Moses, Joshua and the 'Hamilton' effect
It’s been a week of barbecuing and independence. But does Mr. TGH ever take a picnic break? No. Does he ever seek freedom from this beautiful responsibility? No. No, he does not.
So you don’t need a preamble — we can get right to the constitution. Our portion is Pinchas, and it’s our inalienable right to ask questions about some pretty strange tales. Of course if before we do you want to pursue some happiness, you can sign up for TGH here. And read some old episodes here.
Now let’s get to some succession action.
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Our portion of Pinchas has some pretty memorable stories. The title one, of course, in which a zealot slayed and a nation gasped. (A TGH take on said topic here.) There's also the proto-feminist narrative of B'not Tzlofchad, the women who protested their lack of land rights and won a major legislative battle in the process. (We’ve weighed in on that too.)
But tucked in after all those tales is a more seemingly straightforward but highly — or is it slyly — curious incident.
In Numbers 27:12 God tells Moses to climb a mountain and look at the land of Israel he's been leading the people toward — look, then prepare to die because he will not enter.
This is in itself strange, no matter how well we know the story. Is God torturing Moses? Letting him have a brief moment of happiness and then torturing him? But matters get a lot more inexplicable shortly after.
Moses has seemingly no reaction to this directive, brutal as it must have been. He responds instead by saying the nation needs a leader.
"Let Hashem, source of all flesh, appoint someone over the community, who shall go out before them and come in before them, and who shall take them out and bring them in. And God's community won't be like sheep without a shepherd (27:16-17).” God responds by telling Moses to put his hands on Joshua and bring him in front of the whole Israelite nation to appoint him as his successor, an elaborate ceremony that the Midrashic book known as the Sifrei elaborates on as “filling an empty vessel with all his Torah.”
And something seems wrong about all this, namely — why is the talk of succession only starting to happen now; shouldn't this have begun much, much earlier?
Shouldn't God, who has an elaborate and detailed plan for the Israelite people laid out hundreds of years in advance, have already long worked out with Moses how this succession ritual would take place? Why is the very first mention of it coming right as Moses is about to die?
Even if one were to say that until the recent Mei Merivah/rock-water incident it looked like Moses would bring the Israelites in to the land, wouldn’t there still need to have been some kind of succession plan? Given that Moses is 120 years old and, you know, Aaron and Miriam and everyone in that generation is dying, and I mean how long can Moses keep doing this?
But maybe most important is this oddity: why is Moses the one bringing it up? God doesn’t mention succession at all, leaving us to wonder if it even would have happened had Moses not by chance remembered it. “Oh, before I die, the people need a leader,” Moses basically says, almost by the by. And God basically says “Oh yes, that’s right, they do.” And if Moses hadn’t remembered the people just…wouldn’t have had one? Totally bizarre.
And btw, when Moses does perform the rite, it contains a massively important task of putting his hands on Joshua and filling him with the Torah — something that really should have been done a long time ago. Joshua was described as Moses' protege all the way back in Exodus at Har Sinai during the sin of the Golden Calf, nearly 40 years ago. If he hadn't been filled with the Torah sometime before this end-of-the-desert-wandering moment, it's a little 2000-and-late to start now.
The whole thing has a feeling of an afterthought, a highly inconsistent way for God to assign any task, let alone a task as important as who will lead the Jewish people after Moses is gone.
In contemplating this unusually laissez-faire moment, I came across another comment by the Sifrei, remarking that Moses “halach v’asah et zeh b’simcha,” that he “went off and did it with happiness.” I wondered why this was relevant — does his state of mind really matter? I mean, it's nice that Moses enjoyed this process, but what does it have to do with the important issue at hand — installing Joshua as the new leader? If anything wouldn’t Joshua’s emotional state have been more relevant here, seeing as he was the one who now carried all the responsibility?
I think to untangle this Gordian knot it helps to think about succession in general, and what its biggest challenges are. (And there are many challenges, which is why so many transitions go awry.)
One obvious hurdle is finding the right moment. Start too early, after all, and people will lose confidence in the current leader; start too late and they won't have enough time to process the new leader before they take over. (Which seems like a risk here, incidentally.)
But I think there's an even bigger issue with appointing a successor. And it’s crystallized really nicely by an entertainment source.
When it comes to understanding succession, one's thoughts turn, understandably, to "Succession," the recently ended HBO phenomenon in which patriarch Logan Roy endlessly played his backstabbing adult children off each other as he debated which of them he should bequeath his media empire to. Unfortunately, that show helps not at all — Logan is pretty much the paragon of how not to handle a succession.
But another cultural phenomenon, slightly more human, offers a telling thought: the musical "Hamilton," which long-memoried TGH readers will recall helped shed light on the splitting of the sea back in the B'shalach episode of early 2022.
That ditty dealt with the song "Rise Up" and its resonance with an Israelite people unsure of whether to stand up to their Egyptian overlords. As it happens a different song/moment from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster comes in rather handily here. I refer to the tune "One Last Time," involving the political future of President George Washington. (Hey, you knew we’d circle back to July 4.)
In the run-up to the shuffly soul number — you can listen to it here — Washington is asked to be king but demurs, believing that the newly formed United States shouldn't have long-term leaders. Instead, he believes in elections. He is then told by worried aid Alexander Hamilton that Thomas Jefferson has stepped down from the Cabinet to run for president.
Hamilton thinks this might set up a showdown with Washington, but Washington throws his deputy a curveball: he won't run for re-election. Instead he wants succession — a clean, easy, peaceful transition to the next leader, no muss or fuss.
The president asks Hamilton to pen an address, and we begin to rhyme for "One Last Time." Picking up the song in the middle —
[WASHINGTON]
I’m stepping down. I’m not running for President.
[HAMILTON]
I’m sorry, what?
[WASHINGTON]
One last time. Relax, have a drink with me. One last time. Let’s take a break tonight. And then we’ll teach them how to say goodbye . To say goodbye. You and I.
....
[HAMILTON]
As far as the people are concerned. You have to serve, you could continue to serve—
[WASHINGTON]
No! One last time. The people will hear from me. One last time. And if we get this right. We’re gonna teach ‘em how to say. Goodbye. You and I—
[HAMILTON]
Mr. President, they will say you’re weak.
[WASHINGTON]
No, they will see we’re strong.
[HAMILTON]
Your position is so unique.
[WASHINGTON]
So I’ll use it to move them along.
[HAMILTON]
Why do you have to say goodbye?
And then the coup de grace:
[WASHINGTON]
If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on. It outlives me when I’m gone. Like the scripture says: ‘Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree. And no one shall make them afraid.’ They’ll be safe in the nation we’ve made.
I wanna sit under my own vine and fig tree. A moment alone in the shade. At home in this nation we’ve made. One last time.
[HAMILTON]
One last time.
The exchange is remarkable. Washington, who has worked so hard to build a country and lead it, is giving up power, and he is doing so willingly, even enthusiastically.
Maybe more important, he says that it is precisely this enthusiasm that will allow succession to occur.
"We’re gonna teach ‘em how to say goodbye, you and I." And "if I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on."
It is exactly Washington's wholehearted embrace of departure that unlocks all of this. It is his happy parting from the stage that allows the audience to keep watching the play; it is the president contentedly sitting under his own fig tree that will enable the American people to sit under theirs. Our boy Lin-Manuel is making a subtle but powerful point about succession — it only works if the person giving up power does so happily. And, even more crucial, if the people see this happiness. Because if they don't, they wonder if the leader wants to leave or should be leaving. If they don’t, they pine for the leader they once had and don't respect the one they have now.
So yes, they have to be taught how to say goodbye. Only then can the office outlive the leader; only then can the new president be as respected as the old one. (That fig tree line is from the book of Micah, btw, and was part of Washington's actual farewell address.)
I think this potent lesson is exactly what's unfolding in our portion. Moses, after all, had the same gravitational effect on the new Israelites as Washington had on the new Americans. The nation now is composed entirely of people who came of age in the desert — people who only knew Moses as leader. (Like the Americans only new Washington.) These new desert folk would be as unwilling to embrace a sudden shift in leadership in their era as the Americans were in theirs.
And so if there’s any trace of Moses being reluctant to leave the stage — if they could so much as sniff a hesistancy -- they'll be unwilling to accept Joshua as their new steward.
So this succession process needs to happen with Moses’ full buy-in. That’s what I think God is doing in our portion — He is slowly building Moses’ buy-in. He doesn’t order the succession earlier not because He forgot or doesn’t think it’s important, but because He knows if He does and Moses isn’t fully ready then none of it will work. God needs to wait until Moses can get to the point where he can throw himself into it wholeheartedly. And that’s a process.
In fact the first time God told Moses he will not be the leader in Canaan, right after the rock-water incident two portions ago, Moses responds by…trying to maneuver his way into the land. He says nothing to God’s decree of what will happen to him, just goes on right on trying to press into Canaan by trying to get the Edomites to let them pass. This isn’t a man anywhere close to accepting he must give up power; this isn’t a leader eager to sit under a fig tree.
So a little bit later, in our portion, God tries again. This time He gives Moses a little more of a nudge. He shows Moses what the future looks like — what a future looks like without him. It isn’t torture, this gaze-from-the-mountaintop-at-the-land gambit — it’s a way of bringing Moses closer to acceptance. It’s a way of concretizing the reality so Moses gets a little more wholehearted — a little more shalaim, as the Hebraic among us would say, about the power handoff he will soon have to make.
And it works! Because what happens? Moses then brings up the need for succession. Moses responds — unlike the last time — by showing he gets it. He responds by saying the Israelites need to sit under their fig tree just as he knows he will sit under his. And it is then and only then that the succession can take place.
No, this wasn’t all an afterthought. It was a plan that God put in place so Moses could embrace succession on his own. And that’s exactly what happens. Moses is ready, and can now go forward appointing Joshua and bringing the people along with him. Moses is enthusiastic, even happy. Hence also the Sifrei's line that Moses in doing the commandment "went off and did it with happiness." It wasn't Moses' state of mind we care about — it's the Israelites. By Moses being happy, the Israelites had — George Washington-style — been taught to move on.
There is one more phrase that has always stood out to me in all this.
As God is giving Moses instructions on what to do, He tells him that Moses should give some of his grace to Joshua, “l'maa'n yishm’u kol adat bnei Yisrael," in order that the people will listen (27:20). Well of course they'll listen -- presumably they're there and will see/hear what's happening. But according to our reading this added fillip makes a lot more sense. God is telling Moses the reason for this whole process —- He is telling Moses that the wholeheartedness is all about getting the people to listen. That this entire process of preparing Moses wasn’t ultimately for him — it was “l’ma’an yishm’u kol adat b’nei Yisrael.” It was so that the people will accept the transition.
Because sometimes it’s not enough just to be in the room where it happens — sometimes you need to fan the spark into a flame.
Thank you, as ever, for reading, and have a great weekend.