Parshah Commentary

In this week’s parshah, VeZot HaBerakhah, as the Israelites reach the border of Canaan, we reach the end of the annual Torah reading cycle. Moses concludes his oration with blessings for the twelve tribes, before addressing them together as one people: “O happy Israel! . . . Your enemies shall come cringing before you, and you shall tread on their backs.” These are his last words to the Israelites, delivered on the eve of their murderous mass displacement of the Canaanites. Yet this is not the Torah’s last word. The end of the oration is not the end of the narration.

The text goes on to relate the fulfillment of God’s promise to Moses, given in the final verse of last week’s parshah: From Mount Nebo, Moses sees Canaan “with his own eyes,” but he is not permitted to “cross over to there,” and he “dies there in Moab.” In an early midrash, the rabbis argue that Moses, who is traditionally understood to have written the Torah, could not have died “and yet himself written ‘so Moses died there.’” Rather, they explain, “Moses wrote everything up to this point, and from here on Joshua wrote the rest.” But Rabbi Meir objects: “Scripture says, ‘And Moses wrote this Torah.’” According to Rabbi Meir, the word “this” implies Moses wrote the Torah we have, so Moses could not “have given the Torah while it lacked even a single letter”; thus, it must be that Moses wrote what the Holy One, Blessed Be He, told him to write.”

Moses may be a diligent scribe, but he is not always so obedient. Indeed, God explicitly denies Moses entry into Canaan to punish him for his earlier transgression at Meribah. There, God had instructed Moses and Aaron: “Before [the Israelites’] very eyes order the rock to yield its water.” However, instead of speaking to the rock, Moses struck it with his staff, and water still flowed out. His sin is graver than disobedience: It is idolatry. Before hitting the rock, Moses and Aaron had said to the Israelites: “Listen, you rebels, shall we get water for you out of this rock?” When they said we, Moses and Aaron implied that they themselves possessed the power to bring forth water. And whereas addressing the rock would have been in keeping with Moses’s status as God’s mouthpiece and instrument—and Aaron, in turn, as Moses’s—the use of physical force made it seem as if that power were inherent in the prophet’s own body, as superhuman strength. Therefore, God informs him, “Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, . . . you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them.” God’s diction affirms the link between Meribah and Moab: Moses is supposed to command the rock “before their very eyes,” and then it is “with his own eyes” that he is permitted to glimpse the land whose soil he will never touch.

After Moses dies, we are told that “no man knows of his burial place to this day.” The rabbis reason that “no man” must include Moses, too, so “even Moses himself does not know the place of his burial.” Lingering on the qualification “to this day,” they interpret a radical dislocation. They tell how the invading Romans sought the tomb of Moses: “They climbed up above and saw the tomb down below. But when they went down below, they saw it up above. They then split up, half of them going up and half going down, but those above saw the tomb below, while those below saw it above.” The Romans’ strategy should have led them to the tomb, yet it eluded them. A spatial paradox, Moses’s eternal resting place doesn’t coincide with itself: It is never stable, always shifting, so that nobody “to this day” can ever say, “Here lies Moses.” His tomb is in nobody’s territory, and nobody can own his bones. No matter how close the Romans get to the tomb, they still can’t reach it. They can see it, though: asymptotic, forever elsewhere—as Moses sees Canaan “down below” Mount Nebo.

In death, Moses pays the price for having presented God’s power as if it were his own. In a sense, the dislocation described in the midrash has already begun at the moment when Moses writes his own demise in advance. The dislocation, in other words, is temporal as well as geographic. I’m reminded of a posthumously published essay by Gillian Rose in which the philosopher considers her own impending death from cancer. Moses dies at the wizened age of 120; Rose passed away at 48, but she questions whether this death will really have been more “untimely” than any other. Every death, after all, arrives from a future the dead will never know. She writes: “I may die before my time. ‘Before my time’—my time? How can I claim to own a time”? Our parshah frustrates such fantasies of immanent power and ownership—over land, over time, over being. Narratively, it accomplishes this by thwarting our desire for closure, playing up the discrepancy between the triumphalist conclusion of Moses’s oration in the Book of Devarim and the conclusion of his Torah. At its last word, the Israelites remain in the wilderness. Nothing is at rest in a promised proper place.

Moses experiences his non-arrival as punishment. Perhaps, though, the punishment is at the same time a reward. Perhaps Moses’s permanent exile from the promised land is actually a kind of freedom, albeit one he is tragically unable to recognize. In a 2001 interview with Haaretz, Edward Said explained his opposition to the very “idea of home” and attendant notions of fixity, property, exclusion: “I don’t believe in all that. I wouldn’t want it for myself. Even if I were a Jew, I’d fight against it.” In this, Said and Moses differ. The rabbis say Moses sought to enter Canaan right up until the end, begging God: “If I may not enter it as a king, let me enter it as a commoner. If I may not enter it alive, let me enter it dead.” His desire, like his fear, is only human—but so too, the Torah’s unsettled and unsettling ending suggests, is its ultimate unfulfillment. The last word of Rose’s essay on death is a poetic apostrophe without a full stop:

My time and yours,

Time to praise all others—

Placeable and unplaceable time

Samuel P. Catlin is assistant professor of religious studies at Trinity College. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.