Boulder Aish Kodesh

The death of Moshe on the cusp of Eretz Yisrael is like the end of the period between Rosh Hashanah and Shemini Atzeret. Each day of this precious time ushers us further along toward some end, some goal. We are carried in the womb of the Sukkah until we are born; through all of the ushpizin until David Hamelech – malchut – the womb – and then out, into the world. And it is the very same world we left 3 weeks ago to crawl into the womb of spiritual transformation, into the death of Rosh Hashanah, the judgment of Yom Kippur, and the mother-nurturing of Sukkot. We return to the same house with the same walls, the same players on the same stage, and we hope to have been transformed, to have better tools and a better attitude toward participating in the lives we live in a deeper and more meaningful way.

The same failures await us, like Hashem guaranteeing Moshe that the Jews would fail in their relationship to Him. Let us not pretend that they will not come – they will. We hope to be more able to move through them, to humble ask forgiveness before next Elul, to learn from our mistakes and move on.

Like Moshe’s blessings, we hope we have emerged from these holy days with a deep understanding of who we are, what each of us has to offer this broken world. We hope that our common project of living in the confined space of the Sukkah will help us work together toward healing the world, like Moshe’s blessings giving each tribe its role in the larger family.

But Moshe is dead. We cannot ask the question we should have asked, or wanted to ask. We cannot shake the lulav one more time. There will be other forms at other times, but this special time has ended. In the very transition between Moshe and Yehoshua lies the possibility of letting go of one era and taking hold of another.

But as we are reading V’zot Habracha, on Simchat Torah, we are still held in the last moments of the holiday. We still have time together: let us ask for a blessing. Let us ask this time, this holiday, this season, Moshe himself, to bless us forward, to impress upon us deeply all of the emotions we have been through, the new ideas, the inspirations, the commitments. Let us ask to have all of those fruits gathered before our eyes, that we may harvest their abundance on this Holiday of Gathering. For we will need the memory of all of these fruits gathered together as we enter the ground of a new year and an untamed world, with new mind and renewed spirit, as we slowly begin the toil of the field and nurture the pure potential of this year into what will be next year’s harvest.

With Moshe’s death comes the end of the holidays and re-entry into the ‘normal’. As we said, there is no more lulav and no more mitzvah to sit in the Sukkah. But there is one aspect of Sukkot that remains: we can always cry out ‘hosha’na’ – please save!! This is the level of Yehoshua, whose name has the same root as ‘hosha’na’. Yehoshua is not Moshe, and Cheshvan is not Tishrei. The relationship continues, however; only in a different form.

It is specifically Yehoshua that can help us during the time after the holidays, because the period of time after a great revelation is often a vacuum into which Amalek can step. And it is specifically Yehoshua who can fight Amalek¹. When the Jews left Egypt and crossed the sea, they experienced a dry spell in their awareness of Hashem. Just a few days after witnessing immense miracles, they asked, ‘is Hashem with us, or not?’ Just at that moment, Amalek attacks. Rather than fight them himself, Moshe orders Yehoshua to assemble an army and to fight them.

That same vacuum can happen after the holidays when, though we may not have noticed it at the time, we can look back and see that we were actually operating on a very high level. Suddenly, the holidays are over, and we are left without novel tools (as opposed to the habitual ones that can lose their sheen) to connect to G-d, and we might feel directionless. At that moment, Yehoshua can step in and tells us ‘Take Courage!’ and give us the tools to bring that high level into our everyday lives. He can remind us that we can always cry out to G-d, and ask for help in bringing the exceptional clarity afforded by the holidays back into our lives.

As R’ Zilberberg writes² about the time after the holidays, ‘through every word and every plea that a Jew makes, and desires to always be close to G-d, through this, Hashem gives him great strength in order to truly remain close to G-d.’ It is G-d’s desire that we always experience the closeness that the holidays afford – and it was G-d’s desire that the Jews enter the land of Israel, conquer it, build the Temple, and bring the Messianic age. But it is G-d’s desire that we accomplish this ourselves, for by accomplishing it ourselves, we can own it on the deepest level.