The very last pasuk of Parshat Haazinu is very affecting. It reads:
כִּ֥י מִנֶּ֖גֶד תִּרְאֶ֣ה אֶת־הָאָ֑רֶץ וְשָׁ֨מָּה֙ לֹ֣א תָב֔וֹא אֶל־הָאָ֕רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־אֲנִ֥י נֹתֵ֖ן לִבְנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל
For from afar, you will see the land, but you will not come there, to the land I am giving the children of Israel.
Here is Moses- the man who has sacrificed so much for the nation. He has given of his peace, stability, blood, sweat and tears to shepherd the people from Egypt to the Promised Land. And he is being told that he will see the land- but he will not enter. It will forever remain a vision to him- a promise- a dream. But he will not reach it himself.
And what is more- he abides by what God tells him. He could have chosen, like the Mapilim, to take a step into that land to which he had forbidden entry. Yes, God could have killed him. But he could have made the attempt. He doesn’t make the attempt. He surrenders. He obeys God. He sacrifices what he desperately desires because God has asked him to do so.
I believe it was this vision of Moses that led to famous sacrificial scenes in a number of books. I loved these scenes, typing the quotes up and putting them on my blogs, printing them out and taping them into notebooks. In them, I thought, was found true nobility. Man was created, I believed, to sacrifice.
One such famous scene occurs at the end of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
"It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”
Similarly in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:
“We couldn’t stop him because we were the one making him do it. It wasn’t the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting, his big hands driving down on the leather chair arms, pushing him up, rising and standing like one of those moving-picture zombies, obeying orders beamed up at him from forty masters."
That’s who I was, too. I responded to the vulnerability in people, to their pain, and my response was to save them, and to sacrifice whatever was needed to accomplish that. My time. My sleep. My sense of sanity. My sense of self.
But there are limits. There are boundaries. And those of us who live our lives sacrificing for others discover one day that these nonexistent boundaries- these porous boundaries- the ones we haven’t crafted- have to be built. Because you cannot sacrifice for everyone and you cannot exist to save everyone. That is not your role in life.
But wasn’t it Moses’ role? Isn’t Moses our role model? Shouldn’t I strive to be like Moses?
The answer to this question is similar, I think, to the take Dr. Yael Ziegler has on Ruth. She talks about Ruth’s extreme self-sacrifice. She questions whether Ruth ought to be taken as a role model, especially for women. Ruth is willing to sublimate herself, to offer herself up, to literally do everything her mother-in-law says and birth a child whom she gives to her mother-in-law to raise- is this how we want our women to act?
Dr. Ziegler says no. She says there is a very specific subset of people whom we need to act with this sublime selflessness. Specifically, they are the ruling class, the elite, the monarchy. These are the people who are most tempted to be callous and cruel, and thus they are the ones who need this extreme selflessness as a corrective.
Moses was raised within the ruling class. He was raised by the daughter of a man who had no qualms over subjugating an entire people, working them to the bone, and slaughtering their newborns (and per Midrash, bathing in their blood). It makes sense that a child raised within such a system needed to go to the opposite extreme- needed to sacrifice his peace, his time, even his domestic happiness (since according to Rashi Moshe had to separate from his wife because he was always on call to God, and had to be in a state of constant purity) and his final dream- the dream of entering the land. He doesn’t even get to see his own sons, his flesh and blood, succeed him. Moses had to give up everything a man might want.
And we admire him for that. We praise him. He is a role model- but not in this.
There are those of us who are called to the noble streak within these individuals. The Moses who has the challenging life, the life of sacrifice. The David who is tortured in his personal life even while he succeeds in his political life. The Jeremiah who feels fire burning in his bones. We are called to pain, called to suffering, and we can easily persuade ourselves- because our tradition upholds it- that we ought to emulate these characters. We, too, should live lives of pain and of sacrifice so long as we are ennobling and ennabling someone else. In our case it might not be a nation but perhaps it is some individual we think is so holy or so special that they deserve this from us.
This is not healthy. And I think it should be taught as something that is unhealthy. Moses, David and Jeremiah were called and appointed by God. God himself declared that they had to sacrifice- and He did it explicitly. He told Moses he could see the land but could not enter. He, through his prophet Nathan, told David about all the ways he would be punished because of his sin with Batsheba. He forced Jeremiah to speak when he did not wish to. When God calls and speaks to you directly and you are the leader of the generation, then you are truly called to behave this way.
But for everyone else- and that means all of us- it’s not God who is asking us to sacrifice. It’s people. And we should not do it, even when our tradition insidiously wraps itself around us and makes us think we are being holy when we do. Because it’s wrong. It’s not our role. And it will make us sick.
The power of the last sentence in this parsha is the focus on the future. The vision that Moses sees- and the peace it gives him to know that his people will enter the land, even though he cannot. He has accomplished his mission. He has brought them to the brink. He can die content- not tortured- because he is certain of the vision he has seen.
And that’s a different way of interpreting it than the one that comes naturally to me. I like the image of a tragic, tortured Moses, staring out at the land with anguish in his eyes. But I think it’s healthier to imagine a fulfilled Moses, one who is comforted by the vision of the future, and who is able to feel joy on behalf of his people.
When you stand on the mountaintop, what do you see?
Is it your personal anguish and sacrifice that is paramount? Or is it joy because you have brought the nation to the brink- and you trust your successor to take them across?
What if it could be joy? What if it could be trust?
What if you could work hard to make it so?
