“And Moshe went...” (31:1)
At the Sixth Zionist Congress at Basel on August 26, 1903, Theodore Herzl proposed an idea that Uganda should be a temporary refuge for Russian Jews. The Russian delegation stormed out of the conference chamber in fury. These delegates were by no means deeply religious individuals, but it was self-evident to them that this compromise might spell the end of a Jewish State in Palestine; instinctively they knew that the only place that the State of Israel could be established was in The Land of Israel.
At the beginning of Parshat Va’etchanan, G-d tells Moshe, “Ascend to the top of the cliff, and raise your eyes westward and northward, southward and eastward and see with your eyes, for you shall not cross this Jordan River.”
Imagine how Moshe felt as he stood on top of that cliff, gazing out over the land that he longed to enter. The Land of Israel stretched out in front of him like a map. So close. G-d knew how much Moshe wanted to go into Eretz Yisrael, so why did He “tantalize” him in this way?
Each of the Avot, the Patriarchs, is associated with a specific quality: Avraham with chesed, kindness; Yitzchak with gevurah, self-control; Yaakov with tiferes, beauty. The quality associated with Moshe is netzach, eternity. Everything that Moshe did was forever.
It was for this reason that Hashem gave the Torah through Moshe—because the Torah is eternal. Had Moshe entered the Land of Israel with the Jewish people, their entry would have been an “eternal entry”, after such an entry, the Jewish people could never again leave the land; but Hashem knew that the Jewish people would have to be exiled because they would not be able to maintain the high spiritual standards that the Land demands.
If they couldn’t leave, and they couldn’t stay, they would be caught, as it were, in a spiritual vise, and they would face the danger of annihilation.
It was for this reason that Moshe could not enter Eretz Yisrael. But Hashem wasn’t tantalizing Moshe: that feeling of longing that Moshe had when he stood on that cliff gazing into the Land, that feeling entered the collective consciousness of the Jewish People for all time, so that even those delegates at the Zionist conference in Basle thousands of years later knew instinctively that only place that the State of Israel could be was in the Land of Israel.
“And Moshe went...” The verse doesn’t tell us where Moshe went. The spiritual masters tell that Moshe ‘went’ into the heart of every Jew in every generation in every place. A little bit of Moshe Rabbeinu in the heart of every Jew longs for the Land.
Throughout our long, long night of exile, the Jewish people have never lost that same longing for Eretz Yisrael that Moshe felt when he stood on the top of the cliff and gazed upon the land that he was not to enter.
