Moshe was a hundred and twenty years old when he died. His eye had not dimmed, and his vigour had not fled.
What it teaches
Accepting God’s decree. Accepting what God decides even when the heart asks for something else.
Moshe sees the land and hears he will not enter it, and here the Torah records no word from him. He dies at the word of God, his eyes clear, his strength still in him. Accepting the decree looks like this: Moshe sees the goal from afar, and has already laid his hands on the one who carries on.
The lesson
One who knows he will not reach the goal can still prepare a successor.
The Torah’s closing verses: Moshe dies in Moav, no one knows where he is buried and the book stops one river short of the land.
For children, teens and adults
Moshe is in four of the five books. He argues Israel out of destruction more than once, he carries them for forty years, and the last thing that happens to him is that he is shown the land from a mountain top and told he will not be going in. Then he dies in Moav, on the wrong side of the river, and the book stops. Ending with the crossing would have been easy, it happens a few chapters into Sefer Yehoshua, which takes up the story exactly where this one leaves off. The Torah refuses it. Whatever you think about why Moshe was kept out, the sharper question is why the book itself chooses to stay outside with him.
The verses are from Miqra according to the Masorah (Wikisource, CC BY-SA 4.0), via Sefaria, without the cantillation marks. On this site the four-letter Name is written ה׳.
