Moses Didn’t Want to Die

In this week’s Torah reading, God instructs Moses that the time has come for him to die—in fact, He says this more than once. The reading opens with Moses relating that “the Lord said to me, ‘You will not go across the Jordan’” (Deuteronomy 31:2). A little later, the Torah reports that, “The Lord said to Moses, ‘The time has come for you to die’” (31:14). If that were not enough, God tells him yet again, “Now you will sleep with your fathers” (Deut 31:16). In fact, the Rabbis counted no fewer than ten passages in the Torah (going back as far as Num 27:12) in which God tells Moses of his impending death.

 

Why did Moses need all these different summonses? Was he afraid of dying? He himself recounts the reason for his reluctance to die. He had a burning desire to complete his mission, the one that he had been seeking to fulfill for forty years: to lead the people of Israel across the Jordan and into the land sworn to their ancestors. “I begged of the Lord at that time, saying, ‘O Lord God…Let me cross over, I pray, to see the good land beyond the Jordan’” (Deut 3:25), but God turned down his request: “You shall not cross over the Jordan” (Deut 3:27).

 

To our rabbis, the formulation “You shall not cross over the Jordan” seemed to contain a possible loophole, and Moses, no doubt an expert in the ways of legal exactitude, immediately seized upon it. According to an ancient midrash, he said to God, “Fine! I won’t cross the Jordan. But can you at least turn me into a bird, so that I can fly over the river and see the land from the other side?” God said no. Another time, Moses said: “Well then, please make me into a fish, so that I can swim in the Jordan as far as the other bank and in that way complete my mission.” Again God said no.

 

Frustrated by the limits imposed by his own mortality, Moses is said to have gone (how or when is not specified) to the city of Hebron, where not only were Abraham and Sarah, Rebekah and Isaac, and Israel’s other ancestors buried, but Adam and Eve as well. “I must speak with Adam,” Moses said upon his arrival. Now, it is well known that the dead are always reluctant to be awakened, and Adam was no exception. But Moses was quite insistent; at last, an angry Adam appeared before him.

 

“How could you have done what you did in the Garden of Eden?” Moses asked. “Because of your disobedience in eating from the forbidden tree, all humans are sentenced to die.” Adam, despite his ill humor, merely laughed. “You are allegedly the one who brought the Torah down from the mountain and gave it to the people of Israel?” “Yes,” Moses replied. “And you know that the Torah itself was created two thousand years before God created the world?” “Of course,” Moses said. “Well then, look inside the Torah that you brought down, in the book of Numbers [chapter 19:14]. What does it say there? ‘This is the procedure when a man dies inside a tent.’ So you see, I am not responsible for human mortality; it was already decided that humans were to die two thousand years before I was created.”

 

Thus reproved, Moses at last accepted his fate. God did, however, allow Moses to have his last wish fulfilled, at least in one sense. He instructed Moses to climb to the top of Mount Nebo. “And the Lord showed him all the land, Gilead as far as Dan, all of Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah stretching out to the far sea, and the Negeb and the Plain, the valley of Jericho, city of the palms, as far as Zoar. And the Lord said to him, ‘This is the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob’” (Deut 34:1-3).

 

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The Shabbat that comes just before Yom Kippur is known as Shabbat Shuvah, because of the first word of this week’s haftarah from the prophet Hosea, “Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have fallen because of your sin.”

Actually, the usual translation of that first word shuvah as “Return” may be right, but not necessarily. Sometimes this verbal root can simply mean “turn” in the sense of a change in direction, but not necessarily a returning to a place you’ve been to before. (Jews who previously had no connection to their religion but then suddenly seek to establish one are called ba‘alei teshuvah, but in their case they are by definition not returning to some previous state, but switching direction to something entirely new.)

I like to think this difference is important, especially with regard to Yom Kippur. In the ten days from Rosh ha-Shanah to Yom Kippur, Jews are commanded to think seriously about their lives and the ways in which the continuation of Hosea’s words may apply to them, “for you have fallen because of your sin.” This is a divine demand for a change in direction, but one that may in fact be entirely new as well.

Shanah tovah, ḥatimah tovah!