Nehar Deah

Eikev

The Death of Aaron in the Eyes of the Midrash

Among the profusion of topics in the Torah portion of “Eikev” - such as the promise to expel those dwelling in Canaan on behalf of the children of Israel, the command to observe God’s ways and commandments, the retelling of the giving of the Torah and the Sin of the Golden Calf - we also find a short reference to the death of Aaron. The reference appears suddenly at the end of the story of the giving of the Torah: “And I turned and descended from the mountain and put the tablets in the ark which I had made and they are there, as God commanded me” (Devarim 10:5) and immediately in the next breath: “and the Children of Israel journeyed from the wells of Bnei-Jaakan to Moserah, there Aaron died and was buried there and Elazar his son served instead of him” (verse 6). Not only the brief reference of the death of Aaron in the context of the giving of the Torah needs to be explained, but also the fact that according to what is told in the Book of Bamidbar (20:22-29), Aaron died at Mount Hor which is “on the border of the Land of Edom” towards the end of the wanderings in the wilderness and not near Mount Sinai and close to the time of the exodus from Egypt.

The Sages, who noted this double complication, solved it through using the Midrash. Firstly they tried to explain the juxtaposition of the giving of the Torah with the subsequent breaking of the Tablets of the Covenant and the death of Aaron (as can be see in the Book of Devarim). On this the Jerusalem Talmud (Yoma 1:5 [38b]) says: “Rabbi Yudan b’Rabbi Shalom said: why did the written word juxtapose the death of Aaron and the breaking of the tablets? To teach that the death of the righteous is as hard for God as the breaking of the tablets.” The juxtaposition of the issues in the text - even though there was no basis for it in historical reality - the Sages say, teaches how difficult it is for God to see the deaths of righteous people, an extremely tragic occurrence which for God is like the breaking of the tablets as a result of the nation’s sins.

The Sages continue and ask (ibid): “It is written ‘and the Children of Israel journeyed from the wells of Bnei-Jaakan to Moserah, there Aaron died’, and did Aaron [really] die at Moserah? And did he not die at Mount Hor! … But since Aaron died the Clouds of Glory [which accompanied the nation on its travels] went away, the Canaanites tried to incite them [=Israel] … and Israel wanted to return to Egypt and traveled eight journeys backwards [up to Moserah] and the tribe of Levi ran after them and killed from among them eight families, while they even killed from them [=from the tribe of Levi] four [families] … they [=the Children of Israel] said: who caused us this [spilling of] blood? They said: because we did not do kindness to the righteous one [=Aaron] and they sat down and composed his eulogy and did kindness to the righteous one and God regarded this as if he died there [=Moserah] and was buried there.” In other words: when Aaron died the Clouds of Glory, which had protected the nation in his merit, disappeared and faced with the Canaanites who were trying to cause them to go to war, the people of Israel retreated eight stations back along their journey, up to Moserah. This retreat caused a civil war between the nation and the tribe of Levi resulting in terrible bloodshed. When the Children of Israel tried to understand why they had descended to such depths, they realized that they had been negligent in eulogizing the righteous Aaron. Therefore they eulogized him properly at Moserah and therefore the text - says the Midrash - viewed Moserah, the place of the eulogy, as the place where Aaron died, despite the fact that he actually died at Mount Hor. Aaron’s physical death was at Mount Hor, but his “death” in terms of the consciousness of the nation and its mourning took place at Moserah. This is truly a daring explanation, whose aim is to overcome the real difficulty arising from the mention of Aaron’s death in Moserah in juxtaposition to the story of the giving of the Torah.

However this is not enough. In the literature of the sages we find many traditions about the death of Aaron which are dispersed in the Talmuds and Midrashim. At the beginning of the Middle Ages someone gathered all these traditions and combined them into a short work, “Midrash on the Death of Aaron” (which is printed, for example, in J.D. Eisenstein’s book, “Otzar Midrashim” [A Treasury of Midrashim], New York, 5676 [1915]). This work is a dramatic description of Aaron’s final day, the difficulty Moses faced when he had to inform his brother of his death and the refusal of the children of Israel to accept that Aaron had in fact died. When God decreed that Moses should inform Aaron that he would die, which happened on the first day of the month of Av, Moses was bewildered: “I am not worthy to go to my brother and tell him this thing, because my brother is greater than me, and how will I tell him ‘Go up Mount Hor and there you will die’?!”, and therefore God suggests to suffice with broad hints, in the hope that Aaron will realize that his end has come. Moses is sad and weeps, but goes out to fulfill this difficult task. Initially he says to Aaron that “God has commanded that I tell you something”, but he refuses to elaborate on what he means and he suggests to Aaron to leave the camp with him. “Since they had left the camp Aaron said to him: ‘Tell me what the Holy One, blessed be He, said to you’. Moses said to him: ‘[I will tell you only] that we will reach that mountain’”. In this way Moses continued, while postponing the news until they reached a wondrous cave at the top on the mountain. There Moses suggests to Aaron that he take off the clothes of the High Priest, “lest they become impure in the cave”, and Aaron, who still does not know what is happening, innocently obeys Moses’ suggestion. Only when they are standing in the cave and in it “a bed was prepared and a table was laid and a lamp was lit and ministering angels stood”, does Moses reveal to Aaron that the end of his life has come. Moses comforts Aaron by asserting that “would it be that my death will be like yours - you die and I will bury you but in the hour that I die I will not have a brother to bury me. And you die and your sons will inherit your position, but when I die others will inherit my position”. In this way Moses could soothe his brother “and Aaron got onto the bed and the Holy One, blessed be He, received his soul. And Moses went out of the cave and immediately the cave vanished and there was no creature in the world that knew this”. This description is very similar to the Midrashic descriptions of the death of Moses, according to the word of God and in the presence of angels and also of Moses it is written that his burial place is not known.

When Moses goes down to the nation he is scared of telling lies or even of worse accusations: “We do not know what you did to him, it is possible you killed him! … Show him to us living or dead!” God accedes to Moses request, “and in that hour the Holy One, blessed be He, opened the entrance of the cave and the entire nation of Israel saw Aaron’s deathbed” and only then did they believe that death could also come to Aaron, the righteous.

As a result of Aaron’s death, as is written above, “the Clouds of Glory ceased to be” (Sifrei Devarim, paragraph 305), that had covered over the nation, according to the Midrash, during their forty year’s of wanderings in the dessert. “Since the Clouds of Glory ceased to exist, those of Israel who had been born in the desert saw the sun and moon in the sky and wanted to bow down to them, since they had never seen or known a sun or moon”, and therefore Moses had to explicitly warn the nation (Devarim 4:19): “and lest you raise your eyes to the heavens and see the sun and the moon and the stars … and you will bow down to them,” a concern which, according to the Midrash, only arose after the death of Aaron.

We have found teachings which show that the story of the death of Aaron captivated the Sages and various issues were connected to it, both in the national-historical sphere: When exactly did Aaron die? Where and how did the event take place? What were the results of his death? and more so in the personal-human sphere: Is it possible that a great righteous person like Aaron can die like any other man? How does one inform someone of their impending death? How does a leader accept and how does the nation react to such devastating news? The question of the fate of every man is discussed via the clear mirror of the father of the priestly dynasty.

Professor Avigdor Shenan
Hebrew Literature Department

Literature of the Sages - Sifrei Devarim

In the Nahardeah discussion of the Torah portion of “Chukat” we dedicated the discussion to the Tannaic Midrash on the Book of Bamidbar known as “Sifrei Bamidbar” and we explained there that the Midrash is called “Sifrei” (i.e. Two Books) since this is the common name to it and the Tannaic Midrash on the Book of Devarim, called “Sifrei Devarim”. (The Tannaim are sages who lived in the Land of Israel in the first two centuries CE.)

The Sifrei on Devarim is an interpretive Midrash, in other words a Midrash that follows according to the verses of the Bible one after the other and brings most of the varied material from the works of the Sages. The Midrash deals with vast sections of the Book of Devarim, while focusing mainly on the many legal and halachik (connected to ritual law) topics in the biblical book, however there is also an involvement with narrative-poetic parts of the book (such as the poem “Ha’azinu” [Devarim 32] or the story of the death of Moses and his burial [Devarim 34]).

The Tannaic Midrashim (see “Nahardeah” on the torah portion of “Bo”) are customarily divided between those that came from the school of Rabbi Akiva and those that have their source in the school of Rabbi Yishmael. The differences between the two Tannaim are their style, the names of the Sages, the style of Midrash and maybe also in their different world views. While with respect to the other Midrashei Tannaim (the Mechilta on the Book of Shemot, Sifra on Vayikra, Sifrei and Sifri Zuta on Bamidbar) this division seems possible, it seems however that with respect to Sifrei Devarim the situation is far more complex and there are sections from both schools.

Midrash Sifrei was published in Berlin, in a scientific edition according to manuscripts, by Professor Eliezer Aryeh (Louis) Finkelstein, who worked on this book for fifteen years and it became available, surprisingly, in Nazi Germany, about a month after the outbreak of World War One (September 1939). Finkelstein completed the introduction to this work on 16 Av 5699 (31 July 1939), which fell in the week in which Eikev was read. Thus Finkelstein himself later told of the publication of the book: “Only due to the courage of those who lead the congregation of Israel in Germany did the book merit to appear in print and the printing was completed a month after the outbreak of the Second World War … we should be amazed by the courage [of our brothers in Germany] in those conditions and of the exceptional strength of will and also their love of Torah and wisdom which brought us to the decision to print the book despite all else. Other copies were sent to the Land of Israel and also to other countries, however most of them remained in Germany and probably were destroyed during the war and no trace of them remains”. After the war Finkelstein remained hopeful for a long period that additional copies of the book would be found and when his hopes were dashed he returned and photocopied the book, according to the Berlin edition, in 1969 in the United States, thirty years after its first appearance. He appended a brief introduction to this edition, which we quoted above, and a photocopy of the German introduction from 1939, as a “memorial to the leaders of the Jewish Cultural Association in Germany who in truth gave their souls in order to publish this book”.

Personalities - Yehuda (Judah) David Eisenstein, creator of the “Otzarot”

J.D. Eisenstein was born in Mezeritch in Poland in the year 1854 and died in the United Sates at the advanced age of 102. In his youth he was given a traditional education and his whole life he belonged to the conservative, non-Zionist orthodox camp. In the year 1872 he emigrated to the United States where he worked as a translator from English to Hebrew and Yiddish (and vice versa), mainly in composing encyclopedias and anthologies which he called the “Otzarot” (treasures): “Otzar Hamidrashim”, “Otzar Dinim [laws] U’Minhagim [customs]”, “Otzar Vikuchim [arguments]”, “Otzar Masa’ot [journeys]”, “Otzar Peirushim [commentaries] V’Tziyurim [Illustrations] LeHaggadah Shel Pessach [Passover]” and many others. The crowning glory of his work is the vast encyclopedia, “Otzar Yisrael: An Encyclopedia of All Matters Concerning Jews and Judaism” in ten volumes, which was published in New York during the years 1907-1913. It is difficult to claim that Eisenstein’s work matches today’s exacting standards of modern research, but the importance of these anthologies he edited is significant since they helped to widely disseminate Torah and even today certain of them serve as basic reference books. His encyclopedia too is highly regarded amongst Jewish encyclopedias from throughout the ages.

His book, “Otzar Midrashim”, in which we find the “Midrash on the Death of Aaron”, includes about two hundred entries ordered according to the Hebrew alphabet and in them the editor gives basic information on the various Midrashim and also - and here we have the main reason for the importance of this book - he publishes the wording of many brief Midrashim. “I thought it important to collect all the brief Midrashim dispersed throughout our literature … and due to their brevity were almost lost … and also the remnants that are found only in manuscripts and isolated works not known to most readers”, he says in his introduction. His work includes compositions such as “Midrash on the Creation of the Fetus” (about how the fetus comes into being in its mother’s womb), “Midrash on the Death of Moses Our Teacher”, “Midrash of Solomon’s Chair”, “Midrash of Salvation” (on the Song of the [Red] Sea), “Midrash Yonah”, “The Legend of the Shmoneh Esrei [Eighteen Fold] Prayer” (which is a Midrash about the creation of the Amida (‘Standing’) prayer found in prayer books) and many other compositions that Eisenstein collected from many sources and with great effort brought together. They are short compositions whose length is between twenty lines and three to four pages, which deal, as their names testify, with distinct and delineated topics. Most were written towards the end of the period of the Sages and during the period of the Geonim and even later, and they are witness to the weakening of the creative strength of the Aggadic literature and the preference for short works over more wide ranging works such as Bereishit Rabba or Midrash Tanchuma.

Eisenstein concludes the introduction with the following words: “In the meantime the war broke out in Europe between the great kingdoms [= the First World War] … and who knows if after the end of the war if things will change for the better there and we look only to America which in the future will become the center for Judaism and a place of Torah and Jewish wisdom”. During Eisenstein’s life the Zionist movement was already in motion and the first waves of immigration to Israel had begun, but he was not part of the Zionist struggle and pinned his hopes solely on the United States. We are fortunate that things turned out differently.