This sheet on Deuteronomy 34 was written byJames A. Diamond for 929 and can also be found here
Deuteronomy’s final three verses spell out the uniqueness of Moses’ three-pronged legacy: an unparalleled face to face intimacy of with God; the efficacy of the miracles that the Lord sent him to display in Egypt against Pharaoh; and all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before Israel.
Moses’ singularity is first evident in his private life communing with God, and then in two dimensions of his public life, combatting enemies and sustaining his leadership within his own community. Yet, note the subtle distinction made between Moses as God’s emissary vis-à-vis the Egyptians, and Moses in his own capacity vis-à-vis Israel. It may have taken miracles to convince the taskmasters of the Israelite God’s invincibility to release their repressive stranglehold on their slaves. However, the establishment of a cohesive nation and its continuing viability cannot rest on miracles and otherworldliness. That requires human autonomy and human sensitivity to the social, political, and moral dimensions of a human polis, which Moses qua Moses independently set in motion for his successors to follow.
Rashi ends his Torah commentary analogously with a striking midrashic explication of the Torah’s final verse that accentuates its extraordinary emphasis on the human dimension. Rashi oddly identifies that awesome power wielded by Moses in front of the entire nation of Israel with his breaking of the Tablets at Sinai. As Rashi states, Moses “decided on his own to break the tablets publicly. God acquiesced to his will, offering him congratulations (yishar kochacha) on breaking them.” Rabbinically the Torah’s ending picks up on its patent sense of human aptitude but empowering it to the utmost extent of overcoming even God, of persuading God to defer to the human perspective. In fact, this midrash is the very source for idiomatic salutation, idiomatically offered as yasher koyach (may your strength be firm) in grateful response to any job well done, particularly those that benefit community. Every single positive human accomplishment and societal contribution then resonates with its origins in Moses’ exertion of the very outer limits of human capacity.
This is why it is so important for the Torah, despite its minimalist narrative style, to emphasize the seemingly superfluous detail of the hiddenness of Moses’ grave- no one knows his burial site to this day. Given the prevalent phenomenon of worshipping dead saints, it is not difficult to imagine the idolization Moses’ gravesite would have certainly attracted. Shockingly to many, yet soberly, Maimonides discourages frequenting cemeteries and halachically rules in his legal code, the Mishneh Torah, against the erection of monuments on the graves of the righteous (tzadikim), “for their words are their memorials.” (Laws of Mourning 4:4) As Moses’ life and death illustrate, Judaism must never lapse into a cult of the dead but must be a celebration of life and thought. Moses’ grave remains concealed precisely to ensure that our focus is on his “words”, on the legacy of the life he lived and the profound teachings he transmitted.
Prof. James A. Diamond holds the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo.
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