The Death of Moshe

Moshe dies on a mountain in Moav, outside the land. The Torah does not call him a king or a hero here. It calls him eved Hashem, Hashem’s servant. And it says he died al pi Hashem, which literally means at Hashem’s mouth. Our teachers explained that this means Hashem took him with a kiss. It was gentle, and Hashem was right there.

Two things in this verse are worth stopping on. The first is the title. After Egypt, the sea, Sinai and forty years of complaints, the word the Torah settles on for Moshe is eved - servant. Not king, not master, not even prophet, although five verses later the chapter will measure every prophet who came afterwards against him. The second is the obvious problem, and Rashi asks it in exactly those words: is it possible that Moshe died and then wrote and Moshe died there? He gives two answers and neither is a dodge. Either Yehoshua wrote from this point on, or Hashem dictated these lines and Moshe wrote them down himself, in tears. Both answers admit the difficulty rather than smoothing it over, which is more than most books manage about their own last page.

Al pi Hashem is a standard idiom - in Bamidbar the camp travels and halts al pi Hashem, at His word. Rashi reads it here against the idiom, literally: bin’shikah, by a kiss, taking pi as a mouth rather than a command. That is not a sentimental gloss but a claim about what sort of death this is, one that arrives through contact rather than by decree. The title eved Hashem does related work, and the Sifrei heads off the obvious misreading before it starts: lo bignuto shel Moshe hakatuv medaber ela beshivcho, Scripture is not running him down but praising him, since this is how the early prophets are designated. From here it becomes his standing designation right through Sefer Yehoshua, as though the last promotion the text grants him points downward. On the same verse Rashi asks how Moshe could have written vayamot sham Moshe, and sets out the two positions: until here Moshe wrote and from here Yehoshua wrote, against which Rabbi Meir - Rabbi Shimon in Bava Batra 15a, though Rashi’s other source, Sifrei Devarim 357, also names Rabbi Meir - objects that the scroll cannot lack a thing, so the Holy One dictated and Moshe wrote b’dema. Ibn Ezra takes that first position and pushes it further back: for him Yehoshua’s hand begins not at this verse but at the head of the chapter, from vaya’al Moshe.

Someone buries Moshe in a valley in Moav, and the Torah never says exactly where. Nobody has ever found the grave. The Torah does not name who dug it either, but the way the sentence is built, it sounds as though Hashem did it Himself. That is the last thing the Torah tells us Hashem does: looking after somebody who could not look after himself any more.

Every founder gets a tomb. Moshe does not, and the verse goes out of its way to rub it in - it hands you the valley, the country and the landmark opposite, and then tells you nobody knows the place. Rashi says the grave stood ready there from the six days of creation, opposite Beit Pe’or, to atone for what Israel did at Pe’or, so that the man who argued for them while alive goes on arguing for them from underneath. The Talmud in Sotah tells of the Roman authorities sending men to the garrison at Beit Pe’or to find it: those standing above saw it below, those standing below saw it above. Whatever you make of that story, its point is not mysterious. A grave you can find becomes a place people pray to. This one was made unfindable.

Vayikbor oto has no stated subject. Rashi supplies one: hakadosh baruch hu bichvodo, Hashem Himself, following Sotah 14a - and then brings Rabbi Yishmael, who parses the oto reflexively, he buried himself, one of three cases in which Rabbi Yishmael read a suffixed et that way, alongside yavi oto of the nazir and ve’hisi’u otam avon ashmah. On mul beit Pe’or Rashi says the grave was prepared there from the six days of creation to atone for the deed at Pe’or, and counts it among the things created bein hashmashot on the eve of the first Shabbat. Sotah 13b treats the verse’s very precision as the joke: Rabbi Berechiah calls it siman betoch siman, a sign inside a sign - the valley, the country, the landmark - va’afilu hachi, and even so, velo yada ish. Rabbi Simlai, on the following daf, takes the same fact as the Torah’s structural signature - torah techilatah gemilut chasadim vesofah gemilut chasadim: it opens with Hashem clothing Adam and Chava and closes with Hashem burying Moshe. The last verb of Moshe’s life in the Torah is one performed on him.

After Moshe there were many more prophets, but never one like him. The Torah says Hashem knew him panim el panim, face to face, the way you talk to somebody standing right in front of you. Other prophets got dreams and pictures at night. Moshe could simply speak, whenever he needed to.

This is not only a compliment, it is a rule with teeth. Sforno says that because no later prophet ever reached Moshe’s level, no prophet has the authority to add anything to the Torah or change it. The sentence closes the door behind Moshe on purpose. There is also a sharper reading. The Sifrei latches onto one word, b’Yisrael, and says: in Israel none arose, but among the nations of the world one did - Bilam ben Beor. It is a genuinely uncomfortable claim, and the interesting part is what the Sifrei then thinks the difference between them was. Its answer is about control: Bilam knew who was speaking to him and when it would happen, and Moshe did not - the greater prophet is the one with less say in the matter.

Rashi glosses asher yeda’o Hashem panim el panim as shehayah libo gas bo - Moshe was at ease with Him and spoke to Him whenever he wished - and his two proofs are precisely the places where Moshe opens the conversation: ve’atah e’eleh el Hashem after the calf, and imdu ve’eshme’ah mah yetzaveh lachem in the case of Pesach Sheni. The distinction is about who initiates. Sforno draws the legal consequence: since no prophet attained Moshe’s rank, no prophet is permitted to innovate anything from here on, which is why this verse functions as the seal on the Torah’s authority and stands behind Rambam’s seventh and ninth principles. Sifrei Devarim 357 reads the qualifier b’Yisrael strictly - b’Yisrael lo kam, aval b’umot ha’olam kam, ve’eizeh zeh, zeh Bilam ben Beor - and then spends its length on how the two differ. Note the verb as well: velo kam is a report of what has not happened over time, a sentence written from some distance after the events - exactly the feature of this chapter that Ibn Ezra is answering at 34:1, although the proofs he actually names there are the verbs va’yar’ehu, va’yomer and va’yikbor rather than this one.

The Torah reminds us what Moshe did: the signs and the wonders in Egypt, in front of Pharaoh and all his servants and his whole country. This is the last time the Torah tells the story of leaving Egypt, and it tells the whole thing in one sentence.

Look at the word servant twice in these five verses. In verse 5 Moshe is eved Hashem, Hashem’s servant. Here Pharaoh has avadav, his servants. Same root, two completely different arrangements of a life. Egypt is a place where people belong to a person. Moshe’s title says he belongs to Hashem, which is the version of service that the Torah spends four books arguing is the same thing as being free. The word chosen for Moshe’s obituary is the word for exactly what he was sent to end.

The vocabulary here - ha’otot vehamoftim, and in the next verse hayad hachazakah and hamora hagadol - is the vocabulary of Devarim 26:8, the declaration made when bringing the first fruits and expanded at length in the Haggadah: b’yad chazakah uvizroa netuyah uvmora gadol uv’otot uv’moftim. There the acts belong to Hashem. Here the same four terms are gathered up and hung on Moshe, but the syntax will not let them come loose: asher shelacho Hashem la’asot, whom Hashem sent to do. Hashem sends, Moshe does, and the eulogy never allows the second half to stand on its own. Set against that, avadav - Pharaoh’s servants - answers eved Hashem in verse 5. The root ayin-bet-dalet frames the entire obituary, and it is the root of both slavery and worship.

The very last words of the whole Torah are l’einei kol Yisrael - in front of the eyes of all Israel. Our teachers asked what Moshe did in front of everybody’s eyes that the Torah wants remembered last, and their answer is surprising: he broke the two stone tablets when he came down the mountain and saw the golden calf. And Hashem agreed with him. The Torah finishes by remembering the day Moshe broke the tablets for the sake of the people in front of him.

The Torah’s last three words are l’einei kol Yisrael, before the eyes of all Israel, and they are left hanging - before their eyes he did what? Rashi answers with the single act you would expect a book to keep out of its own closing sentence: Moshe broke the tablets. He points to Devarim 9:17, va’ashabrem l’eineichem, and I shattered them before your eyes, and adds that Hashem’s view agreed with Moshe’s. Sit with that as an ending. The Torah’s final praise of its greatest figure is that he once destroyed the thing it was first written on, because the people standing in front of him mattered more than the object in his hands.

Rashi divides the verse into three. Hayad hachazakah - that he received the Torah on the tablets in his hands. Hamora hagadol - the miracles and mighty deeds in the great and terrible wilderness. And then l’einei kol Yisrael: shenesa’o libo lishbor haluchot l’eineihem, that his heart lifted him to break the tablets before their eyes, as it says va’ashabrem l’eineichem, and the mind of the Holy One agreed with his. That last clause rests on Reish Lakish in Shabbat 87a, who reads the seemingly redundant asher of asher shibarta as approval: yishar kochacha sheshibarta. The consequence is worth naming plainly. On the plain sense l’einei kol Yisrael simply modifies the preceding catalogue of signs and wonders, and Ibn Ezra treats it that way by passing over the phrase in silence and glossing only what comes before it - hayad hachazakah as the wonders at the sea, hamora hagadol as the standing at Sinai, which is already a different division of the verse from Rashi’s, and different again from the Sifrei, which reads the two as the plague of the firstborn and the splitting of the sea. On Rashi’s reading the Torah’s final three words honour the moment Moshe destroyed the tablets, and they do it with the same word, l’einei, that binds the eulogy back to Devarim 9:17. The book ends on the far side of the Jordan, over a grave nobody can find, praising a man for breaking its own first edition.