The Precise Thing for Every Moment

In Bamidbar chapter 27, God tells Moses that his life is drawing to a close. Moses’ concern, upon hearing this news, is not for himself but for the people. They will need a new leader. He says to God: 

16. Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation,

17. Who may go out before them, and who may go in before them, and who may lead them out, and who may bring them in; that the congregation of the Lord be not as sheep which have no shepherd.

Wait a minute! Isn’t there a person who has been groomed for the leadership for the past 39 years - Joshua? He was placed in charge of the battle against Amalek. He was the only one Moses took with him (at least partway) up Mt Sinai. He was at the Tent of Meeting with Moses. He was one of the only two good spies. Isn’t it obvious that he is to be the successor, having been mentored by Moses, having spent all these years learning from him, and being the only Israelite with the military experience necessary to conquer the land?

So why does Moses phrase it as if there is no specific candidate, and his request is for God to choose “someone”? Does Moses really expect God to reply, “Ok, appoint Joe Shmoe.”

I’ve been pondering this question and for me, the point emerging from this one brief interchange is that we should never think we know God’s will. Even Moses, the prophet who “knew” God better than any human, needed to humbly acknowledge that God’s will is connected to a larger picture that we can never fully fathom, and therefore there may be surprises. Moreover, even if God’s favour seemed in the past to have been leaning towards Joshua, that doesn’t mean that at this moment it is still the same.

Important to note: This does not mean that God is capricious and acts on whims. What it means is that life is dynamic. Every moment comes with new energies, new strategies, and new mindful behaviour. As the verse is Psalms says, “Today, if you listen to his voice” and as Rebbe Nahman of Breslov points out, “This is to remind us that we must do our living in the present, in today. Every day, every hour has its own specific work, regardless of the past.”

This is a lesson I learned from Yemima Avital, creator of the Yemima method (see my article here for more): that every moment has its diyuk, its precise action. So Moses, accordingly, did not make assumptions and he waited to see what God’s will was in the now. 

We too need to become aware that whatever was right in the past might not be right for now – but if we plug into our intuition, do a clarification process, pray, we will hopefully discover what that precise right thing actually is.

Joshua: Son and sacrifice

Joshua is an enigmatic figure. He is present in a number of stories in the Torah and yet slips under the radar, such that people are not able to, off the cuff, recall much about him except for his being one of the “good spies” and eventually taking over from Moses.

We know nothing about his childhood or background apart from the fact that he is the son of a man named Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim. But there is a fascinating midrash from Yalkut Shimon that suggests a very formative incident:

Rabbi  Eliezer said: For all those years in which Israel sat in Egypt, the Ephraimites sat securely, tranquilly and serenely, until Nun, a descendant of Ephraim, came and declared, “The L-rd has appeared to me and commanded me to take you out.” [He felt/He did it due to the] pride in his heart that they were of royal descent and great warriors; and they got up, took their sons and daughters and exited Egypt. Then the Egyptians arose and killed all their warriors.

In this narrative, where Joshua as a young man experienced this tremendous failure on the part of his father, and perhaps his death, we could understand it if he began to see his teacher and mentor Moshe as a surrogate father figure. Moshe clearly trusts him, appointing him to be the military leader in the battle against Amalek. But we have stronger indications of a bond that is more akin to father and son.

When Moses climbs Mount Sinai, he takes only Joshua with him (although Joshua seems to vanish immediately, with Moses ascending alone – Ex. 24:13,15). Moses tells the elders “Wait here until we will return” (Ex. 24:14) in language very reminiscent of the Akeda story in which Abraham says to his servants, (Gen. 22:5) “Stay here with the donkey… and we will return to you.” Yet Abraham is misleading them. He cannot be sure that “they” will return; according to God’s command, only he will come back.  

In suggesting “And we will return”, Moses is referencing that foundational Jewish story. This does two things: (a) He is placing himself and Joshua in a father-son type relationship (b) He is placing Yehoshua into some kind of sacrificial role. But what that is unclear.

The sacrifice theme continues much later when Joshua is finally officially appointed as Moses’s successor. Moses lays his hands upon him, an action associated with sacrifices.[1] However, Joshua is not to be “sacrificed” in the sense of being put to death. How is he a sacrifice then? The answer I can think of would be that He is a sacrifice in the sense of something pure and worthy, being offered up to God’s service. The intertextuality here hints to us that he has the purity both of Isaac and of the animal at the altar.

Moses’s own children are not worthy successors; Joshua functions as his surrogate son. For Joshua, Moses replaces his failed father Nun, unlike him being someone who genuinely hears God’s voice, correctly and accurately, and leads the people into life, not death. It may even be, as is so often the case, that this early trauma propelled Joshua into his role, spurring him to take on responsibility and leadership so as to fix the crack that opened in his soul.

* * These ideas emerged during a Bibliodrama on Joshua in Efrat, August 2022, based on insights by Rabbi David Debow and others. Yael Valier was the first to suggest the connection between the language of the Akeda and that of the scene at Mt Sinai, but she takes it in a slightly different direction. Her own interpretation of the connection of Sinai with Akeda is that it is intended to indicate the selection of Joshua at this moment for something "big", just as Isaac was being selected for something important – with the others (Ishmael, Eliezer) being told to “remain behind”. 

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[1] God says “lay your hand” and yet Moses lays both hands. It seems as if Moses deviates from the details of the divine command. The Talmud (Menachot 93b) discusses the discrepancy between one hand and both hands, and there Resh Lakish concludes that in the context of animal sacrifice, it is the same thing and the language is interchangeable. He explicitly excludes this case, when the hands are laid upon Joshua; but the idea suggested in this blog would allow him to include this case too in the same category, of "animal sacrifice" so to speak, in a metaphorical sense. Which saves Moses from the charge of not properly fulfilling the divine command.