The Eternal shall bless you and keep you, the Eternal will make His face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Eternal will lift up His countenance to you and give you peace.
Bamidbar 6:23-26
And Moshe heard that the people were crying… (And said) I alone cannot carry these people.
Bamidbar 11:14
What kept Moshe going for forty long years of dealing with an extremely difficult people—a people who constantly complained, rebelled, and came close to killing him?
It is not surprising that Moshe nearly gave up. More than once, he asked God to let him step down. But in the end, at God’s insistence, he continued despite all the problems.
Only when the Israelites stood at the border of the Land of Israel did God force him to resign, telling him that he would not be allowed to enter the land to which he had led the people all those years. Why?
And why is it that the Israelites constantly complained, when, as we see in the quote above, God had promised to bestow upon them all His blessings, His face shining on them, protecting them, and giving them peace? (Bamidbar 6:22-27)
The perils of peace
The answer is that a blessing can become a curse when it is misunderstood.
That God would bless them and protect them and shine His light on themis perhaps self-evident.
But granting them peace is not.
After all, what is peace?
Peace does not mean mere absence of conflict! It is not mere tranquility or peace of mind. Nor does it mean the absence of doubt.
Peace means an ongoing effort to become more and more virtuous. It is a passage from a lesser to a greater degree of perfection, without ever reaching it. It is a journey, not a destination. It is the voyage itself which is the virtue.
If the world would exist in a state of total tranquility, most people would lose their minds. Nothing would need solving. There would be nearly nothing to strive for.
The constantly becoming God
This ontological approach is reflected in the way God revealed Himself to Moshe:
“Eyeh asher eyeh” – I will be what I shall be.
Shemot 3:14
According to Hasidic teachings this means:I will be your constant fascination. I will constantly surprise you. I will overwhelm you with ongoing mystery. And You will never fully grasp Me.
The true meaning of peace is more than serenity.
John F. Kennedy once said:
Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing of opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.
Address to the United Nations, Sept 20, 1963
This may be the reason for the complaints of the Israelites. The Israelites thought that once they were blessed with peace, they would no longer need to strive for it. It was, in their eyes, a perpetual status quo, which did not require any more effort on their part.
And exactly that drove them to lethargy, which made them extremely nervous.
Boredom is a state of mind characterized by a lack of interest, an absence of stimulation, of challenge. It is a subjective experience that can manifest itself in a variety of ways, including restlessness, apathy, and disinterest.
Punishment or Divine Gift?
And this perhaps answers our first question as well. In the end, God’s not allowing Moshe to enter the Promised Land was not a punishment. Rather it was a Divine favor. Had Moshe settled in the Land, he would have lost all his fervor, his fascination, his ambitions. He had been defined by his striving to reach the Land. Had he actually ended his journey there, he would have lost his raison d’etre, his reason for being and grown old.
But Moshe never lost his vigor: He never truly grew old. “And Moshe was a hundred and twenty years old, his eye was not dim and his strength was not abated.” (Bamidbar 24:7)
Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it so eloquently: “Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart but unspent youth.” (Journal, 1864)
Questions for the Shabbat Table
- Why do you think people often imagine peace as the absence of struggle?
- Can challenges and frustrations sometimes help a person grow more than comfort does?
- Have you ever reached a goal that you thought would make you completely satisfied, only to discover that you still longed for something more?
Diving Deeper
Moshe never entered the Promised Land. Do you think a person sometimes remains spiritually stronger while striving toward a goal than after actually attaining it?
Could it be that Judaism values the search for truth even more than the feeling of having fully found it?
Consider the words of the Kotzker Rebbe: “There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.” And the famous teaching of Rav Kook: “The old shall become new, and the new shall become holy.”
Do these teachings suggest that spiritual life depends on remaining inwardly unfinished?
