Parshat V'Zot HaBeracha

Daniel W - October 10, 2025

This week's parashah is V'Zot HaBeracha, the very last of them. Simchas Torah is on Tuesday, and then we start the whole thing all over again - the flow of the Jewish year operates in a cyclical sort of time, very different from the cosmological, linear time that I'll get to in a minute.

V'Zot HaBeracha consists of the last two chapters of Devarim. Chapter 33 contains the blessing of each of the 12 Tribes of Israel, which is fascinating and poetic and mysterious and lengthy. Chapter 34 is much shorter. It begins with G-d showing Moses the land of Israel from atop Mt. Nebo, today located in Jordan. (It's a generally agreed-upon location, unlike many others mentioned in the Tanakh). G-d shows Moses the land, tells him that it's the land that was promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants, and then reports that Moses will not be going in himself. Then Moses dies, and we're told that no one knows where he's buried. The end.

There's a lot going on here in just a few verses. It's a big moment, the death of the prophet. So I turned to Sifre Devarim for some guidance, a collection of midrash written down by (largely) a group of 2nd century rabbis associated with Rabbi Akiva. These rabbis suggested some great, spooky stuff related to the state of Moses's body after his demise.

Devarim 34:7 reads "Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died; his eyes were undimmed and his vigor unabated." "His vigor unabated" is a translation of "וְלֹא־נָ֥ס לֵחֹֽה" - except it could just as easily mean "his moisture never departed." Sifre Devarim includes the suggestion that this is exactly what happened, that if you poked Moses's body after his death he would still be kinda moist - that moisture would "blossom" from his corpse. Between that and the undimmed eyes, we have the suggestion of something kind of rare - is it what a Catholic would call incorruptibility? Is Moses undead? A vampire, or a zombie?

We have no answers because Judaism, unlike Catholicism and vampirology, has no real need to fold this into a larger taxonomy. That Moses isn't part of a larger phenomenon of moist prophets is, in fact, exactly the point. Moses is an anomaly, a unique figure. This becomes explicit just a few verses later, when we are told that Moses was the last person to ever speak "face to face" with G-d - "פָּנִ֖ים אֶל־פָּנִֽים." There's no need to identify what's happening to him in reusable terms, because Moses is entirely alone. He is the last descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who doesn't get to inhabit their Promised Land, and with no children of his own to inhabit it either.

And perhaps this is why he is given a truly astonishing experience, at least in the terms of a Sifre Devarim midrash to 34:2. This comes amid the description of the surveying of the land from the top of Mt. Nebo. G-d points Moses "to the summit of Pisgah, opposite Jericho; Gilead as far as Dan; all Naphtali; the land of Ephraim and Manasseh; the whole land of Judah as far as the Western Sea." Except that last bit is re-interpreted by the rabbis. "הַיָּ֥ם הָאַחֲרֽוֹן" is not the proper name for the Mediterranean Sea, it is simply a direction. "The sea at the far end," from Moses's viewpoint on the mountain. In Joshua 1, which is this reading's Haftarah, the very same sea is just called "יָּ֥ם הַגָּד֖וֹל," the "big sea."

What if, the rabbis ask, we are not just mean to read it as "הַיָּ֥ם הָאַחֲרֽוֹן" but "היום האחרון" - the day at the far end, the day of the dawning of the Messianic Age. What if, in this last moment, G-d gave Moses a vision of the entirety of history, from creation to conclusion?

Speaking as a historian, that sounds like the ideal trip. But it's also a fascinating assertion of how we might conceive of biblical time. While the Jewish year may be cyclical, and therefore the rhythms of our Jewish lives, the sense of cosmological time in this midrash is not. There was once a beginning and there will be an end. Moses, standing on a mountaintop somewhere in the middle, is given a full view of this entire timeline. On a clear day, you can see forever.

What do we make of this? And, more importantly, where do we see ourselves? Are we closer to Moses or are we closer to the Messiah? And, more importantly, do we behave as if we are in the middle or at the end?

This isn't just an abstract question - much of our contemporary political chaos is the direct result of powerful people believing quite literally that the end is nigh. And while we tend to scoff at things like the Rapture and other evangelical Christian nonsenses, there is a Jewish dimension to this as well. What does it mean to view history as something with an ideological, political fulfillment? Is the State of Israel not often represented as some sort of long-heralded ethno-religious conclusion?

We talked a few months ago about the Book of Joshua and how it was used as a political tool, first by David Ben-Gurion in the 1950s and then by extremist settlers in the West Bank in the 1970s (and ever since). This week's Haftarah comes from Joshua, chapter 1; a useful reminder that to use its text as a contemporary political guidebook is wildly unreasonable. In Joshua 1:4, the boundaries of the land promised to the Israelites grows as far as "the whole Hittite country" in the North and as far East as the Euphrates. It's a comically vast "Greater Israel," and it is also wildly different from the Promise Land shown to Moses, looking West from Mt. Nebo just a page earlier in the Tanakh, Devarim 34:1-3. Of course, that has not stopped a variety of Zionist extremists from taking it as a proclamation to be fulfilled.

And regardless of the particularly proposed boundaries, we are surrounded by the argument that the State of Israel is the fulfillment of a clear directive in both our religious texts and in our political history. That it is an conclusion to exile, a promise kept, a realization of a destiny that was somehow always present in the Tanakh despite its many, many inconsistencies. The position of Zionism, at least philosophically and emotionally, is that we are living in an "end time."

And that feels bad! Not only because it aligns so deeply with the Christian Nationalists of America, who believe that a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine is a precondition to their own end times. But also because the whole vibe is so deeply Christian. Once again, I think an under-used critique of religious Zionism is that it is, in fact, much closer in its theology and in its fundamental assumptions to extremist Protestant Christianity than it is to actual Rabbinic Judaism.

There is a tremendous amount of flattening that happens in Christianity, particularly in terms of the way time is conceived. Everything before Christ is a foretelling of his arrival - everything after is a reflection of it, and a foretelling his inevitable return. The end days are always now, and everything you do is in preparation for the end days.

There's a sculpture on Mt. Nebo today, built in the 20th century by an Italian artist, invited by the Orthodox monastery that occupies the site. It's a depiction of Moses and the moment in which he crafted a bronze snake (Bamidbar 21:8-9). It also looks like a crucifix. The metaphor doesn't quite work and it doesn't really have much to do with Moses's death - but that's not the point. The point is a supersessionist one, the reduction of Moses and his narrative from a complex network of metaphors into a flat visual simile, from the complex life of a prophet down to a simple prophetic symbol for the coming of Christ.

Zionism is also about flattening.

It flattens the many ethnicities of Jewish heritage into a single people, in an often violent manner that most often targets Jews that are furthest from whiteness. It flattens all of Jewish diasporic history into one long disaster, without its centuries of luminaries and achievements. It flattens the multitude of Jewish languages, political ideologies, melodies, cuisines, and ways of being into the assertion of monoculture. It flattens community into nation. It's not "two Jews, three opinions," but rather "15.2 million Jews, one opinion." It is positioned against diversity of narrative, against the messiness of experience, against history itself.

To me, that feels extremely un-Jewish. Rabbinic Judaism and its cultural expressions have historically been the antithesis of flattening. It's about digging through all the layers and considering what it might mean if that יָם is actually a יום and there's something trippy behind it. The study of Jewish history should explore all of its multitudes, all of its tiny variations and bizarre anecdotes and competing visions of the future.

There's also something fundamentally arrogant, I think, about believing oneself to be in the end times. It's like a cosmological sort of Main Character Syndrome. If even Moses, the closest thing the Torah has to a protagonist, didn't get to participate in the end of his own story, who are we to claim the end for ourselves?

Moreover, we have all the more to gain by asserting ourselves as somewhere in the middle. We gain the future, first off, with its abstract mysteries and its multitude of possibilities. We get to reject nihilism and doomerism, and resist the urge to simply give up in the face of both Zionist triumphalism and corporate-accelerated climate disaster. And we get to create new dreams, forged in new arguments and tempered by the shared assumption that we, like Moses, can see far into the distance.