Why he could not enter the land — and why Glenn Beck’s history lesson has to start at Sinai
By Hazan Gavriel ben David · Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo
Moses is the greatest Jew in history. That is not my slogan. It is the last word the Torah speaks about a human being. “Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10).
The Talmud adds that every other prophet saw through an unclear glass; Moses saw through a clear one (Yevamot 49b). Maimonides writes that Moses’ prophecy was waking and direct, without riddle.
If you take those lines seriously, the foundation stone is not Jesus, and it is not Muhammad. It is the man who stood at Sinai and then died on the wrong side of the river.
I write this as an open letter to Glenn Beck and as a teaching for the House of Abraham that gathers at Beit HaShoavah. Glenn, you love the children of Hashem. Our teachers hear in ahavah the root hav — to give. Love is not a feeling you announce. Love is what you hand over.
You have given Israel a public defense when many pulpits went quiet. Keep giving. But if I take you at your own history lesson — tablets in Liberty’s hand, a broken chain at her feet, pilgrims who thought they were finishing Moses’ march out of captivity — then the line does not stop in Nazareth. It goes back to Moses.
We arrived against our will. We will still give an account
Pirkei Avot 4:22 — the Mishnah, Rabbi Elazar HaKappar said: against your will you were formed, against your will you were born, against your will you live, against your will you die, and against your will you are destined to give an account before the King of kings of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. No one voted to be born. No one votes at the hour of death. Hashem writes the story. We surrender even when the ending is not the one we drafted.
That is why Moses is also the greatest example of a fairytale that refuses to behave. He leads a nation out of Egypt. He receives the Teaching. He begs to cross. He does not cross. The children go in. Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein’s reading of Simchat Torah is the same hard mercy: things do not turn out as the righteous man wished. Reality is not a prosperity script. The Author remains the Author.
King Hezekiah is praised in the same key of trust, not replacement religion. “He trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel; after him there was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor among those who were before him” (II Kings 18:5).
The same chapter records that he smashed the bronze serpent Moses had made after the people burned incense to the object rather than to the One who sent it. That is the Jewish allergy in one scene. The moment the go-between becomes the destination, smash it.
Why Moses could not enter the Promised Land
Rabbi David Fohrman’s series Why Couldn’t Moses Enter the Land? is more precise than a failure-of-nerve story, and therefore more uncomfortable for later faiths built on a permanent mediator.
In Exodus 18, Yitro watches Moses sit from morning until night. Moses explains what the people are doing. “The people come to me to seek God.” He judges disputes and makes known the statutes of God. Law, in that sentence, is not a hoop. Law is how a nation seeks God.
Yitro answers with a phrase the Torah almost never uses: Lo tov — “This thing is not good.” The only other lo tov is Genesis 2:18, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” He then says Moses cannot do it levadecha, alone. The only other “X listened to the voice of Y” in that formula is Abraham listening to Sarah and taking Hagar. A third party enters an intimate pair because a technical problem looks unsolvable from inside the covenant.
A Technical Solution To A Spiritual Problem
Fohrman’s reading: Yitro’s hierarchy of judges is a technical solution to a spiritual problem. It saves Moses’ body. It also inserts layers between the people and the Presence they came to seek. In the war with Amalek, Moses raised his hands, pointing away from himself toward Heaven. Rashi says the hands win nothing; looking up wins. A court system is not the same gesture.
Forty years later, Moses looks back with the word Eichah — “How can I bear your burden alone?” (Deuteronomy 1:12). The Midrash ties that Eichah to the Eichah of Lamentations and to God’s Ayekah — “Where are you?” — after Eden. Lament is about distance. Weddings celebrate union. Funerals mourn separation.
The First Crack In Moses Leadership
Fohrman argues that the first crack trained a generation to reach for an intermediary when direct trust became too heavy. The spies were the next intermediate: a military file on a spiritual demand. There are no military solutions to spiritual problems.
That is why Moses can say, “The Lord was angry with me on your account.” Not because he cheered the spies. Because a well-meant system of mediators laid track, they later ran. If that reading is even half right, the later claim that there is one mediator between God and men is not the completion of Moses.
It is the institutionalizing of the distance already named as a wound. Job does not bridge the gap by inventing an umpire who can place one hand on God and the other on man, as if they were two litigants in the same order (Job 9:32–33). Sinai’s shock is that the Creator closes the distance Himself, then hands Israel a Teaching that is the form of love, not a substitute for it.
Glenn, you are right. The Root is Still Israel —
Hebrews 8 says that calling the covenant “new” makes the first one old, decaying, ready to vanish. Jeremiah 31 does not say the Torah vanishes. It says the same teaching will be written on the inward parts of the same people after exile. Repair is not replacement. Those two readings cannot both be the last word.
Paul’s olive tree in Romans 11 warns the nations not to boast against the natural branches. That warning was ignored for most of church history. Mishnah Kilayim 1:7 forbids grafting one kind onto another. The Sages were answering Leviticus 19:19, not Paul. Still, Torah is jealous of kinds. It does not bless the sermon that declares the root obsolete and then claims to live on its sap.
The synagogue of Israel reads Hebrew. The Septuagint is Alexandria’s translation of the Greek Scriptures. Moses did not need Alexandria. Youth in Israel wrapping tefillin and handing out Shabbat candles are not retrieving Paul. They are retrieving Sinai. Meanwhile, a generation here is doing what unrooted children do when the story they were handed no longer holds.
Isaiah does not appoint America as the witness. “You are My servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified” (Isaiah 49:3). The remnant is described without a second scripture: “The remnant of Israel shall do no iniquity, nor speak lies; neither shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouth” (Zephaniah 3:13).
Jews read Isaiah 53 as Israel, or the righteous of Israel, because the book has already named the servant. Christians read a different subject into the same lines. Volume does not settle that. The living covenant does.
The Word Does Not Go Forth From Washington
October 7 tore a veil. It did not move Zion to Virginia. Zechariah’s burden opens on Damascus and only then gives Zion a king on a donkey who cuts off the war-horse (Zechariah 9). Esau and Ishmael are not late fan-fiction. They are Genesis unfinished.
Revelation is a book whose own churches cannot agree on how to read, and it did not give this decade the map its popular teachers promised. Our prophets and the greatest Jew in history already wrote the map in Hebrew.
Jordan Peterson, “They Do Not Set Well”
Jordan Peterson’s remark that the two testaments do not sit easily together is not an insult to your friendship. It is a literary fact that Jews have been named since the first century. Our Bible and the book that says ours is vanishing cannot both be the last word.
“For out of Zion shall go forth Torah, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:3). Not from a studio. Not from a covenant that ages Moses into museum glass.
Christianity and Islam, in their classical forms, both stand up and tell the people who came out of Egypt that the last word has moved — to a son, or to a later prophet. The God who took us out of Egypt does not share that credit. That is not a call to hate your neighbor. It is a refusal to pretend that three mutually exclusive claims are one religion.
Moses, the greatest Jew in history, does not enter. He enters the people’s memory instead, which is harder. He is still the unmatched prophet. The land is given to the children so they will learn not to outsource the relationship again.
Glen, You Are One Of My Heroes
Glenn, keep supporting Israel. Most of your Jewish friends will thank you and change the subject. This is the subject. Against our will, we arrived. Against our will, we will give the account.
The only sane posture left is the one Moses learned on the mountain he was not allowed to cross: surrender to the God who took us out of Egypt, and do not put anyone — judge, king, apostle, or son — where the people were supposed to seek Him.
Hazan Gavriel ben David teaches at Beit HaShoavah, the House of the Water Pouring, in Amarillo. More Torah at beithashoavah.org.