How Am I Not Myself?

On Aging in Vayeilech

[Moses] said to them: I am now one hundred and twenty years old, I can no longer come and go. Moreover, the Lord has said to me, “You shall not go across yonder Jordan.” (Deuteronomy 31:2)

I can no longer come and go — One might think that this was because his physical strength failed him! Scripture, however, states (Deuteronomy 34:7) “His eye was not dim nor his natural force abated!” What then is the meaning of I cannot? It means: “I am not permitted” because the power is being taken from me and given to Joshua. — Another explanation: “I can no more take the lead in the matter of the Law”; this teaches us that the traditions and the well-springs of wisdom were stopped up for him.

Moses gives two reasons in this week’s parasha, Vayeilech, that he can’t continue leading the people, a temporal limit and a spatial limit. First, he is old. Second, God has decreed that he cannot enter the Promised Land. Wouldn’t one reason suffice? Moses might have given a secular argument: “I’m weary, and besides, who wants gerontocracy?” On the other side, he might have skipped mention of his age altogether. After all, if God can take the Israelites out of Egypt and feed them in the wilderness, surely he can sustain Moses well beyond 120 years. Should Moses’s old age really be a count against him, independent of the decree that he not enter the Land?

Let us ask the question this way: Had the people, for some reason, decided to remain nomads, never entering Eretz Yisrael, would Moses, then, have been allowed to lead them for millennia? I suspect not. Thus, Moses gives two reasons for his need to step down. One is general—even great people need to pass the baton. Two is specific—the mere entry of Moses into the land, if only to lead for one more year, and then hand over the keys to Joshua, would undermine something. Practically, it would deprive Joshua of the needed independence to lead in a new place without the shadow of Moses hanging over him. Metaphysically, it would imply that Moses has completed his work, has arrived. But that would be a bad model for leadership, insofar as leaders should be willing to take on ambitious projects irrespective of whether they can finish the work or enjoy the dividends in their lifetimes.

Rashi suggests that Moses’s interpretive wellsprings have dried up. The point is not Moses’s physiological condition—he is too frail to move—but some kind of mental block that is placed upon him as a way of limiting his power. I once met a great and famous philosopher who was old and past his prime. His area of expertise was the concept of personal identity—to what being does the name “Zohar Atkins” refer? When I asked him questions about his work his responses were muted and difficult to parse. Maybe his mind was still sharp, but he was not the person I expected to meet based upon his work, and yet he was the same person. Who is Moses stripped of his gifts? Is he still Moses? Should we say that a Moses who can no longer paskan, giving over the Law, is not “the real Moses?” Was Moses the baby or Moses the teen not “the real Moses?” What is the self? The death of Moses—dramatized by Rashi as a decline—raises the question about what it means to step down not just from our formal roles but from the informal dynamics in which we find ourselves expressing certain personae. What happens to us when we can no longer put on a certain face? Are we still ourselves, less ourselves, more ourselves, or just different?

If you were to ask the author of your favorite book about his or her intention in writing it would the response be satisfying? Imagine I could summon Kafka’s ghost and ask him about every line in The Metamorphosis. Perhaps he would be as inarticulate or misleading as an athlete explaining how he scored the winning basketball shot. Maybe Kafka would tell me that he feels violated I’m even reading him—after all, he told Max Brod to burn his works. Or maybe Kafka would just say “I’ve put my whole being into my work and have nothing left to say, nothing to add.”

When Moses’s wellsprings dry up, I imagine that Moses becomes a kind of outsider to himself, no longer able to be an authority on his own intent or vision.

There is a famous Midrash that imagines Moses in the back of Rabbi Akiva’s classroom, totally disoriented. Which Moses is it? Is it the Moses who sees God face to face or is it the ghost of Moses, a shadow of a man who has become epochally senile? Perhaps both can be true at once. Both readings are poignant. In any case, we learn from Moses that aging is hard and that even great people—perhaps, even more so than normies—have a hard time with it.

Why does Moses single out his inability to “go out and come” as the reason for his retirement? According to Leon Kass, the dignity of the human being is to be found in its ability to move, to self-direct, and to change location. The sun is not as great as man, because the sun is fixed in the sky, but Adam and Eve can leave the garden, Abraham can leave Ur Kasdim, the Israelites can go down to and leave Egypt. Death, which is a form of rest and static, begins with the loss of locomotion, literally and metaphorically, the inability to change, to journey. Death is a form of hardening. And when we become too rigid, incapable of changing our minds and hearts, we die.

Yom Kippur which is the day of Atonement is also a day of heightened consciousness of death. The realization that if we don’t change our ways we are already dead, the realization that death deprives us of our ability to revise ourselves, is one way to motivate teshuva, movement. On Yom Kippur we die so as to discover the dignity of locomotion, the gift of self-direction.

Moses is doubly deprived. He is deprived of both the Promised land (more space) and immortality (more time). Yet his double deprivation is also a sign that limitation is fundamentally good—good for us and good for the world. A lack of limits would mean a lack of movement, a lack of change, a lack of drive. Moses would be like the earth, rather than the being who moves upon it. Yet we are a part of the earth, too, our name taken from Adama. We come from dust and return to it.

Moses tells us that he cannot enter the Land because he is too old. Is he right? Or is this just a coping mechanism, helping him avoid the real reason he can’t enter, namely, that God has decreed it so? Moses emphasizes I cannot enter first, but then adds, God said…thou shalt not. Are we dealing with a cannot, a failure of capacity, or a shall not, a circumscription of a perfectly healthy capacity? Or perhaps the two merge—death and aging are something that happen to us whether we accept them and something that we can accept and voluntarily undergo. For Heidegger, an authentic life is one that faces death resolutely, that is a “being towards death” rather than a running away. If Heidegger is right, then Yom Kippur, coupled with the reading of Vayeilech, offers us an opportunity to acknowledge our mortality, our finitude, and to ask ourselves, what do we care about, what will we do with our limited time on earth, how will we move, and to where, while our minds, hearts, and limbs allow us?

Shabbat Shalom and Gamar Chatima Tova,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh