Moses Sees the Land He Cannot Enter, Then Asks Who Leads Next

There are two kinds of seeing in the Torah, and the rabbis of the Mekhilta and the midrashic schools were precise about distinguishing them. One kind of seeing is given as a gift, as joy, as the opening of a promised future. The other kind is given as sorrow -- the view from the edge of something you will never reach. Both kinds were given to Moses at the end of his life, within the same ascent of Mount Nebo.

The passage in Deuteronomy 34 records that God showed Moses all the land -- from Gilead to Dan, from Naphtali to Ephraim, from Manasseh to the south, and the plain of the Jordan to Jericho, and the coast to the far sea. Rabbi Akiva, one of the great sages of the 2nd century CE, read this as something more than a geographical survey. The verse says the Lord showed Moses all the land; Rabbi Akiva taught that God showed Moses all the recesses of the land of Israel, every hidden valley, every spring, every territory, displayed before him like a set table. Rabbi Eliezer went further: God empowered Moses' eyes to see from one end of the world to the other. The physical capacity of Moses' sight was temporarily expanded to match the scale of what he was being shown.

The passage preserved in the Mekhilta -- the tannaitic commentary on Exodus, compiled in the school of Rabbi Ishmael in the 2nd century CE -- sets this vision of Moses in contrast with the vision given to Abraham. To Abraham, in Genesis 13:14, God said: lift up your eyes and see from the place where you stand. That was a seeing of pleasure. To Moses, God said: go up to this mountain, go up to the summit of Pisgah -- and what Moses saw from there he could never walk through. That was a seeing of pain. The same physical act of looking, the same divine gift of enhanced perception, and an entirely different emotional structure underneath.

The midrash notices: Moses saw with his eyes what Moses did not traverse with his feet. He saw it all. He knew it in the way a person knows something that has been placed before them in perfect clarity, and then watches the door close. The land was completely visible and completely unreachable. This is the specific cruelty and the specific mercy of what God did at Nebo: He did not let Moses die without seeing. He just did not let him enter.

Then, before the final ascent, Moses did something the midrash on Numbers 27 records and expands: he asked God who would lead Israel after him. The verse is: may the Lord, God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint a man over the congregation. But the Midrash Rabbah, developed in the academies of the Land of Israel through the 5th and 6th centuries CE, reads the prayer as containing a more specific anxiety. Moses said: Master of the universe, since you are removing me from the world, tell me who are the shepherds you are installing over your children.

The commentators who follow Rabbi Azarya in this midrash focus on what Moses feared for his own reputation among the patriarchs. He did not want to appear in the world to come having left the flock in disorder, having failed to arrange the succession. The patriarchs -- Abraham, Isaac, Jacob -- were watching. Their descendants were Israel. If Moses died and the nation fell into chaos, the disgrace would be felt by the entire lineage.

Rabbi Yudan bar Simon read the same prayer differently: Moses was concerned for God's name. The nations were watching. If Israel suffered without good leadership, the nations would say that divine justice had erred -- that God knew the nation could not make it and led them to failure anyway, just as they said at the sin of the scouts. Moses was praying not for himself but for the theological honor of the One who sent him.

God's answer, as the midrash records it, is surprising in its indirection. Rather than naming Joshua directly in this passage, God says: by your life, Moses -- if you do not know now, you will know. The greatest of the prophets, the one described as the most outstanding among those who ever spoke in God's name, is told that the answer to his deepest question about the future will come. Not immediately. But it will come.

Rabbi Yosei bar Yirmeya offered the midrash's final observation on Moses' prayer: the prophets were compared to women, he said, because just as a woman is not shy about demanding her household needs from her husband, so the prophets were not shy about demanding Israel's needs from their Father in Heaven. Moses, at the edge of death, looking out over a land he could see and not enter, was still demanding. Still asking. Still pressing for the answer that would secure the future of the people he had carried since Egypt. The seeing of pain and the demand for continuity were both expressions of the same insistence: what God had started, Moses needed to know would be finished, even without him.