Coming and Going

The White House

It’s really hard to convince an elderly person to do something they don’t want to do. In my own life, I can think of two such examples I experienced first hand. The first, in the early 1990s, was convincing my grandmother, who was hard of hearing and had diminishing eyesight, that it was no longer safe to drive. Her argument that she “knew the route to the grocery store by heart” obviously didn’t hold water. She was angry to have to turn in her license even though she knew it was the right thing to do. For this fierce woman, it was a literal and symbolic surrender. She knew no such experience as giving up on anything. She survived the Depression, her husband’s murder in 1939, and then went to work raising her two children. Her faith, humility and diligence buoyed her throughout her long fulfilling life and she died a resolute model of strength for her daughters and grandchildren. Even her last few months were something of a stubborn refusal to let go: she subsisted exclusively on chocolate chip cookies and baseball updates. I’d like to say that the promise of seeing her beloved in heaven persuaded her to let go but I’m not sure.

Her daughter, my mother, was much the same. In Mom’s case, she died of cancer at 79, nearly twenty years younger than her mother who almost made it to 100. Mom had a breast cancer that went into remission briefly before coming back and spreading to her lungs, spine and cerebral cap. When it was clear that she wouldn’t survive the disease and, as is so often the case, the radically destructive debilitating effects of the chemotherapy, she refused to hear our arguments that a few good months of life was worth more than riding out her illness and crippling therapy to the end.

When she died I remember sitting with her oncologist for a kind of wrap-up. More thinking out loud than anything else, I asked why she didn’t listen to us, end treatment, and take a victory lap with her kids for living a beautiful, generous, meaningful life. “She always wanted to see London,” I offered, a kind soft-focus prayer of regret. “Some patients,” he said matter-of-factly, “are so determined to live on their own terms that if they could, they’d be driven to the cemetery with a chemo-bag attached to their coffin.”

I wish Mom could have heard that. She’d have laughed, shaken her head, and admitted he was right.

No less a person than Moses was reluctant to leave the stage as well — at least according to the Midrash. Entire chapters of rabbinic interpretive literature give voice to Moses’s bargaining with God for a chance to live long enough to see the Land of Israel. After a life devoted to liberating his people from slavery and leading them through forty years of wandering, he certainly deserved it. One of the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful portrayals of Moses’ refusal to leave the stage is in Deuteronomy Rabbah 11. You can read a translation HERE.

But this is rabbinic speculation. Sacred rumor, we might say, light-heartedly.

Moses faces the moment in the Torah — a public sacred document, as it were — with public grace and equanimity. He leaves us to conclude, perhaps, that it was only behind closed doors that Moses railed against God.

יֹּ֣אמֶר אֲלֵהֶ֗ם בֶּן־מֵאָה֩ וְעֶשְׂרִ֨ים שָׁנָ֤ה אָנֹכִי֙ הַיּ֔וֹם לֹא־אוּכַ֥ל ע֖וֹד לָצֵ֣את וְלָב֑וֹא וַֽיהֹוָה֙ אָמַ֣ר אֵלַ֔י לֹ֥א תַעֲבֹ֖ר אֶת־הַיַּרְדֵּ֥ן הַזֶּֽה׃

He said to them: I am now one hundred and twenty years old, I can no longer be active. Moreover, יהוה has said to me, “You shall not go across yonder Jordan.”

יְהֹוָ֨ה אֱלֹהֶ֜יךָ ה֣וּא ׀ עֹבֵ֣ר לְפָנֶ֗יךָ הֽוּא־יַשְׁמִ֞יד אֶת־הַגּוֹיִ֥ם הָאֵ֛לֶּה מִלְּפָנֶ֖יךָ וִירִשְׁתָּ֑ם יְהוֹשֻׁ֗עַ ה֚וּא עֹבֵ֣ר לְפָנֶ֔יךָ כַּאֲשֶׁ֖ר דִּבֶּ֥ר יְהֹוָֽה׃

It is indeed your God יהוה who will cross over before you, and who will wipe out those nations from your path; and you shall dispossess them.—Joshua is the one who shall cross before you, as יהוה has spoken. (Deuteronomy 31:2-3)

The Torah text is quite clear. Moses himself confesses to God that he “can no longer be active.” The Hebrew phrase is “I can’t any longer keep going and coming.” It takes a toll to lead, he admits, however we measure it. The line is vague enough that the Sages debate its meaning. Was Moses admitting a diminishment of his physical strength? Or could he no longer go on because, as Rashi reminds us, God told him the power was to be transferred to Joshua. Ibn Ezra suggests that Moses was no longer able to lead the people in battle. Others say that his power to reason had weakened. Whichever it was we will never really know. All comments, conjecture, and interpretation remain on the page. Sacred conjecture. Nachmanides lays the matter to rest by telling us that showing to Moses the succession plan of Joshua taking the lead was in fact miraculous. He got to see the transfer of power and appreciate it for what it was. One wonders if at that moment, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

Ultimately, the decision was between Moses and his God. And the Torah text here is a kind of press release for succession.

I was thinking about these discrepancies of sacred text, these conflicting accounts of Moses’ public and private face while watching President Biden struggle mightily to arrive at the conclusion that the time had come to leave his campaign to a younger generation and pass the torch to Vice President Harris. Throughout this first part of the summer the President was fumbling, fuming, leading, serving, traveling, working, and most important of all for a man of faith — searching his deep soul for the answer.

One measure of a person, we might say, is the way in which they wear their grief publicly. President Biden’s graceful withdrawal and generous passing of the leadership torch to Vice President Harris is in fact a model of what it means to hold unimaginably great power and then, when the time comes, to know how and when to let it go. I think of a number of occasions leading services and passing the Torah on the bimah. Invariably there is that one person who really wants to keep holding on — they love the Torah so much! “I know you love it,” I’ll say. “But it belongs to all of us.”

Like democracy.

Very few people involved in the cult that is now masquerading as a political party to elect the fascist Donald Trump and his pseudo-libertarian running mate J.D. Vance, will have the openness and humility to discern what we all just witnessed. Their deeply disturbing hatred; their fealty to some of the most outlandish lies ever told about stolen elections, porous borders, the economy, gender, sexuality, reproductive rights, and the Second Amendment; and perhaps most incomprehensible of all — their willingness to accept a convicted rapist, convicted felon 34 times over (and with a non-Citizens United created Supreme Court a convicted insurrectionist and seditionist) as their leader, touched by God, tells you everything you need to know about the difference between Biden-Harris and Trump-Vance.

But people with open hearts of any political persuasion know what they just saw on Sunday when Joe Biden stepped down. And anyone who has helped an elderly loved one to be embraced by the loving light of their twilight years with the compassion they deserve and the celebration of a life well-lived, knows what they saw as well.

Don’t be fooled by the irradiating tungsten burn of Trump and MAGA hate while Joe passes the torch. He overcame so much in his life and dedicated himself to public service. He brought the nation out of COVID; he invested hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding national infrastructure and international stature by reinvigorating alliances with NATO; he stood by Ukraine; he expanded Medicare; lowered prescription drug prices; aided combat veterans neglected under Trump; and re-established climate change guard rails that his denying predecessor tore up.

Even in an era of media conglomeration, unchecked interest group spending, social media atomization, A.I. and Russian interference, some facts are indisputable.

Great leaders accomplish great things. People of good will from all walks of life know that.

And those same good people from all walks of life know what it means to admit that their time has come to let others lead. “I can’t any longer keep coming and going,” Moses told his people.

“I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

And “I believe today what I always have: that there is nothing America can’t do – when we do it together. We just have to remember we are the United States of America.”

An admission of his limits with hope for the future is the perfect coda, a memorable message that will seal Joe Biden’s name in history.

I’m proud to have voted for him and will work like hell to support Kamala Harris to continue that great legacy so that the rapist felon Donald Trump will be defeated once again by a free and fair election.