Look Long, Act Now

This morning’s Torah reading, Parashat P’kudei, was the last Torah reading that Rabbi Milton Steinberg lived to read. He died on March 20, 1950, having suffered from a long-term heart condition that ultimately took his life at the age of forty-six. Considering the breadth of Steinberg’s scholarship, his communal leadership here at Park Avenue Synagogue, and his national standing, the tragic dimension of Steinberg’s early passing is incalculable. To this day, we are left with a gnawing series of “what ifs,” projects and plans that he would never shepherd to completion. In his biography of Rabbi Steinberg, Rabbi Simon Noveck describes one such effort that occupied Steinberg’s imagination right up to his dying day. Steinberg, Noveck writes, “gave a great deal of thought to one congregational matter – the possibility of a new community house and better facilities for the religious school…Steinberg urged the board to allocate the sum of four thousand dollars required for a set of plans.” (Noveck, p. 241) Rabbi Steinberg, we know, would not live to see the envisioned structure, would never enter it, passing away just a few short months later. That building, we know, would be named posthumously in his honor in March of 1952: the Rabbi Milton Steinberg House. Its beauty was both external and internal, its façade adorned by the historic Gottlieb windows, now redistributed throughout our present building, its interior dedicated to the study of Torah so central to Rabbi Steinberg’s legacy.

In imagining the concluding days of Steinberg’s life, I could not help but wonder whether in reading the final parashah of his life, Rabbi Steinberg was not struck by the power of it all – whether he himself took comfort in seeing his own tragic circumstance played out in the life of Moses. The defining construction of Moses’s own life, the mishkan, the desert Tabernacle meant to house God’s presence, was nearing completion. Not only this last parashah, but the entire final third of the book of Exodus has been devoted to its construction. The design, the specs, the donations, the building process – everything has taken place under the leadership and direction of Moses, his fingerprints figuratively and literally on every bit of it. The Children of Israel still had to get to the Promised Land, to be sure, but it was this project – a house in which God’s presence could dwell, that was the thundering theological retort to their hundreds of years of pyramid building in Egypt: a grand project of communal, theological and personal significance.

“And Moses finished the work,” va-y’khal Moshe et ha-melakhah. The cloud of glory descended filling the Tabernacle with God’s glory. But then comes the verse that Moses did not see coming, the verse that none of us were expecting: V’lo yakhol Moshe lavo el ha-ohel, and Moses could not enter…” (Exodus 40:35) This was Moses’s finest hour, his culminating effort and achievement. And yet, he discovers, the glory was not his to be had. The greatest prophet of our people was denied entry into the very house he longed for, worked toward, and wished to see established. I imagine when Rabbi Steinberg read this passage, it hit close to home, a sting and a perhaps also a sense of comfort that even Moses had been in the very spot in which he found himself.

To study the life of Moses or any great leader is to know the delicate and often painful divide between a leader’s hopes and labors and his or her seeing them fulfilled. Nobody stood closer to God than Moses, and yet just a few chapters ago he pleaded to see the face of God and was denied. Not even Moses, our greatest prophet ever, could see God’s face and live. So too, in the years to come, despite having led the children of Israel through the desert for forty years, Moses would be taken to the mountaintop to view the land, but he would never set foot in it – his life journey stopping short of its intended final destination. So too, King David, about whom we read in today’s Haftorah, fought in so many wars to bring the young nation together, yet he was denied the privilege to build the Mikdash, the Temple in Jerusalem. That honor would be reserved for his son Solomon. Jacob and his son Joseph die living in the exile of Egypt, Rachel dies on the road to Bethlehem. So too Miriam, who led Israel through the sea, never crosses the River Jordan. All of these leaders and so many more work towards a literal or figurative Promised Land, and none of them ultimately make it there.

Be it Moses, Miriam, or Milton Steinberg, the knowledge that they would not live to see the fruits of their labors was undoubtedly a bitter pill to swallow. The nineteenth-century Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch explains: “It was not Moses’s work, not his relationship to the divine laws … which had found expression in the mishkan [tabernacle] … it was the nation, who by this sanctuary had prepared a home for the Torah … and it was the nation for whom God allowed God’s glory to enter the home of the Torah on earth." (Hirsch on Exodus 40:18) In other words, distinctive and heroic as Moses’s labors were (and they were), ultimately they were neither about him, nor his personal legacy. His efforts were not intended to differentiate his unique relationship with God, but just the opposite – to democratize God’s presence and God’s Torah among all the Israelites. Denying Moses entry into the Mishkan, painful as it may have been for Moses, only served to make it abundantly clear to him that the true reward for his efforts would be the self satisfaction wrought from the knowledge that his labors were to be enjoyed by those who would outlive him.

My teacher, mentor, and friend Michael Brooks has taught me more about the Jewish community and leadership that anyone else in my life. He recently retired from his position as the Hillel Director at the University of Michigan having built an institution that is the envy of the Hillel system. Not surprisingly, Michael has codified a list of leadership principles, and while I have never seen the full list, I do know that his eleventh principle is “If we want to leave a legacy, it can’t be about us.” All that we labor for in this world – the institutions we build, the businesses we develop, the books we write, and the children we raise – cannot be contingent on our ability to see them to completion. The time, the energy, the hopes, and the dreams we invest in the passions of our lives, in no small way they are projects that define our very being. Nevertheless, it would seem, it is not for ourselves that we labor. Each of these efforts must be driven by something beyond our mortality.

Unlike other faith traditions, we Jews believe that our greatest impact is to be had in this world – a stretch of time which all of us know is as brief as it is unpredictable. As such, we must always be driven by the urgency of the present moment, a drive to love and learn and live knowing that we have but a small window to leave our mark on eternity. Such knowledge, however, is not meant to yield a shortsighted posture of being, as if all that matters is the thin slice of our own mortality. Rather, just the opposite. All that we do, all that we build, all that we endeavor is predicated on our ability to “look long” – well beyond the horizon of our lives. We comport ourselves with an intergenerational sense of responsibility, knowing that just as we exist on the shoulders of those who have come before, so too we labor on behalf of those who will follow. As Rabbi Art Green explains, this is the true meaning of the fifth commandment – to honor one’s parents. It means that we must “recognize the gifts of prior generations” (Radical Judaism, p. 111). Each one of us must seek to build on the foundation set before us, every generation a prologue for the one to come. As a parable in the Talmud teaches, just as we entered this world and found trees planted by prior generations, so too we plant trees for those yet to come.

All of our lives will be, by definition, unfinished portraits, compositions in need of completion by future generations. Despite this knowledge, or more exactly, precisely because of this knowledge, we must act with urgency to address the needs of the hour. As Rabbi Tarfon taught: Lo alekha ha-m’lakhah ligmor, v’lo atah ben horin l’hivatel mi-mena, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but neither are you free to avoid it.” (Pirkei Avot 2:21) It is not incumbent upon us, nor is it possible. So let’s plant seeds, let’s build buildings, let’s write books, and let’s raise our children – not for us, but for those to follow. We must act now – all the while looking long. Whether or not we ourselves enter that Promised Land is beside the point. We must march forward, fulfilling the promises of those who came before, acting in the interest of a world still yet to come.