The Torah specifically does not tell us where Moses is buried. A number of explanations are offered for this, but one stands out for me. Moses, great as he was, was still a human being. The danger of his grave becoming a shrine and the Jewish people elevating his status beyond human, was just too great. There is nothing wrong with people praying to God at the grave of a righteous person. But in the case of Moses, it wouldn’t have been a large leap for people to start praying to the man instead of to God. (Unfortunately, I believe there are indeed many examples of this today in the Jewish world where people pray to lesser men than Moses.)
Idol worship has been a great test for the Jewish people from day one. We have always looked for intermediaries between ourselves and God. The Sages tell us that the first two of the Ten Commandments were spoken directly by God to the entire nation. But the intimacy of the experience was so overwhelming that they asked Moses to listen to the rest and convey what God had said. This was the start of a slippery slope that resulted, only forty days later, in the building of a Golden Calf. It didn’t take long.
A direct relationship with God is a challenging concept. We’d rather have something in between. We see an example of the Jewish people slipping even further in the book of Samuel when they asked for a king. Samuel was upset and one of the explanations given is that the same problem had arisen. Direct relationship with God had been too difficult, so God had communicated, until that point, via prophets. Now, even this was too much. They wanted a secular government – “like all the nations” – so that they could put God just a bit more at arm’s length.
Maimonides tells us that the first step toward idol worship is giving too much honour to God’s intermediaries. Once people do this, the next obvious step is to set up their own intermediaries. And finally, the intermediaries take on a power of their own as God recedes further and further into the distance.
Each and every one of us has the opportunity for a deeply intimate and intensely personal relationship with God, the formless consciousness that is the source of all things. Children need no intermediaries to talk to their parents. We need no other human beings to intercede with God or to ‘bless’ us. We need no good luck charms or trinkets to fight off evil eyes. God is the best, and in truth, the only place to turn.
Judaism believes that God will be as direct with us as we choose to be with him. Back in the days of Samuel, God did allow the Jewish People to appoint a king. And took a step back from the relationship. He leads us in the way we want to go. And in that particular instance, it was a disaster. But if we want – as surely, we all do – to have our own personal and direct line of communication, all we need do is open our hearts and set it up.
