its vision: if God is God then humanity can become humanity. Never may the boundaries be blurred. The heroes of Judaism are not gods in human form. To the contrary, the absolute transcendence of God means the absolute responsibility of mankind.
In Judaism more than any other faith in history, the human person reaches its full stature, dignity, and freedom. We are not tainted with original sin. We are not bidden to total submission. These are honourable ways of seeing the human condition, but they are not the Jewish way. That is why Judaism was and always will be a distinctive voice in the conversation of mankind.
Ha’ish Moshe: Moses, mortal, fallible, full of doubts about himself, often frustrated, occasionally angry, once falling into an abyss of despair – that is the Moses who set his seal on the people he led to freedom, permanently enlarging their horizons of aspiration. The Moses we meet in the Torah is not a mythical figure, an epic hero, an archetype, his blemishes airbrushed away to turn him into an object of adoration. He is human – gloriously human.
Maimonides writes, in his great declaration of human free will: “Every human being [note: not just “every Jew”] may become righteous like Moses our teacher or wicked like Jeroboam” (emphasis added).5Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva 5:2.
Such an assertion, made of any other founder of any other faith, would sound absurd, but of Moses it does not sound absurd. His very humanity brings him close and summons us to greatness. The clear, absolute, ontological boundary between heaven and earth means that God never asks humanity to be more or less than human.
This is an austere view of the world but it is also the most lucid I know, and ultimately the most humane. It is the most lucid because it insists on a radical distinction between the infinite and finite, the eternal and ephemeral, God and us. It is the most humane because it invests each of us, equally, with dignity sub specie aeternitatis. We are, all of us, the image and likeness of God. We need no intermediary to speak to God. We need no priest or divine intercessor to be forgiven by God. We are each the son or daughter of God.
The distance between us and God may be infinite, but there is a bridge across the abyss, namely, language, words, communication. In revelation God speaks to us. In prayer we speak to God. It is that shared conversation that allows an Abraham, who calls himself “dust and ashes” (Gen. 18:27), to say to God, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” (18:25). It is that possibility of dialogue that allows Moses to say, “But now, please forgive their sin – but if not, then blot me out of the book You have written” (Ex. 32:32). It is that ongoing dialectic of Written and Oral Torah – divine word and human interpretation – that has embraced patriarchs and prophets, sages and scribes, poets and philosophers, commentators and codifiers, and has not ceased from Moses’ day to ours.
Not wrongly, therefore, did Jewish tradition, when it sought to accord Moses the highest honour, call him not Moses the liberator, the lawgiver, architect of a nation, military hero, or even greatest of the prophets, but simply Moshe Rabbenu, Moses our teacher. “Moses commanded us the Torah, an inheritance of the congregation of Jacob” (Deut. 33:4). Those words – no mere words but the covenantal text shaping the pattern of Jewish life and the structure of Jewish history – are in every generation the link between us and heaven: never broken, never annulled, never lost, never old. God may “hide His face” but He never withdraws His word.
As we take our leave of Moses, and he of us, the picture we have is indelible: it is a picture of the man who came close to despair yet left an immortal legacy of hope, who died without finishing his journey yet who has been with the Jewish people on its journeys ever since. It is his very humanity that shines forth from the pages of the Torah, sometimes with such radiance that we are afraid to look, but always and only a mortal and fallible human being, a medium through whom God spoke, an emissary through whom God acted, reminding us eternally that though we too are only mortal, we too can achieve greatness to the extent that we allow the presence of God to flow through us, His word guiding us, His breath giving us life.