Parashat Pinchas 5768

In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Pinchas, we learn of a groundbreaking legal case. A man name Zelophehad dies and leaves no male heirs. His five daughters petition to inherit his possessions. Moses brings the case before God, and Adonai exclaims, “The plea of Zelophehad’s daughters is just: you should give them a hereditary holding among their father’s kinsmen; transfer their father’s share to them” (Numbers 27:7).

The encounter with Zelophead’s daughters is immediately followed with a very different sort of divine decree. “Adonai says to Moses, ‘Ascend these heights of Abarim and view the land that I have given to the Israelite people. When you have seen it, you too shall be gathered to your kin, just as your brother Aaron was’” (Numbers 27:12). Yes, directly after asking Moses to ensure the daughters’ inheritance, God instructs Moses to climb to the heights of a tall mountain and look over the Promised Land, the land which Moses himself will never enter. God shows Moses the land and lets him know that he will die before he ever enters it.

At this point in our narrative, the great Moses, whom we have followed from birth to old age, no longer looms mightily over the people. Moses’ brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam, have recently passed away. The people have tried again and again to overthrow his leadership. Moses has proven unable to overcome his tendencies toward anger. And, while Moses continues to stand before God and the Israelites, his fate is also known: Neither he nor the people he led out of slavery will ever step foot into the Promised Land he first prophesied about so many years ago.

Rashi, the great Medieval Torah commentator, wonders why the Torah would follow a passage about the daughters’ inheritance with the decree for Moses to climb the mountain and look out over the future he will never know. What is the link between these two stories? Rashi imagines that the case of inheritance must have stirred up a number of deep feelings and assumptions in Moses. Rashi, quoting Midrash, imagines that this inheritance case (filled with sweet promises of the future) might have led Moses to begin re-imagining what the future might yet hold for him. Maybe, Moses might have thought, his future would be different than God had previously ordained. Rashi envisions Moses thinking to himself: God has asked me to deal with these laws of inheritance, perhaps God’s decree that I must die in the wilderness has been annulled and I will enter the Promised Land.

When God asks Moses to look over the land, a land which he will never enter, God is acting with compassion. The Torah knows that a change in one’s reality can be difficult. How could anyone expect Moses to fully assimilate this new reality into his consciousness? For year’s Moses had envisioned himself leading his people into the Promised Land. How could things have turned out so differently? This week’s Torah portion opens up us as readers to the realities of lost expectations. Moses imagined his future one way, but it will be another. By gently reminding Moses of what will be, God helps to reorient Moses to his “new normal.”

Sometimes life leads all of us down paths we would not choose for ourselves. All of us face disappointments, losses, or unexpected changes. It is natural, Torah teaches us, to resist these new courses. However, we come to learn this week that healing often begins with acceptance and that no matter where our future takes us, God remains by our side. This is not the only time that in Torah that God will remind Moses of his changed future. This is a step in a process. A good reminder for us all.