Wisdom Is Not Enough
[I]t is not the earth I will miss/it is you I will miss.
Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses whom the LORD singled out, face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10).
Moses went to the archangel of the Divine Presence and said, “Seek mercy for me, that I not die.” The angel said to him, “My master, Moses, why the exertion? This is what I have heard from behind the curtain: That your prayer is not heard on this matter.”
Midrash Tanchuma, Va’etchanan 6:1
The Greek philosophical tradition holds that wisdom liberates us from fear of death. If the soul is immortal and the body is a prison-house—as Platonic tradition holds—then one should be not just indifferent to death, but excited to die. According to this line of thinking, dying well and honorably matter more than living with longevity. Even for the materialist Epicurus, there is no reason to worry about death, “For where I am, death is not, and where death is, I am not.”
One can find similar teachings in Eastern traditions: Enlightenment frees us from the illusion of ego, and thus from our grasping attachment to this life. In Jewish tradition, the exemplar of the ascetic ideal is Rabbi Akiva who rejoices in his ability to fulfill the verse, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your soul and all your heart and all your might,” as he is being flayed alive by the Roman army.
Yet the Torah presents Moses both as a paragon of wisdom and as someone who tried with all his power not to die. Why? Why, if Moses is so wise, is he so adamant to live, even when he knows his time is up? The Midrash presents Moses as someone who left no stone unturned in his attempt to persuade God to let him escape death. It presents him not as someone who accepted that he had lived a good, full life, but as someone who tried to undo God’s verdict.
We tend to make Moses’s quarrel with God about his desire to enter the Promised Land, but I’m convinced that was just a procrastination tactic. Sure, the Land is great, but Moses is using it as a pretext to put off dying altogether.
But, wait. Doesn’t Moses express a death wish earlier in the story, when he is fed-up with the people? Doesn’t Moses voluntarily offer to sacrifice his own life in place of the people, after the sin of the golden calf? What’s going on? Is Moses a Samurai warrior or is he an Archilochus (the Greek poet who preferred to lose his shield and live than die fighting)?
I tend to think Moses was bluffing all the times he asked to die. He talked a big game to God, but inside he was scared.
I can think of three interpretive possibilities:
1) The Torah wants us to see that even Moses was not exempt from the human condition, that no amount of prophecy or seeing God “face to face” can take away the challenging burdens of existence. Perhaps prophecy makes life more challenging, not less, contra the self-help industry.
2) The Torah wants us to see that wisdom is connected to aspiration, not achievement. Moses’s desire to live another day means Moses never considered himself “done.” We are never done. There is no summit. Wisdom is the climb from somewhere, not the view from nowhere.
3) The Straussian reading: Moses accepts that he must die, but doesn’t want to appear accepting lest the people think that he is happy to be leaving them behind for something better.
Perhaps the fact that Moses doesn’t want to die is connected to the Torah’s teaching that he attained an unprecedented and inimitable level of intimacy with God. If Moses dies, the text implies, this level will never be available ever again. Won’t the people be lost if they lack a living leader who knows God “face to face”?
But God is the one who insists that Moses must die, which means that God is insisting that, in fact, we do not need to live in a world in which God is seen or known “face to face.”
Secularism, as it were, begins the moment Moses dies. And yet it is God who declares that the occlusion of God’s face is par for the course, a necessary precondition for entry into the land.
The story is thus about control. Learning to be in relationship with God without a supremely wise prophet to mediate will be difficult and confusing. But relying on the same prophet for too long will stunt our growth and obstruct our independence. Even perfect leaders need term limits. This is the radical subtext of the Torah’s concluding words: profound wisdom is insufficient; knowing God face to face was great for Moses, but is a red herring for us. The Torah isn’t trying to make us feel bad that Moses is unsurpassed in spiritual ability. On the contrary: Moses had what it took to get us up to the Promised Land, but not into it. We may not have his wisdom or spiritual clarity, but we have other gifts.
Abraham’s quest begins with the search for an alternative to idolatry. The Torah ends by reminding us not to idolize our own tradition, not to make a graven image of spiritual experience, a monument of our leaders, a totem of our text, a fetish of wisdom, an effigy of the law, an icon of land. And because we are always just short of internalizing this lesson, we must begin again.
Chazak Chazak V’nitchazek
Shabbat Shalom, Chag Sameach,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
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