The loneliness of Moses’ death was not unique

AT the end of the Torah Moses dies.

His time had come.

It’s that simple.

The Torah records, “his eye had not dimmed and his vigor had not diminished” (34:7).

Moses did not die of illness or incapacity. He reached 120 years, his task in life was finished, and he died.

Right before that, Moses ascended from the plains of Moab to the summit of Mount Nebo and G-d showed Moses the land that he so desired to enter, but could not.

Moses gazed over the entire Land of Israel, “the Gilead as far as Dan [in the north]; all of Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim and Manasseh; the entire land of Judah as far as the western sea; the Negev and the Plain — the valley of Jericho, city of date palms — as far as Zoar” (34:1-3).

Moses died on Mt. Nebo.

G-d Himself buried Moses, or, according to another opinion in the Talmud, Moses buried himself.

Either way, no one was there.

“And no one knows his burial place to this day” (34:6). Therefore, Moses’ tomb could not become a shrine for the worship of Moses — for idolatry.

It was a risk. Moses liberated the people from Egypt, Moses delivered the Torah, Moses healed rifts within the people and adjudicated countless individual disputes, Moses defended the Jewish people against G-d’s anger for the people’s backsliding, Moses led the people for 40 years in the desert.

Moses was as outsized a figure as ever existed.

Moses was so important to the Jewish people that his grave could have become a place where everything he taught, based on the oneness and omnipotence of G-d, could be subverted.

Moses’ death surely seems unique.

It wasn’t.

MOSES died alone.

But everyone dies alone.

As I write, it is the day before the awesome day of Yom Kippur, when our fates our sealed. But I could just as well be writing the same thing any day of the year.

“You can’t take it with you,” the saying goes.

There is a lot more — infinitely more — than one’s possessions that “you can’t take with you.”

One cannot take one’s illusions about oneself; one’s self-deceptions; one’s rationalizations. Rare is the person who does not consider himself “a good person.”

It’s a phrase that’s almost become a cliche.

Who isn’t a “good person”?

Yet, at the end of life, one’s inadequacies cannot be papered over.

Needless to say, one’s achievements also cannot be papered over.

But the key implication in “taking it with you” is the place to which one is taking it. The place of ultimate Divine judgment.

It is not just Moses who faced this.

Everyone does.

Only because of the spiritual integrity of the Jewish people, no one knows where Moses is buried. But for the spiritual integrity of Moses himself, it would make no difference if everyone knew where he was buried.

Because that is an irrelevancy to the loneliness in everyone’s death.

We alone will be held accountable for all that we did, for all that we contributed and all that we marred.

The Jewish people wailed for Moses for 30 days after he died. Again, the unique response to Moses’ passing came after his death and did not touch him at his death.

In that he was alone.

In that we are all alone.

Whether at Yom Kippur time or any other time during the year, the end of the Torah bids us to take care with our lives, to do better, not to be satisfied or deluded as to our greatness; to keep growing and improving; not to flinch from self-scrutiny; not to fall to rationalizations as to why we can’t.

We can.

That is the challenge at the end of the Torah.

To try to stretch beyond what we take to be our limits to ascend to the summit.

Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News