What is the Message for Us?

The long fall holiday season is over now, close to 60 days of suspended time when we were seeking forgiveness from our friends and family, examining our thoughts and actions and deciding what we can work on during the next year, and reconnecting as best we can to our Judaism in a surreal year that has deprived us of our sense of community. Just a week ago, we had the culminating experience of Simchat Torah – one of my favorite holidays, along with Purim. On Simchat Torah, as you recall, we completed the reading of the Torah – Moses cannot enter the Promised Land but surrenders his life to God with a kiss – and started all over again with the Creation story.

And occasionally it dawns on us: Moses never makes it into the Promised Land, but neither do we! Our reading doesn’t continue with Joshua but goes back to the beginning of the Torah once again. We never get into the Promised Land through all of our cycles of reading!

On the surface, the meaning of this is pretty straightforward. The Torah is also called “The Five Books of Moses”. The first book is an epic poem that sets the stage – the creation of the world, the stories of our first ancestors – and the other books serve as a second, longer epic poem that follows Moses from his birth to his death. Anything that occurs later than that is reported more prosaically in the historical books that follow – Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings.

But there is a deeper meaning that we can take from this. We too are left peering at the Promised Land from Mount Nebo before we have to go immediately back to תהו ובהו, the chaos that was the universe before God started establishing order in the Creation story. What does this mean for us? I will start by speaking about this in general terms before attempting to connect its meaning to the spiritual crisis in which we are now adrift.

I started as I usually do, by considering what Jonathan Sacks had to say about this in his several years of collected writings about each parasha in “Covenant and Conversations”. He calls to mind chapter 2 of Pirkei Avot:

לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה

“It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”

There is a parable that fleshes this out a bit. There was once a king who was hiring workers to fill a gigantic hole. The foolish worker takes a look at the hole and says, “How can I ever finish this?” The intelligent worker says to himself, “I was only hired for a day, at least I have found work.” Thus God says to the people, “You are all only hired for your day. Do your day’s work and do not worry about the rest”.

Rabbi Sacks continues by saying, “For each of us, … there is a river we will not cross, a promised land we will not enter and a destination we will not reach. Even the greatest life is an unfinished symphony. Moses’ death on the far side of the Jordan is a consolation for all of us. None of us should feel guilty or frustrated or angry or defeated that there are things we hoped to achieve but did not. That is what it is to be human. … Life is about falling a hundred times and getting up again. It is about never losing your ideals even when you know how hard it is to change the world. It’s about getting up every morning and walking one more day toward the Promised Land even though you know you may never get there, but knowing also that you helped others get there.” He reminds us, “There is in Judaism no equivalent of ‘and they all lived happily ever after’.”

Rabbi Sacks further admonishes us, “We cannot foretell the future, because it depends on us – how we act, how we choose, how we respond. The future cannot be predicted, because we have free will. Even we ourselves do not know how we will respond to crisis until it happens. Only in retrospect do we discover ourselves. We face an open future. Only God, who is beyond time, can transcend time. Biblical narrative has no sense of an ending because it constantly seeks to tell us that we have not yet completed the task. … Each person has a promised land he or she will not reach, a horizon beyond the limits of his or her vision. What makes this bearable is our intense existential bond between the generations – between parent and child, teacher and disciple, leader and follower. The task is bigger than us, but it will live on after us, as something of us will live on in those we have influenced.”

I have quoted extensively from Jonathan Sacks because I believe he had some insightful comments to make about this reality – that we never get to the Promised Land any more than does Moses. Rabbi Harry Rosenfeld expands on this: “As we look at the prophets and leaders in the Tanakh, not a single one sees the actual fulfillment of his/her prophecy … No one ever gets to finish the task. Reality teaches us that in every aspect of life, as soon as we reach what we think is the ‘Promised Land’ the next step looms before us, and ultimately falls to our successors. Moses does not lead the people into Canaan, that is Joshua’s task. Joshua does not finish the settlement of the land, each of the Judges moves that process forward. David does not get to build God’s Temple in Jerusalem, that is Solomon’s to build. The list is endless.”

So how does all of this relate to the very particular circumstances in which we find ourselves today? What can we see but not reach? Think of all of the Zoom meetings that you have had with family and friends. There they are, right on your screen, but you can’t be with them in person. You can’t hug them, you can’t kiss them, you can’t take a grandchild’s hand, you can’t stroke your mother’s forehead.

Furthermore, we are aware not only that we have no control over our present circumstances, but we cannot see into the future either. How long will things remain this way? What can we do to make the most of the lives that we have and not feel suspended in time? How can we feel comforted and supported by God, as well as hopeful for our loved ones and for the future? We are not guaranteed a “happily ever after” either, but the lives that we do have are a precious gift and we do need to continue to infuse them with meaning – with the joy and love that we are able to experience, with wonder for the beautiful world around us, with gratitude for what it is that we do have.