Towering Humility: Parashat Shoftim

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Parashat Shoftim
Deuteronomy 16:18 – 21:9

As Moses continues to prepare the Israelites for their future without him, he does not only scold and warn them. He also seeks to reassure them. He promises that God will continue to send the people prophets who will give them guidance as they need it: “A prophet, from your midst, from your brethren, like me, shall the Eternal, your Almighty God, raise up for you.” (Deut. 18:15)

As I discussed last year, this promise raises a difficulty: “It is striking that Moses says that this prophet will be ‘like me.’ This seems to contradict the Torah’s insistence, before (- see Numbers 12:6-8) and later (- see the very last verses of the Torah,  Deut. 34:10-12). It is a basic article of faith that there never was and never will be a prophet like Moses. (See the hymn, Yigdal, based on Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith.)”

Last year I referred to a traditional attempt at resolving that difficulty. But this time I wish to dwell a little longer on the plain words of Moses’ promise and their plain contradiction of our received evaluation of Moses as the unique prophet of Israel, never to have an equal, ever.

It seems to me that what this verse is telling us is simply that Moses did not believe in his own eternal uniqueness! The Torah has already described Moses as “more extremely humble than any person on the face of the earth.” (Num. 12:3) Here we have the pure expression of that humility. Even though Moses had the most intimate relationship with God imaginable, he did not reserve such uniqueness to himself. And even though Moses insisted on the eternal validity of the Divine revelation that he was communicating, he still also believed that this revelation could continue forever, with new prophets arising in future generations.

Thus Moses’ statement expresses absolute humility regarding his own role as a prophet. But it also expresses the most open-ended confidence in the expansive quality of the Torah. If human history would continue to unfold, then, Moses felt, the Torah would have to continue to unfold, as well.

But Moses miscalculated regarding how that unfolding would take place. Eventually prophecy would die out in history, but the need to keep expanding the Torah remained. Who would step in to fill the void left by the absent prophets? Without prophets, who would take upon themselves the role of presenting new words of Torah for the people?

Refusing to give up on keeping the Torah alive, we realized that we would have to do it ourselves.

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Greenstein


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