I was in synagogue last Saturday for a bat mitzvah. The Torah portion was from Numbers, when the Israelites are in Transjordan on the outskirts of the Promised Land. We read what one scholar has called the "most enigmatic incident of the Pentateuch." The people are angry at their leaders, and dying of thirst. God commands Moses to assemble the people and speak to a rock, then the rock will produce water. So Moses says, "Hear now ye rebels!" and thwacks the rock with a rod, twice. The water comes out, but God is enraged. He says Moses "believed me not," and as a result God enforces a death penalty: Moses and his brother Aaron will not enter the promised land. They both die beforehand. Aaron dies when Moses takes him up on Mount Hor, and first strips him of his priestly garments.
Our rabbi told of a famous midrash, or commentary, on the section, in which scholars of the Middle Ages imagined God tasking Moses to tell Aaron of his death. Moses is afraid, and holds back on telling Aaron, even as he leads him up the mountain, to a cave filled with the dead.
I found the story frightening and absurd. God’s punishment of the brothers is arbitrary and extreme. Our bat mitzvah girl sermonized that Moses was being punished for his "arrogance." With death? Jstor says many scholars have tried to rationalize the punishment. A waste of time, I say. (And another point for Christopher Hitchens’ attack on religion.) Then, too, Moses leading his brother up to a lonely death he hasn’t anticipated reminded me of Tony Soprano snuffing his nephew, Chris, in an auto accident in one of the final episodes of the hit HBO series, then coming back to the family and telling a bunch of lies. The Bible justifies a lot of violence.
The rabbi had an interesting interpretation of the episode. He said that we are all afraid to talk about death. Even God is afraid to tell Aaron of his death; and he makes Moses do the job. The rabbi then told a story of his own. A woman was dying. Her husband tried every day to jolly her. "You look great," when she wasn’t looking great. And he planned a trip to Florida. Every day he talked about the trip she would take when she got better. Finally he even bought tickets and brought them in to her. A friend of the couple visited , and the woman she said to him, "I know it’s a charade, but he does it to keep my spirits up, and I go along with him to keep his spirits up." The friend told the rabbi the story. The friend wondered if it was such a good plan. The rabbi said, No: The couple had cheated one another of the knowledge of death, and the resulting communication/understanding.
My wife, who lost a close friend not long ago, flared at the lesson. She said, "All you want in that situation is to try and find some pleasure in the day and gain peace of mind and acceptance. This couple had worked out a way of keeping their spirits up as the wife was dying. The rabbi would take away their one form of solace, and make them even more miserable about the terrible events they both knew lay ahead. This couple both knew what was happening, and they had found their own way of trying to make peace with death." (I’d note that my wife is no fan of Christian ministers, either.)
I am rather inclined to agree with the rabbi.
I have looked at a fair few reports about people facing death and it struck me that once they accepted it as inevitable the struggle was over, and often fear disappeared.
I have to think here of what the Dutch author Godfried Bomans once wrote. He confessed that he was very afraid of dying. But so he was once, as a university student, of 'viva voce' exams (in his time virtually all exams at Dutch universities were 'viva voce').
However, as soon as he had entered the room of the professor the fear had gone. He hoped this would also be the case when he would be on the threshold of death.
As a matter of fact he died suddenly and totally unexpectedly in middle age.
I have always been intrigued by similarities between the stories of Romulus and Remus and the stories of Moses and Aharon (see link to en.wikipedia.org
). Graves might tell us that both tales are variants of the story of the sacred king and his tanist (in the sense used by Frazer in The Golden Bough).
I also see some similarity with the occultation of the twelveth imam of Shiite Islam or Jesus' empty tomb in the Gospels.
If no one knows what happened to Moses (or at least knows where his grave is), his authority (or that of his sacred law) never formally ends as some tribes claimed after the death of Muhammad.
One might also wonder if the burial story is tacked on to an early version of the story in which Moses is transformed into a semideity rather like Romulus. We have some descriptions of sects that worshipped a semidivine Moses in Greco-Roman times.
Phil – Thank you for the very interesting post. It includes two topics I'd like to comment on: (1) my general reaction to inexplicable (and to us, brutal and irrational) acts of God that we read about in the Old Testament (understand I'm coming mostly from my Christian background so will stick with that terminology) and (2) how we as humans handle the inevitable prospect of death.
I will only address the 2nd topic here, hoping I can come back to the first one in the next day or two.
I certainly understand and appreciate your wife's viewpoint about the couple's way of dealing with the wife's terminal illness. All human relationships involve charade from time to time, so I see nothing wrong with theirs if it gives each of them some comfort. But I also presume that the moment the charade ceased to make either of them comfortable, the relationship would be solid enough for either the man or his wife to address the reality of the situation without fear of the consequences.
I'm reminded of one of Kurt Vonnegut's extraterrestrial creations — the race of Tralfamadorians (sp?… going by memory but think that's close) who were able to travel through time and who all were aware of the inexplicable way their universe would end, but they just chose to live in the more pleasant segments of time instead.
Of course, we don't have that choice. But dealing with death is a very personal and usually an individual matter, as anyone who has spent time with someone who is slowly dying will tell you. As Woody Allen once said, it's different than sex in that you can do it alone and no one's gonna laugh at you.
I have more empathy than your wife apparently does for ministers and rabbis, however. They deal daily with the nigh-impossible task of trying to help people in their most difficult moments, and they have their human shortcomings and doubts just like the rest of us. It's not a job that I could do, day in and day out, so I respect what they do, while I stop short of revering them. No human is worthy of reverence. We are here to try and help each other get through this thing called life– whatever it is, and that's about all we should expect from each other.
1. This is where I find Karaism exceptionally useful. Instead of running for interpretation to rabbis, try reading other commentaries, but from the beginning start to think on your own, not CHOOSE between what different rabbis say. That is the difference – intense thinking versus intense judging whose answer is better right from the start.
My think about this episode is follwoing – if you were told "say", don't you freaking hit!
Judging from other parts of the Bible, the act of SAYING and the act of DOING have much less in common in the realm of God than in the realm of men. (A propos -, I always write God and not G-d, because it is senseless to project the limitations on usages of Hebrew into other languages, another thing that becomes obvious the moment you start thinking on your own parallel to reading the Sages).
That difference (words vs. physical action) could very well reflect much deeper unsubordination in the relationship between Hashem and Moses than we think using human standards. Do not also forget that the difference between saying and striking also constitutes the difference between "asking" and "ordering" and may very well be an act of rebellion on a much deeper level that we can see it.
Now about death. One of the absolutely most beautiful things about Judaic thought is how it approaches the problem of thought about death among alive. It was said that death is a "door", but knowing what is behind that door wont' help you in any way before you open it and therefore is USELESS.
Now if you think about it, just to know that it is a DOOR answers the main question and removes the biggest logical antagonism of the idea of death – as end of hope.
IMHO (I am sorry if it makes your wife angry, Phil) when people face coming death, they should celebrate the imminent Grace of God who PUT that DOOR there for us and together indulge in fantasies of what could be behind it, clearly knowing that these are just fantasies, but they serve as a glue between generations who already left, who are leaving and those who will be left…
As one of such fantasies one can read, not as a manual, like Tibetan Buddhists, but just as entertainment, the Tibetan Book of Dead. Certainly one has to treat it exactly as I mentioned before – as fantasie and may be some food for thought.
My favorite prof in literature here in Cologne once said that religious rituals for burials contains human wisdom over the ages about how to deal with dead.
I would feel like a cheater if I had to spend time with somebody dieing and avoided the issue. It's much too important a point in life to ignore.
It feels my mother suffered after her sister died. She died when the rules were still rigid, the-dieing-person-must-not-know. What bothered her was that everybody around her knew, so why did everybody assume her sister would not notice, not feel it? Wouldn't at least she have left signs that told her sister all without words. Who protects whom in such a situation. The dieing the survivors that have to live on? Should we ask them to do this for us?
It takes away the chance of a final goodbye and maybe the chance to talk about things not considered important before, things one had no time to talk about or that were simply to hard to confront. With somebody dieing the perceptions must change. She is on her way to step out of our time.
The real test, Phil, is when your wife will be confronted with the situation. Dead is one of the biggest taboos in our societies. No, I wouldn't agree with her in this respect I think.