[Avodah] Die!

[Akiva Miller]

.
I was struck by the grammar of Devarim 32:50, where Hashem tells Moshe
Rabenu, "Die on the mountain which you are ascending..." According to my
verb lists, the very first word here, "u'moos" , is in the
tzivui (imperative, command) tense.

Many mitzvos are phrased in the imperative tense, such as "Sh'ma -
Listen!". And many others are phrased in the future tense, such as
"V'ahavta - You will love"; which I understand to be a rather polite way of
expressing a command. It *sounds* like a mere prediction about the future,
but one cannot deny that it is, in fact, a command. The reverse seems to be
happening here, and at first glance, Hashem seems to be simply telling
Moshe about what is going to happen, rather than issuing any orders.

In the version of the story of Moshe's death that I'm familiar with, Moshe
was lying down, and with a "kiss" Hashem took his neshama. A lengthy
version of this story can be found in the 7 Adar section of Eliyahu Kitov's
"Book of our Heritage", and on pages 407-409 of "The Midrash Says" on
Devarim. In that version, Moshe was reluctant to surrender his neshama, but
ultimately acquiesced. In fact, Ibn Ezra explicitly interprets "moos" not
as "die", but as "*prepare* to die". Rabenu Bechaiye even quotes Ibn Ezra
and builds upon him, explaining that dying and sleeping are not possible
for a person to do immediately, even if one would want to, and therefore it
doesn't make sense to use these verbs in the command tense.

So I was intrigued to find the command/imperative form here. On the most
simple pshat level, Hashem is not telling Moshe *that* he will die, rather
He is commanding Moshe to do so: "Die!"

Mulling this over in my head, purely from a literary perspective, I felt
that this usage might appear in a particularly violent story about good
guys and bad guys, and one of them (it doesn't really matter which) has
cornered his enemy, and is about to give the final death-blow, and screams
"Die!" As it turns out, that's pretty close to what happened to Iyov. This
word "moos" appears in exactly one other place in Tanach, that being Iyov
2:9, where Iyov's wife offers him some advice on how to end his suffering:
"Curse G-d and die!" Tellingly, Rashi on that pasuk in Iyov tells us that
the verb is a command just like in Devarim 32:50.

What emerges from this - in MY mind - is a very different story than the
medrash I cited above. Moshe did not *allow* his body to die. Rather,
Hashem commanded and Moshe obeyed.

I want to suggest that when Rabenu Bechaiye said that humans are unable to
sleep or die at will, that applies only to ordinary humans. It does not
apply to humans who could survive 40 days and nights without food or water,
and certainly not to humans who were able to travel to a place from where
they could see Hashem's "back". In other words, when the time came, Hashem
"kissed" Moshe, and Moshe's neshama deliberately and actively went to a
place not much different from where he had already been on past occasions;
he died.

Thoughts?

Akiva Miller
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