Va'Etchanan: A vision of the land

From Rabbi Maya Zinkow, "VaEt'chanan: Al HaMar VeHamatok" at https://truah.org/resources/maya-zinkow-vaetchanan-moraltorah_2024_/
If we look carefully at the interaction, we see that Moses specifically uses the word “good” twice in his request. Like many of us, Moses wishes to see “the good land,” but not its imperfections. And who can blame him? Knowing he won’t experience the Land of Israel himself, Moses wants to die with a dreamscape in his mind’s eye, skipping over the nightmares that surely await his people on the other side of the river, those horrors that any human being might find painful to gaze at: bloody wars, unrelenting desert landscape, and — especially — the sacrifices and painful choices sure to be made in the building of a nation. God’s response to Moses’ request is spoken in a punishing tone: “Enough!” God says, “Never speak to Me of this matter again” (Deuteronomy 3:26). The harshness is, perhaps, a response to Moses’ attempt to avoid the bad as he seeks to see the good. The midrash in Sifrei Bamidbar (135:1) teaches that God “showed Moses the distant as if it were near; the concealed, as if it were revealed — all that is called ‘Eretz Yisrael.’” That is to say, as Rashi summarizes: “I will let you see the whole of it,” not just the good of it.
As I prepare to fly home from a summer in Jerusalem, I am contemplating just how to bring back a report of the whole of it: the chilling account of October 7 from a family member of multiple hostages — her trauma and her resilience; the lived reality of Palestinians fighting relentless demolitions in Umm al-Khair under the weight of occupation — their pain and their resolve; the perspective of a friend in an intelligence unit making crucial decisions about targets in Gaza; the depth of Hamas’s evil and the hell of Gazan civilian life; the stickers with a message of peace and coexistence seen around the city from activists who love this country — the hope they give me, and the despair prompted when I see a man scratching them off a lamppost with his house keys.
While it all feels impossible to hold at once, it is a comfort to imagine God showing Moses the distant as if near, the concealed as if revealed, inviting him to see past the simple good and into the complexity. We are not just meant to see the good land, but the whole of it. In every generation, we are called upon to gaze about to the west, the north, the south, and the east; to see even what is hard to look at and cry: eichah! And when we witness injustice, bitterness, and badness, we are meant to take up the sacred task of picking up the shattered pieces of destruction and building something good, building something worth gazing upon.

From Ellen Dannen, "Moses Died with a Promised Land" at https://www.reconstructingjudaism.org/dvar-torah/moses-died-promised-land/
I see Moses. I see a person who has been saddened by the events of life. The people he has lived among have failed to understand him. The most important events of his life have been ones they were unable or unwilling to take part in, which they deprecated. Life asked the impossible of him—walk out from everything you are and know and go into a place of uncertainty and discomfort and spend your life there guided by the intangible.
But there is another side to this Moses who died outside the Land. Moses died possessed of and by the promised land. He did not reach it, but it was still there in his last moments, there to be seen with his last gaze.
What do we know of the history of the Hebrews after they entered their promised land? They remained fractious, quarrelsome, difficult, faithless. Their entry into the land became only an entry to a place to continue to be as they were.
Moses, only Moses, died with a promised land.