EE & R, 3_9: Between the Torah and the Prophets: Moshe, the Master of Those Who Know
(For the previous installment of "Exodus, Exile and Redemption," click here. For ToC, click here.)
Having explored the disparate teachings of the Torah and the Prophets in their depth, we are now ready to resolve the apparent contradiction between these divine works regarding sacrifices and the Law. We asked:1 How could the prophets declare that Hashem demands from us nothing “but for doing justice and loving kindness and walking humbly with your God” (Michah 6:6-8), when the Torah prescribes countless commandments and detailed sacrificial practices?
The answer now comes into sharp focus. As has been explained in the previous chapters,2 the root dichotomy between the Torah and the Prophets involves the possibility of knowing Hashem – the ultimate question of human existence, from which all else follows. Two absolute yet seemingly contradictory truths are taught regarding this question, one by each of the divine works, based on two kinds of humans. In general, humans can indeed know God and see Him, but there once was a human, greater than them all, who knew that he couldn’t know God and couldn’t see Him.
As a rule, human beings can aspire to the kind of knowledge the prophets attained – a knowledge shaped by perception, bounded by experience, and colored by our human condition. This is the knowledge we understand and relate to: a God who is compassionate, just and righteous, revealed through actions and attributes we can perceive. But we also hold a belief that there once was a human – perhaps more properly considered something more than human – who stood alone in his comprehension of God. This was Moshe, who knew that God is ultimately unknowable.3
From Moshe’s perspective, human attempts to know God are, at best, futile. Therefore, for him, sacrificial worship is a rightful acknowledgment of the failure of human knowledge. The act of offering something to God is symbolic of our inability to comprehend His essence, a reminder that we cannot truly know or grasp God in His totality. Furthermore, the Law in general – rigid, prescriptive and unyielding – is necessary, because from Moshe’s vantage point, humanity is fundamentally ignorant. Humanity knows not what it does, and without the Law, it is lost. Since the ultimate truth is beyond human grasp, we cannot be certain about what is right and how to conduct our lives; rather, this information must be revealed to us.
And yet, even as we accept Moshe’s superior comprehension of God’s unknowability, there remains a chasm between his understanding and ours. It is as though an alien with superhuman intelligence appeared among us and told us that our greatest insights are mere flickers of primitive awareness. From the alien’s perspective, our “intelligence” would be akin to the awareness of ants – a limited, rudimentary form of consciousness. We might accept this truth intellectually, but our human condition binds us to our limited perception. We would continue to think, live, and act according to our own bounded understanding, even while acknowledging the being’s superior understanding.
Likewise, we accept that Moshe stood on a level of comprehension far beyond our reach. We observe the Law, as Moshe instructed us to do. We accept its necessity, understanding that from Moshe’s superhuman vantage point, the Law is essential. But at the same time, we – who can aspire only to the prophetic level of knowledge – can’t help but feel in our hearts that the Law is not the ultimate way to serve God, that He desires from us nothing but for doing good.
In our kind of knowledge, which is grounded in human understanding, we can feel that we do know God. We encounter Him in His mercy, His justice and His compassion. We see and experience these qualities, and so we believe we understand Him. Yet, our certainty is itself a contradiction, because we simultaneously believe Moshe, who told us that God cannot truly be known. And so, there lies within us a profound tension: We live by the Law, believing Moshe’s superhuman comprehension, but internally, we remain confident of our own kind of comprehension. We inhabit two worlds: the world of human knowledge, where we feel we know God, and the world of faith in Moshe, where we accept that God is unknowable and that the law is necessary to guide us in our state of ignorance.
This tension is the root of the prophets’ inevitable contradiction with the Torah. Their role is to present the truth accessible to human understanding, as no man will ever again arise like Moshe.4 And according to the highest knowledge attainable to man, Hashem can indeed be known and emulated, and should not be worshipped in self-negation through sacrifice specifically and the Law in general. That is what the prophets taught, all the while aware that in light of the comprehension of someone greater than they could ever be, this was all fundamentally incomplete – Hashem cannot be truly known fully, only worshipped.
The distinctive teaching of the prophets emerges as a consequence of their limits. The prophets are “not permitted to introduce anything new from here on” (Talmud, Shabbos 104a), and yet their most important message appears as a novel teaching. This is not a contradiction but a direct result of their constraints. Forbidden to add anything new to the Torah itself, the prophets teach an ideal not promoted by the Torah: knowledge of Hashem. The Torah is sealed forever, never to be altered after Moshe’s passing, precisely because the prophets are all lesser knowers than Moshe: They think they know God, whereas Moshe knew that God cannot be known.
(For the next installment of "Exodus, Exile and Redemption," click here.)
I remind you that the distinction between the two kinds of knowledge, along with what is and what isn’t truly knowable about Hashem, remains to be explored further in our work.
“No prophet arose again in Israel like Moshe” – Deuteronomy 34:10.