Our guest author this week is Rabbinic Intern Shawn Weiss, Ziegler Rabbinical School student and Alumni Fellow of the Flesh Family Sinai Temple Israel Center Rabbinical School Fellowship.

Even Moses’s prayers sometimes go unanswered. When Moses prays to God in this week’s parshah, to “cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan,” after God tells him he will not live to enter the promised land, God promptly rejects Moses’s plea.

“Enough!” God thunders, “Never speak to Me of this matter again!”

It is a jarring moment. One would be forgiven for thinking that only Moses, among the Israelites, would be allowed to enter the promised land. Not the other way around. And it is no less jarring to see Moses plead with God to change God’s mind, like a child begging their parents, and to be denied!

What to make of this unexpected turn of events? 

Denying Moses entry into the promised land, after all that he had done for God and the people Israel, at first seems like a cruel, even tragic, punishment. Imagine stopping a marathon runner with the finish line in sight; or preventing a writer from finishing a decades-long manuscript just prior to completion. 

But God wanted it this way and it behooves us to understand why. 

In interrupting the completion of Moses’s journey, God establishes a different kind of completion: an intergenerational succession plan.

 “Give Joshua his instructions,” God tells Moses, “and imbue him with strength and courage, for he shall go across at the head of this people, and he shall allot to them the land that you may only see.” 

What is for Moses an abrupt end to his own personal journey is a new beginning for the Jewish people. What God is telling us is that it’s not all about Moses and it’s not all about Joshua. It’s not about any one of us. Our journey, as a people, is how we make ourselves known to God.