A Simple Farewell (1976)
The theme that dominates these days is that of farewell. Shemini Atzeret comes at the tail end of Sukkot, which itself is the conclusion of the whole High Holiday season, including Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The Rabbis explain Shemini Atzeret, this one-day celebration at the end of the holiday season, as a special day set aside by God. He may be compared, they say, to a king who invited his children for a feast for a number of days. When the time came for him to take leave of them, he said to them, “My children, please stay with me for a while, even for only one more day; it is difficult to take leave of you.”And the biblical figure who dominates this holiday, when we read the last portion of the Torah, is that of Moses delivering his last discourse and then dying.There is something pathetic about Moses in this role. He is a man who looms larger than life itself. Yet his death is so very human! He wants so desperately to live that he is even reduced to begging: “And I pleaded with the Lord at that time, saying... let me, please, cross over and see that good land.” The Rabbis fill in the gaps in this biblical account of the dialogue between God and Moses, and they add that Moses said: “If I cannot come in as the leader, let me come in at the end of the procession as an ordinary Jew. And if I cannot come in alive, let me at least come in dead, to be buried in the Promised Land.” But the divine response was, “No – you shall not cross over there.” Moreover, the Tradition adds that Moses wrote the last words of the Torah by himself, with his quill dipped into an ink made of his own tears: “And Moses died there” – there, on the plains of Moab, not in his Promised Land.When the Rabbis approach this story of the death of Moses, they make a number of interesting remarks, one of which has always astonished me. Rabbi Samlai taught: “The Torah begins with an act of lovingkindness, and concludes with an act of lovingkindness. In the beginning, as it is written, ‘And the Lor…
