Moses Dressed His Brother for Death on the Mountain

The Command to Go Up

God told Moses to take Aaron and his son Elazar up the mountain, and Moses understood what the instruction meant. He had carried the burden of knowing things in advance his whole life. He had known the plagues before they fell, had known the sea would split before it split, had known about the golden calf while he was still on Sinai holding the tablets. This time he knew that his brother would not come back down.

Aaron did not need to be told. He looked at Moses and understood, and the tradition records that he accepted what he understood without resistance. The three of them went up: Moses, Aaron, and Elazar, the son who would be high priest before the day was over.

The Transfer of the Garments

What happened on the mountain was both ceremony and farewell. Moses removed Aaron's priestly garments one piece at a time. The linen breeches first, then the woven tunic, then the sash, then the robe with its hem of bells and pomegranates, then the ephod with its two onyx stones engraved with the names of the twelve tribes, then the breastplate with its twelve stones set in gold, then the golden headplate with its inscription: Holy to God.

Each garment he removed from Aaron he placed on Elazar. The transfer was exact, deliberate, witnessed. No garment was set aside. No garment was spared. Elazar stood beside his father and was dressed, piece by piece, in everything his father was being undressed of, until Aaron stood on the mountain in no garments at all and Elazar stood beside him as high priest.

Moses performed this ceremony. He was not a bystander. He was the officiant at his brother's retirement, at his brother's final hour, at the passage of an office held for forty years from the hands of one man to the hands of another. He had done harder things. He had faced Pharaoh. He had stood at Sinai for forty days and forty nights. But the tradition does not record anything quite like this: the moment when Moses removed his brother's clothes and understood that Aaron was standing before him, for the last time, as an ordinary man.

How Aaron Died

Aaron sat down. The tradition says God took his soul with a kiss, the same way the tradition later says Moses died, the death reserved for the perfectly righteous, a death without suffering, a departure so gentle that the soul barely noticed it had left. Aaron's soul went the way it had lived, in holiness, in the service of the sanctuary, in the presence of his brother who had watched over him from the moment Moses first arrived in Egypt and Aaron came out to meet him on the road.

Moses came down alone. Elazar came down beside him, dressed in Aaron's garments, already high priest. The people at the foot of the mountain saw them come down without Aaron and understood. They mourned for thirty days, and the tradition notes that the entire people wept for Aaron, women and men alike, because Aaron had been the one who made peace between quarreling people, who loved peace and pursued it without ever asking whether it was convenient to do so.

What Moses Remembered

When Moses was told he would be gathered to his people, the sages of Sifrei Devarim found particular weight in that promise. He would be gathered to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to Kehat and Amram, to Miriam. And to Aaron. Moses had been present at Aaron's death in a way he had not been present at any of the others. He had held Aaron's robes in his hands. He had watched his brother's face in those last moments on the mountain, and what he saw there was something worth being gathered toward.