This week is Shabbat Nachamu the Shabbat of "comfort." It is named that because of the first verse of the haftarah that is read this week: "Comfort, oh comfort My people, says your God." (Isaiah 40:1) Shabbat Nachamu is always the first Shabbat after the fast of Tisha b'Av when we mourn, amongst other things, the destruction of the First and Second Temples. The continuation of the haftarah speaks directly to this mourning: "Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and declare to her that her term of service is over, that her iniquity is expiated; For she has received at the hand of the Lord double for all her sins." This is the first of the seven Sabbaths following Tisha b'Av and leading up to Rosh Hashanah, New Years day, called the seven Sabbaths of comfort-shiv'ah de-nechemta. Each Shabbat we read a comforting prophecy until we are once again ready to face God in judgment on Rosh Hashanah. This cycle plays out annually. First the three weeks prior to Tisha b'Av in which we sink to the depths of sadness, and then seven weeks in which we make our way out of the tragedy and into the joy of the High Holy Days and the Festival of Sukkot which is completed with the wild celebration of Torah. (In the Temple times the wild celebration would be in honor of the annual rededication of the altar on Sukkot.)
It seems strange then that the Torah portion on Shabbat Nachamu, this Shabbat of comforting, is Va-etchanan. The portion starts with Moshe relating to Israel how he pleaded with God to be allowed into the Holy Land to be able to finish the mission for which he had been commissioned by God at that lonely encounter in the desert. "Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan, that good hill country, and the Lebanon." This plea is all the more poignant in that Moshe already knows that the die is cast, that the sentence has been decreed, that he will not cross over into Canaan. The midrash even points to this experience to teach that a person should never despair of praying "even if the sword is on his throat."
When God answers Moshe, it is not in a pastoral mode. It is not the comforting God of Isaiah whose voice and words Moshe faithfully reproduces for Israel. God speaks in anger. "Enough! Never speak to Me of this matter again." This "enough," the Hebrew rav lecha, points to a complex set issues. The talmud and the midrash note that this is the same phrase that Moshe used in condemning Korach and his community: "You have gone too far (rav lachem), sons of Levi."
The Holy One of Blessing said to him: "Moshe, I am One who repays payments. What you did is being done to you. You said: 'You have gone too far (rav lachem).' (Numbers 16:7) I, too, say: 'Enough (rav lecha).' You said: 'Pay no regard to their offering.' (ibid. 15) I also said: 'Never speak to Me of this matter again.'" Moshe said to Him: "What did I do? Because I said to them 'Listen you rebels' (Numbers 20:10)?! For the sins of others you are going to kill me?" (Devarim Rabba, Va-Etchanan)
How painful this must have been for Moshe. He thought that he was defending the Divine order in telling Korach and his community that they had overstepped their bounds. Moshe also alludes to the incident of the "Waters of Meribah" in which the Israelites had once again risen against Moshe and Aharon. In their demands, the Israelites had brought into question, again, the whole project of the Exodus. "Why did you make us leave Egypt...?" (Numbers 20:5) Moshe was calling the Israelites rebels because they were. He was reasserting God's authority. Yet, he was punished. So Moshe plaintively asks "For the sins of others you are going to kill me?"
The first rebuke to Moshe is that he is overstepping his authority just as Korach did. This must have stung even more since this is exactly what Korach himself said to Moshe. "You have gone too far (rav lachem)! For all the community are holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst." (Numbers 16: 3) It is as if in these last moments God is taking Korach's side. How different this is than God's declaration after the incident of the Golden Calf when He was through with Israel and he angrily told Moshe: "Now, let me be, that My anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them, and make of you a great nation." (Exodus 32:10) God was about to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and make a great nation of Moshe's seed alone. God both granted Moshe the power to stay God's hand ("Now, let me...") and also made it obvious that Moshe alone was worth as much to God as all of Israel. There again Moshe defended Israel's life and future. And yet, here, in this week's portion, Moshe stands alone with God and there is no one to defend him. God is the accuser, using language coined by Korach.
This "Enough!" resonates in another way, too. Another midrashic comment reads rav lecha to mean you have (yesh lecha) a rav, a master-and who is this? Joshua. (Sotah 13b) That is, your reign is over and it is time for Joshua to reign. There cannot be two rulers at once. God is firmly telling Moshe that his leadership of Israel was not unconditional but was confined in time and place and that time was up and he was not to go to the next place, to the Holy Land. Just as Jethro had taught Moshe that he should not think that he could carry the whole burden and responsibility of the judicial system on his own shoulders, Moshe was now being confronted with the fact that the leadership of Israel had only been his for a designated period of time. The leadership was God's and it was granted to Moshe. This is articulated in another interpretation of rav lecha-you have a rav, a master. God was saying to Moshe: "The difference between Me and you, is that you have a master, Me, whilst I have no master. Your authority is only as My messenger, not as Me."
This exchange with God was elaborated upon by the Sages too. Moshe, according to one midrash, begged to be allowed to enter Israel even as a lay person, not a leader. When God refused this, Moshe asked for his body to be taken in and buried. God refused this too. In his desperation, Moshe did not grasp that the line that God was drawing was not serendipitous. The leadership that was needed in the desert was radically different than the leadership that would be needed in the Land of Israel. The generation of the desert was a transitional generation who were totally dependent on God (and therefore on Moshe) for their very sustenance. Once the Jordan was crossed there would be a need for political institutions, military structures, agricultural infrastructure and so forth. Moshe was a leader who was almost God. ("And as Moshe came down from the mountain bearing the two tablets of the Covenant, Moshe was not aware that the skin of his face was radiant, since he had spoken with God." (Exodus 34:20), "Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moshe... for all the great might and awesome power that Moshe displayed before all Israel." (Deuteronomy 34:10-12)) Once the Jordan was crossed, Israel would need Joshua.
This world of discourse and pain in a two word phrase returns us to the question I posed at the beginning of this dvar Torah: Why, on the Shabbat of Comfort when we are recovering from the trauma of Tisha b'Av, do we read of Moshe's distress?
The high point of this week's portion is, of course, the retelling of the story of receiving the decalogue, the ten sayings (asseret hadevarim) at Horev. In this moment of revelation Moshe was at his peak. God would speak and Moshe would relay the word of God to the Israelites (Deuteronomy 5:5). Israel was fearful of being exposed to the full power of God's revealed glory and was happy for the mediation of Moshe. This arrangement also found favor in God's eyes who saw in it righteousness and humility. (Deuteronomy 5: 19-26)
Why did the revelation take the form of an introduction ("I am the Lord your God...") and then commandments and prohibitions? Why was it not enough to merely bask in the revealed glory of God? For someone like Moshe, who was at a spiritual level which was unattainable by any other mortal, this might have been enough. Moshe's face resembled God's face. Moshe was imbued with the Divine spirit. However, once the people of Israel crossed the Jordan they would be spending most of their time in a struggle (at times epic and at times mundane) for survival. Most people would not walk in "radical amazement," to borrow Abraham Joshua Heschel's apt phrase. The eighteenth century Hassidic master Reb Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev taught that the commandments were the ways to enact revelation in our lives. They are the concrete containers of the ephemeral experience of God's glory.
This too is what Moshe could not accomplish. When he was alive and leading Israel, the people knew that God was in the Tent of Meeting and that his reflected glory was in Moshe's face. There was not much that they had to, or could personally do to bring God down to earth more than this. Moshe's tenure as leadership was the time in which Israel was fed Divinity literally with every mouthful. It was, however, Israel's task to live a God infused life on their own, in the mundane and quotidian details of existence. This could not be done for them. This was not Moshe's expertise.
And so, in the wake of the destruction of the Temple, we are comforted in the knowledge that now we have to create communities and gatherings which are a mikdash me'at, a miniature Temple-not by building replicas of the Temple but by doing deeds which create concrete containers for the ephemeral experience of God's glory. Every time we keep the Shabbat or we treat workers fairly we reaffirm the Exodus from Egypt and create a lasting monument to God's revelation. We read of Moshe's moment of painful realization that his chapter in history was drawing to a close in order to realize that now we, all of us, hold the responsibility for enacting the revelation of God in the world. That we can do that is our comfort. That we must do that is our challenge.