Yehoshua and Moshe Rabbeinu
Rabbi Dovid E. Eidensohn
We find an incredible teaching about Yehoshua ben Nin, the disciple
of Moshe Rabbeinu who led the conquest of Israel after the Exodus from Egypt.
The Tanchuma[1]
earlier shows how Moshe was told by HaShem that he was not to lead the Jews
into Israel, but would be given the privilege of seeing the land before his
death, which was imminent. Moshe then immediately launched a war with the
Midianites who had caused many Jews to sin with their women so that a huge
amount of Jews were punished with death by HaShem. It would seem that Moshe’s
senior disciple, Yehoshua, would follow in his rebbe’s path, and that he, too,
would launch wars to conquer Israel as fast as possible, even if by so doing he
may somehow shorten his own life. This was after all the way Moshe did. Moshe
could have delayed the war with Midian until he lived a few years longer, but
he did not. He flung himself into the war, knowing that he would die immediately
afterwards, and thought only of serving HaShem. But it seems that Yehoshua had
different concerns. He thought that only be dragging out the conquest of Israel
would he merit a long life, and for this he was punished that Moshe lived 120
years and Yehoshua only 110.
In fact, the Jews had always tormented Moshe, and even HaShem,
saying they wanted to go back to Egypt and not go to Israel, (the men, that is,
but the woman demanded to go to Israel as the Medrash teaches, a Medrash we
have produced in a recent piece.) If so, it is very strange that Yehoshua, who
was a faithful servant of Moshe for so many years, when becoming the successor
of Moshe, should reverse this and drag out the conquest of the holy land,
perhaps the most important thing that any Jewish king ever did.
Furthermore, we find that Yehoshua had no sons. If he had a son, it
was possible and even likely he would have succeeded his father. Perhaps this
too was a punishment for his lack of urgency to conquer the holy land for the
Israelites.
Another problem is that the great rabbis who succeeded Moshe, such
as Yehoshua and others, were not so interested in insisting that the Jewish
residents in Israel learn the Torah properly. What these great Jewish leaders
did was to go to a few cities easy for them to reach, but to spread their reach
so that all Jews would learn how to behave in Israel, they did not do. This led
eventually that Jews of the majority of the Jewish cities did not know the
Torah and the will of HaShem properly.
It is also known that the
Jews in the early times of the first settlement of Israel regularly turned
their back on HaShem and worshipped idols. Would this have happened if the
senior rabbis of the generation had taught everyone the entire Torah and
drilled it into everyone with a strict series of classes in every city of the
Holy Land? Thus, the plan of Joshua to minimize the conquest of Israel and
leave it in the hands of the pagans had a role in the eventually paganization
of the Israelites who delayed conquering the land because of Yehoshua.
The failure of Yehoshua is followed in the Medrash Tanchuma there with
the tragedy of the tribes who noticed that the first land conquered by Moshe
for Israel was perfect for raising animals. They received permission from Moshe
to go there on the condition that they first lead the Jews to conquer Israel,
and they agreed and kept their word. They then returned and established their
communities. These communities were the first Jews to be driven away from
Israel when pagans conquered the Israelites in latter generations. The Medrash
says specifically that their love of money, produced by the many animals that grew
there in the earliest conquests of the Jews under Moshe, caused them to be
driven away from Israel before the rest of the Jews, who came to Jewish lands
that did not produce so many animals and wealth, but theirs’ was a holier land
than the land that produced the wealth and the animals.
We thus have a sad story of failure and destruction, which had a
strong source in Yehoshua and his determination to live longer by prolonging
the conquest of the Holy Land.
To my knowledge this failure of Yehoshua is unique. Here was the
major and unique disciple of G‑d’s close friend Moshe, who, at the great moment
of conquering Israel quickly for Israel and teaching the Jews, not money and
farming, but Torah, failed. How tragic was his failure. It set up the habit of
the Jewish people living in the early generations of the Holy Land to be
missing in knowing Torah properly and missing in knowing and HaShem properly,
until Jewish history became a catastrophe of paganism, wicked kings, pagan
women marrying Jewish kings, beginning with Shlomo HaMelech who married the
daughter of Pharoah who taught him how to worship idols.
And why? Because the greatest disciple of Moshe wanted to live a
longer life, something that was denied to him, along with the greatness of
Israel which became a settlement filled with paganism and lost Jews.
The Mishneh at the end of Sota talks about the decline of the
Jewish people in the Second Temple period, the gradual decline of the rabbinate,
and the sad story of the loss of the level of Torah to the Jewish people
through the generations and the destructions. It concludes about a new period,
called Footsteps of the Moshiach. It is a period where Moshiach waits to be
revealed but we find evil that never existed in the world. “A son fights with
his father, a bride with her husband’s mother…and there is nowhere to be saved
other than our Father in Heaven.” Reb Elchonon Wasserman zt”l, the leading
disciple of the Chofetz Chaim explained that this Mishneh is the bottom of all
bottoms, but HaShem is watching, and is prepared to reveal Moshiach and turn
the world into a much better and holier place. This, however, requires that we
turn to Him, because only He can change things.
