When you were a child, did you ever find it strange to imagine that the principal of your school actually had a house? Surely he lived in the hallways, ate dinner in the cafeteria, and kept his pajamas tucked away in a locker. Leaders, when we are young, seem to exist only as leaders. Their humanity, their private lives, their quiet struggles are almost impossible to picture.
That is why the closing chapters of the Torah are so startling. After decades of Moses standing before Pharaoh, before Israel, and before God Himself, the Torah quietly records his final moments, not as an untouchable icon but as a human being.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the late Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, points out that in Haāazinu and the chapters that follow, Moses appears not as a demigod but as a man, great, flawed, and deeply human. For Rabbi Sacks, this is what makes the Torah so unique: it never blurs the line between God and man. It never turns leaders into saints. Instead, it insists that even the greatest leader in Jewish history is still mortal, still fallible, still one of us.
The great liberator, the lawgiver, the man who stood up to the greatest empire on earth, his life ends not in conquest but in longing. He can look into the land, but he cannot enter. And the Torah presents this not as a flaw in Mosesā legacy, but as the defining marker of it. What are we meant to learn from a leader who is denied his own finish line?
Rabbi Sacks explains that Jewish tradition has always offered many images of Moses. The Talmud portrays him as the man who out-argued angels, insisting that Torah belongs not in Heaven but among human beings (Shabbat 88a). Midrash paints him as the rabbi who could annul even Godās vow by using the very laws God had taught him (Shemot Rabbah 43:4). Philo saw him as a philosopher-king, Maimonides as the prophet who alone spoke with God panim el panim, āface to faceā (Exodus 33:11).
And yet, the Torah itself does not leave him as a statue of marble or a perfect sage hovering above ordinary life. We see him despair. We see him strike the rock in anger. We see him beg God to change the decree that he will not cross the Jordan. We see him plead for the people and then rebuke them when they fail. Moses is not the angel the sages imagined or the philosopher the Greeks admired. He is a man.
Rabbi Sacks stresses that this is deliberate. Pagan cultures turned kings into gods, later traditions turned leaders into saints. The Torah insists on the opposite: God is God, and man is man. That is why no one knows Mosesā burial place.
It would be too easy to turn him into an object of worship. Instead, the Torah leaves him as a model, not to be adored, but to be imitated.
There is a verse near the end that almost sounds like a throwaway detail: āMoses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died, yet his eyes were undimmed and his strength unabatedā (Deuteronomy 34:7). At first glance, the two descriptions seem unrelated. But Rabbi Sacks noted that one explains the other. Why was Mosesā strength unabated? Because his eyes were undimmed. Even after decades of disappointment, rebellion, and wandering in the desert, Moses never lost sight of the ideals that had set him on his mission. His strength lay in that clarity of vision. He could falter, grow weary, even cry out in despair, but he never surrendered his youthās vision of justice, holiness, and service to God.
Mosesā story also teaches something radical about leadership. He is the one who leads Israel out of Egypt, through Sinai, and to the very border of the land. But he is not the one who leads them in. That task belongs to Joshua. Rabbi Sacks reads this as a truth about history: different generations require different leaders. The skills that can shatter chains in one era are not the same as those that can plant roots in another. Moses was the leader of liberation, not of settlement. And that is precisely the point. Leadership in the Torah is never about self-glory, never about finishing the job on oneās own terms. Moses dies with his mission incomplete because no leader owns the mission. It belongs to God, and it continues with the next generation.
In a world that crowns its leaders as flawless and immortal, Mosesā story is bracing. His greatness lies not in his perfection but in his humanity. He fought for justice, he argued with Heaven, he carried a people who sometimes broke his heart, and then he died, as every man must. The Torah affirms that to be mortal is not to be meaningless. On the contrary, it is our mortality that gives weight to the struggle. Mosesā unfinished journey tells us that no single life completes the task of redemption. But every life can move it forward.
At the heart of Haāazinu is this paradox: Moses, the greatest of leaders, ends his life with unfinished business. He can see the land, but he cannot step into it. And in that denial lies the essence of his greatness. We are not asked to be angels. We are not asked to be gods. We are asked to be human beings who, like Moses, fight for justice, cling to God, and never let the light in our eyes grow dim. Strength does not come from pretending to be perfect. It comes from holding on to vision when the world wears us down. That is why Moses remains the model of all time, not as a superhuman saint, but as Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher. And that is why, as Rabbi Sacks reminded us, the Torah closes not with the myth of a flawless hero, but with the portrait of a human being whose greatness was born in his humanity.
