Moshe: A Human Being, a Burning Bush

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 where his grave is. Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died, yet his eyes were not dimmed nor his energy abated. The Israelites grieved for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days, until the time of weeping and mourning was over.

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 He had then breathed the breath of life into the first man, so now He buries the greatest of men as the breath of life departs from him. There is a sense of closure: 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" - to Israel, granting them their taste of eternity. 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.

Adam and Eve may have been tempted to look back; Moses looked forward. But both stories are essentially about human mortality. The name Adam itself comes from the word adamah, "the earth." Indeed the same play on words appears in both cases. In that of Adam:

And the Lord God formed the man [ha-adam] from the dust of the ground [ha-adamah] and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

In the case of Moses:

Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than any man [ha-adam] on the face of the earth [ha-adamah].

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 for ever, 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. But we have within us immortal longings.

There never was nor ever will be another Moses, but his life was as eloquent as his teachings, and no less challenging. In him, every conventional wisdom about leadership is overturned.

We judge leaders by their success. Moses failed at almost every stage. When he first tried to secure freedom for the Israelites, Pharaoh responded by making their burdens worse. The Israelites complained. They continued to complain through the long years of wandering. They had no food; they had no water; the food was boring; the water was bitter; they wanted to go back. Forty days after receiving the greatest revelation in history, the people had made a golden calf. On the brink of entry into the land, the spies brought back a demoralising report, delaying their arrival by forty years. Korach challenged his leadership. His own brother and sister spoke negatively about him. He himself, for a momentary lapse in striking the rock, was forbidden to enter the promised land. In his final speeches he predicted that Israel, having received every blessing, would forget its vocation and suffer exile again. Can a life of failures be a success? In worldly terms, no. In spiritual terms, emphatically yes.

We expect a leader to have a sense of destiny, personal greatness. Leaders generally believe in themselves. Moses did not. When asked by God to lead the Jewish people, he refused time and again. "Who am I," he said, "that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" I am unworthy. The people will not believe in me. Yet it is this man, apparently so self-effacing, who takes hold of a fractious, recalcitrant people and turns it, within the space of a generation, into a nation capable of conquering a land, establishing a state, and co-authoring with God surely the most remarkable story of any group on earth. We have to remind ourselves that the man who delivered, in the Book of Devarim, the most eloquent and visionary speeches ever uttered, was the same person as the one who said, early in the Book of Shemot, "I am not a man of words, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue." Moses' greatness lay precisely in the fact that he did not believe in himself. He believed in the Caller and the call.

Moses was not Abraham, irenic, serene, composed, a man who lived far from the clamour of politics, private in his relationship with God. He belongs to a later stage of history, when Israel is no longer a family clan but a people, with all that implies in terms of potential conflict and strife. He is a man poised between earth and heaven, bringing God's word to the people and the people's word to God, at times wrestling with both, trying to persuade the people to obey, and God to forgive. Not for him a peaceful death like that of Abraham, "an old man and full of years." Instead Moses dies, "his eyes undimmed, his energy unabated." In Dylan Thomas' phrase, he does not go "gently into that dark night." Indeed the first half of the phrase explains the second half: Moses' energy was unabated because his eyes were undimmed, because he never lost the vision that had driven him since his encounter with God at the burning bush. He was a burning bush himself, 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"; in the case of Moses the word "entire" is missing). 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.

One thing above all else shines from this passage: Ha-ish Mosheh, "Moses, the man. This appellation occurs five times in the Torah (Ex. 11:3, Ex. 32:1, Ex. 32:23; Num. 12:3; Deut. 33:1). Moses was the greatest human being who ever lived, but he was and remained a human being. This is an unmistakable theme of these closing chapters, conveyed in several ways. "To this day no one knows where [Moses'] grave is" - a statement to discourage his burial site from becoming a place of pilgrimage or worship. "There on the mountain that you have climbed you will die and be gathered to your people, just as your brother Aaron died on Mount Hor and was gathered to his people. This is because both of you broke faith with me in the presence of the Israelites . . ." The repeated references to Moses's sin are reminders that "There is none on earth so righteous as to do only good and not sin" - not even the greatest. Long before the birth of other monotheisms, the Torah is setting out an axiom fundamental to its vision: if God is God then humanity can become humanity. Never may the boundaries be blurred.

Judaism came to birth in a world in which the dividing line between heaven and earth was anything but clear. The gods were semi-human. The epic heroes of humanity were semi-divine. It is precisely this lack of clarity against which Judaism is a sustained note of protest. The heroes of Judaism are not gods in human form. To the contrary, the absolute transcendence of God means the absolute responsibility of mankind. Precisely 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. (I once pointed out the difference between the synagogues and the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. The former - the Altneushul in Prague is one of the few surviving examples - were small, modest, humble; the latter magnificent, often taking centuries to complete. I suggested that in a Cathedral the worshippers are aware of the vastness of God and the smallness of mankind. In a shul, we sense the closeness of God and the greatness of mankind. I stand by that analysis). 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, more than anyone else, 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; and he is all the greater for it. He is human, gloriously human.

Maimonides writes, in his great declaration of human freewill: "Every human being [note: not just "every Jew"] may become righteous like Moses our teacher or wicked like Jeroboam." 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. Moses was the greatest of the prophets - and the prophets themselves lived among the people. They had no robes of office. They administered no sacred rites. Though God spoke to them, they spoke in words people could understand. They were not oracles, shamans, people wrapped in mystery who spoke in parables and enigmas that only the initiated could fathom. 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 also the most lucid I know, and ultimately the most humane. Lucid because it insists on a radical distinction between the infinite and finite, the eternal and ephemeral, God and us. 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 sacrifice to apologise 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. It is not a person or a place, but something altogether different. It is language, words, communication. In revelation God speaks to us. In prayer we speak to God. Moses' greatness was that he - the man who said, "I am not a man of words" - brought us the divine word: the written Torah which never ages, and the oral Torah through which it is made new and alive in every generation. Judaism is a religion of holy words, words that when internalised have the power to transform a "stiff-necked people" born in slavery into "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" dedicated to creating a society of gracious and collective freedom. Judaism is the ongoing conversation between the "I" of God and the "Thou" of mankind, in which each of us has a share.

It is that shared conversation that allows an Abraham, who calls himself "dust and ashes," to say to God "Shall the judge of all the earth not do justice?" 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." It is that ongoing dialectic of written and oral Torah - revelation and 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 law-giver, architect of a nation, military hero or even greatest of the prophets, but simply Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher. "Moses commanded us a Law, the heritage of the congregation of Jacob." Those words - no mere words but the foundational document, 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: of the man who failed yet succeeded, 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.