As someone who has taught Torah to thousands and enjoys almost nothing more than seeing my old students passing on the Torah I taught them, the last Rashi in this week’s parsha struck me as bittersweet. Rashi notes that Moshe statement that the Jews will turn against God after he dies (31:29). Yet, pointing to a verse in Shoftim (2:7) which asserts that the Jews served God for the many years that Yehoshua was alive and then some, Rashi wonders how Moshe could have said such a thing. He answers that, since Yehoshua was Moshe’s student, so long as Yehoshua was alive, it was as if Moshe himself was alive.
Indeed there is no more meaningful relationship than the relationship of someone who teaches Torah with their students. And yet, no student is the same as their teacher. In the case of the greatest teachers like Moshe, there is likely to be a decline. Indeed, there is a tradition that Yehoshua forgot three thousand laws after Moshe died (Temurah 16a). But even when the quality of the teachings are maintained or even improved, they are never quite the same. So how can a teacher really feel that it is if they themselves are still living so long as their students are giving over some of the Torah that they had taught them?
Perhaps the citation from Shoftim can help us. Yehoshua took what he learned from Moshe and led and inspired his charges to observe the laws of the Torah despite very challenging circumstances. Given all of the negative influences around them, it was a feat that only a handful of leaders were able to accomplish. In other words, Yehoshua not only passed on some of what he learned from Moshe, but he was able to use it in a way that fulfilled the whole raison d’etre of Moshe’s teachings to begin with, to further the Jewish people’s relationship with God.
Of course, Moshe would be happy no matter how Yehoshua got the Jews to follow the Torah. But being happy is not the same as feeling as if he were still alive. That comes from the Torah bearing Moshe’s unique personal stamp, something that can only be done by someone who heard it themselves from the teacher. We know, for example, that by the time Moshe’s teachings were passed on to Rabbi Akiva, they were so different that Moshe could not even recognize them (Menachot 29b). Granted, that is a very long time afterward. But a living experience can only fully be understood by someone who lived it. Teaching involves much more than just words. It is oral and it is live. It involves gestures and voice inflections, it involves unspoken understandings and it involves a unique atmosphere created by those in attendance. Not only are these things almost impossible to impart to someone who was not there, they are things that we are only aware of on the sub-conscious level, such that we do not even realize that there is a need to pass them on, even if we could. Though the student was there and imbibed all of this, he will not be able to pass it on himself. He will however live the teaching for the rest of his life. And he will pass on his own living teachings, which may well be heavily influenced by his teacher’s Torah alive inside him, but they will now be his own. So Rashi is correct that when Yehoshua died, Moshe died as well.
It is true that our actual teachings only truly last through our own students. Yet when they pass on what they learned from us, something important happens nevertheless – the Torah we taught is integrated into the national Torah that belongs to all of the generations. There is a mixture of an almost infinite amount of teachings from all of the teachers of the past that have been mixed in with each other to the point that none of them are recognizable, yet coalesce to create something even greater – the Torah of the Jewish people.
This is what happens not only with our teachings but with our very existence. We make our contribution, which has a direct impact on one generation and one generation alone. That generation then takes our contribution and mixes it into the great pool of creativity and accomplishment that marks the Jewish people, allowing it to rejuvenate itself and provide more ways to serve God constantly. In this way, our lives may be limited, but our contribution lives on.
