The great Jewish existentialist, Franz Rosenzweig, began his monumental philosophy of Judaism, The Star of Redemption with these words: All knowledge of the Whole has its source in death, in the fear of death.” That abiding fear, and the inescapable destination of all human lives, and of all human life, in death, is a fact beyond appeal. There are no exceptions, no delays, and no negotiations with our ultimate end. “From dust you are, and to dust you shall return,” is no empty biblical verse, it is the context within which we fashion our lives and attempt to establish some record of enduring worth.
Death threatens to reduce human life to an absurdity. If I am to die, regardless of how I live, then it doesn’t really matter how I live my life at all. Whether righteous or selfish, generous or stingy, rich or poor, death will claim us all in the end. This fact is so staggering that it makes our lives appear irrelevant, merely the passing of time in the face of the inevitable.
Some seek solace from this terrible fact in the comfort of religion and the hope that death isn’t really the end at all. Others seek to soothe their fear through philosophy, hoping that abiding value may emerge from clear thinking. Still others seek peace in a psychological approach, simply resigning themselves to eventual nothingness. Around the globe, some sought comfort in the identification with the group, knowing that their own identity would continue through the existence of the group, even though they themselves would cease.
While each of these responses has some merits, none makes the fear subside completely. Regardless of what goes on in our hearts, our heads, or our souls, we still don’t like dying; still feel sorrow and distress at its call.
All of us—from the greatest to the least—will die. But does that really render our lives irrelevant. Is it pointless to go to a party simply because we know in advance that the party must end? Do we avoid love because our lover may someday disappoint us? Is it absurd to rear children because they will one day move out? Rather than retreating to some abstraction to save us from the fear of death, we might look to the way we conduct our lives in the face of death. We live our lives as though the journey itself has intrinsic, irreducible value. We fall in love because it is right for the moment, be raise children because it is delightful and meaningful to do so, and we party because there is so much in life to celebrate.
I know of no greater symbol of the ultimate value of living for its own sake than that greatest of all prophets, our teacher Moses. At the very end of his life, knowing that his death is imminent, God tells Moses, “You may view the land from a distance, but you shall not enter it—the land that I am giving to the Israelite people.”
Moses spends his whole life journeying toward the Promised Land. The great goal of his entire career is to bring the children of Israel from Egyptian bondage to freedom in the Land of Israel. Surely if anyone ever deserved to reach their ultimate goal, that person was Moses. Yet even Moses cannot enter his final destination, he can only approach it, only approximate it, and only view it from the outside.
In that view, Moses resembles each of us—always on the way, never able to reach the final destination, but blessed with the vision to see what we cannot attain ourselves. Targum Onkelos, the ancient translation of the Torah into Aramaic, tellingly renders the passage as telling Moses that he cannot go “to the land, for I am giving it to the children of Israel.” The ultimate goal is one that we cannot attain as individuals, but is a gift to the ages—to our children and to all children. Perhaps it is for this reason that this week’s Torah portion contains no mitzvot , no commandments that need doing. In the last stages of life, we turn our attention to conjecture, to seeing what we cannot individually experience. Our vision exceeds our grasp, and knowing that our children will continue our journey is a vision well worth having.
Perhaps it is for that reason that Rashi notes that God tells Moses “I know that it is dear to you, therefore I say to you, “Ascend, and see.” Rashi knows that our ability to imagine, to conjecture, to anticipate is a step up from mere animal existence. By feasting our eyes on the path we have taken, we affirm our membership in something transcendent. Death, for Moses, constitutes an elevation, the next stage of his journey.
As Franz Kafka, a contemporary of Rosenzweig, writes, “Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life.” Moses’ humanity, and ours, is a finite measurement. Our limits are real and unavoidable. But our vision can soar above our bodies, and we can touch the heavens with our ability to imagine, to identity, and to affirm.
The Midrash asserts that what we do during our lives has meaning because we are weaving the fabric we will wear in the world to come. How we conduct ourselves now, the extent to which we study Torah, embody and transmit it, determines the nature of our influence on the world and on the future, inspiring the Eternal One to bestow some measure of eternity on the works of our hands, and on our journey.
Shabbat Shalom!