Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, teaching in Jerusalem, January 2020.
I would like to share not my own interpretation of today’s first reading, but an interpretation by an Orthodox Jewish rabbi from Chicago by the name of Yehiel Poupko. In 2015 I traveled with an interfaith group to Israel that was co-led by Rabbi Poupko. He is a friend of Christians, yet he is firmly and happily Jewish, and I often turn to him for insights about the Hebrew Scriptures, which we Christians have been opening for only twenty short centuries as part of our Holy Book.
As it happens, the story of the death of Moses appears in autumn on the Jewish lectionary calendar, too, and this year that festival, scheduled for October 7th, was marred badly by the terrorist attack in Israel. Since October 7th, of course, the war in Gaza and Israel has only worsened, and we hold in prayer all innocent life in peril, including citizens of Gaza (most of them children) and the Israeli hostages and their terrified and grieving families. As that region continues to suffer the ravages of war and injustice, I invite you to hear a Jewish reflection on the death of Moses, as we join countless people of all faiths who pray to God for peace, and for justice.
Here is Rabbi Poupko’s interpretation. I have changed some of the Hebrew words and names to help this be easier to understand in our hearing, but left others, most notably the Hebrew pronunciation of Adam, a-DAHM, and the non-Anglicized Hebrew name for Moses, which is Moshe. Rabbi Poupko writes:
“The [Torah reading on the Jewish calendar] enables an unusual meeting this week. Adam and Moshe, these two who begin and end the Torah, will have their once a year reunion. With the conclusion of the Torah reading cycle on Simkhat Torah [the Day of Rejoicing in the Torah, an autumn holiday], we focus not just on the loss of Moshe, but we review his whole life. Indeed, there was once a time, which has now been lost, when Simkhat Torah was both a happy and a sad day. It was a day when following the Torah reading, [poems] that extolled the greatness of Moshe, that reviewed his life accomplishments, and that lamented his passing were known, read, and chanted in the synagogue. Sadly, there are few synagogues left in which these [poems] are known, let alone read. No sooner do we finish reading about the death of Moshe than we begin the Torah reading again and we meet the first person, Adam. These two, Moshe the last person of the Torah meets up with Adam the first person of the Torah. These two have an enormous amount in common. Given what they have in common there are also some equally enormous differences.
Adam and Moshe are the two loneliest people in the Torah. By the time Moshe dies Aharon and Miriam have preceded him in death. His wife and two children have slipped into oblivion. He is all alone on [Mount Nebo].
However, his greatest friend, the love of his life, is with him, the Kadosh Barukh Hu [the name for God which means ‘the Holy One, Blessed Be He’]. Moshe is kissed into eternity [by God]. When Adam, fashioned by the very hand of the Kadosh Barukh Hu, is kissed into life he is utterly and absolutely alone; except of course for the presence of the Kadosh Barukh Hu. For this first person of the Torah, the Kadosh Barukh Hu provides the kindnesses of food, companionship, and clothing. For Moshe, with whom the Torah closes, the Kadosh Barukh Hu performs the kindness of clothing him for burial and is his constant companion. Whereas Adam is told that he will eat lehem – bread – by the sweat of his brow, Moshe tells us that when he was forty days with the Kadosh Barukh Hu, he did not need lehem – bread. Both Adam and Moshe want to know everything that there is to know. That of course is what it means to be a person possessed of an element of the divine intellect. Adam wants to know all there is to know and so he eats of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, asserting that he knows what the Kadosh Barukh Hu knows. Moshe also wants to know everything there is to know, and so he asks the Kadosh Barukh Hu, ‘Let me see Your very Being.’ The Kadosh Barukh Hu tells him that is not possible. Moshe accepts that. [We heard that story last week.] Moshe is then given the gift of the Name. Adam does not possess the Name. [And so] the Kadosh Barukh Hu addresses the loneliness of Adam by creating a partner for him. The Kadosh Barukh Hu addresses the loneliness of Moshe by becoming his companion.
It is Adam who is given Eden and then expelled. It is Moshe who first restores Eden in the [Tabernacle]. (Please recall that there are kruvim – cherubs – only at the gateway to Eden and in the [Tabernacle] above the Ark; that the Tree of Knowledge is realized in the tree shaped Menorah; that one of the rivers that flows out of Eden is Gihon, which then lends its name to the spring below the Temple Mount. Adam spends most of his life east of Eden looking back on what was lost. Moshe arrives just east of Eden and spends an eternity there looking over the river in the knowledge that he has brought the Jewish people to the restored Eden, the Land of Israel and Jerusalem. Moshe restores what Adam squandered. And we are still in [the Garden of] Eden. The tragedy is that we do not know that.”
I invite your reflections on the death of Moses, the provocative words of Jesus of Nazareth, who for us Christians is sometimes called the New Moses, this season of autumn, or this perilous time in world history; and I invite any other ideas, questions, or insights that the Spirit may have given to you.
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Preached at the 5:00pm liturgy on the Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25A), October 29, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington. This was a short homily designed to prompt shared reflections from others in the assembly.
Deuteronomy 34:1-12
Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46
Source: Torah Matters, a weekly emailed reflection on the Torah passage, by Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, October 11, 2017.