Moses and David Will Shepherd Israel at the End of Days

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Draw No Nearer

A bush was burning in the back of the wilderness and not going out, and Moses left the flock standing to walk over and look at it. He got close. A voice stopped him where he was. Draw no nearer.

Take off your shoes, and then the terms. The honor coming to him was his and would go no further: not to his sons, not to his sons' sons, not one inch past his own lifetime. And there were two things in the world already spoken for, and he was not to put a hand on either. The priesthood belonged to Aaron and to Aaron's children after him. The kingship belonged to David and the house of David.

Aaron was in Egypt, alive, an older brother Moses had not seen in decades. David had not been born and would not be for centuries. Moses stood barefoot in front of a fire that would not eat its own fuel and was told, before he had agreed to anything, the exact shape of what he would never be allowed to hold.

He took the job.

One Sentence at the Rock

Forty years later the water ran out again at Kadesh and the people came at him again, and he stood in front of the rock with the staff in his hand and said, "Hear now, you rebels."

That sentence cost him the country.

The sages who worked over it did not pretend the punishment was proportionate. They reached for an image from a wardrobe. A moth gets into a garment and does not tear it, does not burn it, simply eats the thing quietly until there is nothing left to wear. Every good thing Moses had wanted was in that one wish, to walk across the river and stand in the land, and it went the way of a coat in a chest.

Rav Aha looked at where it ended and said the hard version out loud. The man who had been set up as a god over Pharaoh was now flat on the ground, begging.

After All This Labor

God told him his days were drawing near.

"Master of the world," Moses said. "After all this labor, You say to me that my days are drawing near? I shall not die. I shall live and tell what the Lord has done."

"You cannot," God said. "That is all of man."

Moses tried a different door. "Then one thing before my death. Let me go in, and let every gate in heaven be split open and every deep place under the earth, so that they all see with their own eyes that there is nothing besides You."

He was offering to trade his own crossing for a public proof that God was alone in the world, which was the one thing he knew heaven wanted more than it wanted him on the far bank.

God did not take it. What He said instead was that Moses had spoken about there being no other, and He would say the same about Moses: no prophet has risen in Israel like him, and none has since. The man asked for a river crossing and got a sentence written about him. He died on the wrong side of the water with the sentence.

The Throne Was Not Settled Until They Sang

There had been one morning when he held everything.

The sea had closed, the chariots were rolling in the surf, and Moses opened his mouth on the shore and the whole nation came in behind him. Rabbi Berekhya said in the name of Rabbi Abahu what that song did. God has existed from eternity, and even so His throne was not settled and He was not known in His own world until His children stood on a beach and sang. It is the difference between a king and an emperor. A king rules. Then he fights a war, and wins it, and the people who watched him win it raise him.

Centuries later a man in the hills of Judah wrote that he would not be afraid of the multitude of people who came against him in battle. The rabbis reading that line heard an older voice under it. Moses had counted the nations around him and said they were more numerous than he was, and had been told, flatly, not to be afraid of them. The same fear, the same answer, the shepherd with the staff and the shepherd with the harp saying it four centuries apart.

Seven Shepherds and a Man in the Middle

When the end comes, there will be seven of them walking with the Messiah, and the Talmud sets them out by name and by position. David stands in the middle. Adam, Seth, and Methuselah are on his right. Abraham, Jacob, and Moses are on his left.

Look at where they put him. Not at the head of it. On the left hand of the shepherd boy from Bethlehem, close enough to touch the crown he was warned away from at a burning bush before that boy's ancestors had left Egypt.

Moses never got the land, never got the priesthood, never got the throne, and never got to pass any of it to a son. What he gets, at the end, is a place in the line, and the shepherd boy standing on his right.