| In truth, the divine essence fills all of existence, but our own being creates an interposing barrier by generating an apparently separate, independent reality.
Moses, the most humble of human beings, did not have his own individual existence (as he states of himself and Aaron in the verse “what are we?” [Ex.6:7 ו]), and so there was no cause for any interference.
At times, Moses narrates as an outsider, in third person, and at times he speaks from his perspective, in first person. Even when Moses speaks to God, the Divine Presence speaks from his throat.
In essence, God wrote the Torah and signed it with Moses’s name. It is actually the Torah of God, with Moses serving as the scribe.
The Torah’s description of the death of Moses (see Bava Batra 15a) is the most extreme expression of this.
As a result of the total identification between Moses and God, Moses wrote, as dictated to him by God, the description of his own death (something that the human mind cannot comprehend).
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz |
