Moses Is Still Suffering With Us in the Final Exile

The Shepherd Who Did Not Stop at the Grave

Moses died on Mount Nebo at the age of a hundred and twenty. He saw the land he would not enter. He lay down. He was gathered. The Torah says God buried him in a valley and no one knows the place of his burial to this day. The plain reading is that he is gone, as surely as any man who lived and died is gone. The plain reading misses everything.

The Tikkunei Zohar, compiled in late thirteenth-century Castile, does not consider Moses finished. It gives him a title: Ra'aya Mehemna, the Faithful Shepherd. This title is not a memorial. It is a job description. A faithful shepherd does not manage the flock from a comfortable distance. He goes into the same terrain, faces the same cold, the same exposure, the same danger. The flock does not graze in safe meadows while the shepherd sits indoors watching from a window. Moses does not rest behind the world watching Israel suffer from the other side of death.

He is in it with them. Inside the exile, bearing it in his own body, taking on the wounds as an intercessor takes them: from the inside, with his own substance.

What the Final Exile Requires

The final exile, in the kabbalistic understanding, is not simply the longest exile. It is the exile of maximum hiddenness, the period described in Deuteronomy 31:18 as the hiding of God's face. The prophets have fallen silent. The Temple is gone. The Shekhinah, who traveled with Israel through earlier exiles as a visible if anguished presence, is now so deeply hidden that people argue about whether she is there at all.

In this darkness, the Tikkunei Zohar in section 108 describes Moses taking on a specific function. Multiple souls can inhabit a single body for the purpose of tikkun, repair. The great souls of the dead are not imprisoned in their own histories. They can enter the present to do what the present requires. Moses, whose soul carries the weight of the entire Torah and the entire Exodus, enters the bodies of those in exile to suffer with them and through that suffering to work from within what cannot be worked from without.

The Argument Moses Made Before He Died

Moses argued with God about dying. The tradition preserves those arguments at length: he listed his accomplishments, he named his services, he asked to be allowed to enter the land even as an animal, even as a bird. God refused each request. The gate was closed. He had struck the rock instead of speaking to it, and that was the reason given, though the mystical tradition suspects the reason goes deeper than a single moment of anger.

What the Tikkunei Zohar finds in those arguments is not defeat but preparation. Moses, who could not cross the Jordan in his body, will cross it in a different mode. The soul that argued with God about dying carries that argument into every generation of exile. It refuses to simply accept that Israel must suffer alone. It pushes, as Moses pushed, against the decree of abandonment, working from within the suffering to find the opening that the decree left.

How the Shepherd Carries the Flock

The Tikkunei Zohar's image of Moses in exile is specific. He does not hover above Israel offering encouragement. He descends into them. The word used in kabbalistic literature for this kind of soul-entry is ibur, the impregnation of one soul into another, a temporary joining that adds the greater soul's capacity to the smaller one's struggle. A person in the depths of exile who suddenly finds the strength to hold on, to pray when prayer feels impossible, to maintain the identity of Israel when the pressure to abandon it is enormous, may be carrying more than their own strength.

The Faithful Shepherd has not stopped shepherding. The valley where his body lies unknown is not his address. His address is wherever the flock is, and the flock is in exile, and the exile has not ended.