Revelation is a central feature of Judaism. The Torah’s authority and authenticity stem from its transmission to the entirety of the Jewish people at Sinai. Going forward from there, tradition expands this revelation to Jews everywhere, throughout time. The Torah tells us this as follows.
וְלֹ֥א אִתְּכֶ֖ם לְבַדְּכֶ֑ם אָנֹכִ֗י כֹּרֵת֙ אֶת־הַבְּרִ֣ית הַזֹּ֔את וְאֶת־הָאָלָ֖ה הַזֹּֽאת׃
כִּי֩ אֶת־אֲשֶׁ֨ר יֶשְׁנ֜וֹ פֹּ֗ה עִמָּ֙נוּ֙ עֹמֵ֣ד הַיּ֔וֹם לִפְנֵ֖י יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֵ֑ינוּ וְאֵ֨ת אֲשֶׁ֥ר אֵינֶ֛נּוּ פֹּ֖ה עִמָּ֥נוּ הַיּֽוֹם׃
I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day before our God יהוה and with those who are not with us here this day. [Devarim 29:13-15]
The most far-reaching revelation in human history has to have been that of Moses. The arc of his prophetic journey began with a burning bush in the wilderness and ended with a panoramic view of the promised land. More than a mere view, it was a vision of a new world – one in which the first-ever monotheist nation founded its eternal homeland. Moses’s whole life had led up to this moment.
After all that he had been through, it seems somehow tragic, maybe even cruel, that Gd did not deliver Moses into the land after employing him as the prophet to guide the Jewish people from Egypt all the way to the east bank of the Jordan. It must have been hard for Moses to see the land up close, in detail, yet find out that it was to be forever just out of reach.
For better or worse, most people can relate Moses’s experience to turning points in their own lives. Not being allowed to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour is one of everyday life’s most widespread letdowns. Anyone who has ever worked hard to develop a project only to have it given to someone else who did not lay the groundwork knows the feeling of disappointment.
Before Moses was given his final mission in Parshat Matot he was given a unique challenge in Parshat Pinchas. The instructions described in these two chapters bring us to contemplate his overall role in the long-term future of the Jewish people. Among those instructions was a bitter pill for him to swallow. Not only was he to be passed over for the honour of leading the people into the promised land, but he was given the task of personally promoting his replacement for that role as follows.
And יהוה [Gd] answered Moses, “single out Joshua son of Nun, an inspired man, and lay your hand upon him. Have him stand before Eleazar the priest and before the whole community, and commission him in their sight. Invest him with some of your splendor, so that the whole Israelite community may obey.
וְהַֽעֲמַדְתָּ֣ אֹת֗וֹ לִפְנֵי֙ אֶלְעָזָ֣ר הַכֹּהֵ֔ן וְלִפְנֵ֖י כׇּל־הָעֵדָ֑ה וְצִוִּיתָ֥ה אֹת֖וֹ לְעֵינֵיהֶֽם׃
וְנָתַתָּ֥ה מֵהֽוֹדְךָ֖ עָלָ֑יו לְמַ֣עַן יִשְׁמְע֔וּ כׇּל־עֲדַ֖ת בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃
This is a pivotal and strange moment. Moses is told to give his splendor to Joshua. Rashi understands this word מֵהֽוֹדְךָ֖ to mean the glow that Moses received at Sinai.
That strains the imagination; how could it be that this divine quality borne of Moses’s unique ascent of Sinai and his delivery of the Torah is transferable? Neither the scars of battle nor the strength he gained from years of struggle and resistance are transferable. How would such a quality as splendor be transferred? Joshua may have been most worthy, but he came with no prophetic experience.
The difficulty of the idea of transferring the glow led commentators such as Seforno and Ibn Ezra to conclude this was about Moses giving Joshua authority and respect in Moses’s own lifetime so that others would come to respect Joshua and adopt a reverence for him as they had for Moses. So, this was – in today’s language of corporate leadership – transition planning; Moses was to manage the transition through Joshua’s on-the-job training.
Perhaps the best comparable case in the modern history of world events to what Moses faced was that of Michael Collins, command pilot of Apollo 11 – the first moon landing mission. NASA’s Apollo program was the most massive and impressive undertaking of science and logistics of its time. There were over 400,000 engineers and scientists in the program. Adding in the number of other participants in industry and government, it involved as many workers as there were men at Sinai.
Out of all the Jews, Moses was chosen to deliver the nation to the land of Israel. Out of all the people at NASA Collins was chosen to deliver Earth’s first mission to the moon’s surface. And, like Moses, Collins was chosen to deliver, but not to set foot on his promised land.
Most people know that Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk on the moon, and many know that Buzz Aldrin – who piloted the lunar module – was the next out the hatch to walk on the moon on 21 July 1969. However, few people seem to know that Michael Collins piloted the mother ship from the Earth to the Moon and orbited the moon for 21 hours – ten times – within 9 miles of the surface, surveying it for future missions. In the meantime, Armstrong became one of the most famous people in all of history. Aldrin, due to a scheduling change that placed him out the hatch after Armstrong, much to his chagrin, got a distant second place. Collins by comparison became a footnote.
Collins got the job of commanding Apollo 11 because he had more space flight experience than the other candidates. Armstrong and Aldrin had special technical skills and did a magnificent job of working together to park the lander on the moon. However, Collins had the mission-critical task of flying Apollo 11 alone while others walked on the moon. His ten orbits were the lone potential single-point failure risk of the mission. He described it like this.
“I don’t mean to deny a feeling of solitude. It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the Earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon, I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus G-d knows what on this side.”
There is a famous photo that Collins took of the moon, the earth, and the lunar module returning to dock with Apollo 11. It has been noted that Collins was “the only person, living or dead,” who was not in that image. He was the pilot, the surveyor, and the essential first-hand witness and human interface between the billions on Earth and the two astronauts who first set foot on NASA’s promised land. Everything he did guaranteed mission success and laid the groundwork for future missions. And, he did it knowing that he was never going to return and set foot on the moon in a future mission.
This brings us back to Moses. He was the scribe, the teacher, and the essential human interface with the Divine in the manifestation of the Torah in the material world. The next leader, and those who were to follow would not have nearly the same claim to divine access to the revealed text, the law, and interpretation of the Torah. Thus, the transition plan was mission-critical.
In Parshat Pinchas that moment of transition begins. In the Midrash of Avot of Rabbi Natan, we learn that the rabbis say that the מֵהֽוֹדְךָ֖-splendor was the teaching itself! What was the spiritual energy, the light of revelation that was passed on? It was the content of the Torah itself.
Today, far from the time and place of Moses and Joshua, we might struggle to find that signal of the Divine amidst the noise of facts and opinions, and the deluge of information we receive every day. However, this small episode in the Torah suggests that there is a core of revelation, a spiritual energy that we find when we seek to peel back the layers of transmission and translation and find that original core of Divine revelation.
The world in which we live seems to be tearing itself apart with recrimination, slander, libel, name-calling, and vilification on nearly every platform on the internet. Politically motivated righteousness seems to dominate every conversation. Reverence for institutions and governments seems to be at an all-time low. Bad actors in governments, in professional and social media, in non-profits, and in religious institutions have given ample cause for such criticism.
It seems that people with large constituencies and influencers with even larger followings want to lead us astray. They lack the firsthand knowledge, mission perspective, and humility of a Moses, or a Joshua, or a Michael Collins. Our institutions have lost collective sight of the mission to any promised land – spiritual or material.
They may have lost sight of the mission, but we should not be hasty to dismiss the core and original missions of our institutions. We still need governments because the anarchy, violence, and disorganization of a lawless society is intolerable. We need trust in our institutions because real moral and social capital are the mission-critical pillars of civilization. Working to understand and return our institutions to their original purposes could be our only effective way of restoring such trust.
Religiously, we would do well to return to that original moment of prophecy, when and where the splendor was revealed. The shining of Moses’s face can be understood as the physical manifestation of Gd’s presence in this world, offered as it was to be perceptible to humans. Such revelation was thus transferred from teacher to student, generation after generation. We gain access to it through the performance and study of every Mitzvah – “na’aseh v’nishma (נעשה ונשמע) – we will do and we will listen.”
The promised land is a mission as much as it is a place. The light of Torah guides us on our way. One might encounter this light – this splendor – at an unexpected moment: kissing the mezuzah in the prayer room at the site of the Terezin concentration camp, or meeting a released hostage, or in sharing a Seder with four generations of a family, or in packing a meal for JFS before Rosh Hashanah, or when praying at full strength at Neilah as the light of day fades away on Yom Kippur. One need not wander in the desert for 40 years or fly around the Moon to find it. There are moments of opportunity everywhere if we seek them out with open hearts, open minds, and the humility that springs from true faith in our mission.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rosenblatt and Dr. Terry Neiman
