The beginning of the third chapter of Sefer Shemot records Moses’ encounter with God at the “burning bush.” It begins as follows:

Now Moses, tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, drove the flock into the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. An angel of the L-rd appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. He gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. Moses said, “I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why is the bush not burnt?” When the L-RD was that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: “Moses! Moses!” He answered, “Here I am.” And He said, “Do not come closer. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground. I am,” He said, “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the god of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

The uniqueness of Moses’ prophecy is enshrined by Rambam in his list of Thirteen Principles, found in his Perush a-Mishnah to Massekhet Sanhedrin Pereq Heleq (the 10^th chapter). It goes (in part) as follows:

The 7^th fundamental principle is the prophecy of Moses, our teacher, that is to say, we should believe that he is the father of all the prophets that preceded him and that followed him. All are below him in rank. He was chosen by God from all of mankind. He reached a greater understanding of God than any man who ever existed or will ever exist will be able to reach. He attained such an extreme sate of exaltedness above the level of a human being that he reached to the level of a celestial being and became established at t he angelic level. There was no curtain which he did not pierce. No physical impediment held him back and no defect, whether small or great, troubled him. The imaginative powers and sensations were separated from him in all his perceptions and his power of lust was silenced. And he remained pure intellect only, It is in this sense that it is said to him that he spoke to God without the mediation of angels. (See Fred Rosner, Maimonides’ Commentary on the Mishnah: Tractate Sanhedrin [New York, 1981], p. 153.)

In light of these words (which are repeated in Mishneh Torah, and {with some variation} in the Guide for the Perplexed), another famous Maimonidean passage becomes difficult to fathom. It is written in the course of the Rambam’s stirring declaration in Hilkhot Teshuvah (5:2) regarding the Jewish assertion of man’s absolute freedom of will. It goes as follows:

Let not the notion, expressed by foolish gentiles and most of the senseless folk among Israelites, pass through your mind that at the beginning of a person’s existence the Almighty decrees that he is to be either righteous or wicked. This is not so. Every human being may become righteous like Moses, our teacher, or wicked like Jeroboam; wise or foolish, merciful or cruel, niggardly or generous; and so with other qualities. (Rambam, The Book of Knowledge: translated by Moses Hyamson {Jerusalem, 1965}, p. 86b-87a)

But if it the uniqueness of Moshe Rabbenu is an article of faith, then how could any human being become righteous like Moses? Wouldn’t the actualization of that possibility contradict that dogma of Judaism?

Numerous answers have been suggested: the common denominator of virtually all of them is that the term “righteousness,” however defined, in truth does not include those intellectual capabilities (and/or the prophetic powers) that made Moses the greatest prophet ever to have lived, and the unique and never-to-be-repeated role he has in Judaism. Thus, to the extent that a simple reading of the Hilkhot Teshuvah passage could be construed to be absolute and to include those intellectual capabilities and / or prophetic powers, in truth it only expresses the Rambam’s use of rhetorical excess to underline his assertion of human free will.

R. Aharon Soloveichick, zatzal, (in a shiur delivered circa 1986 at YU that I heard) once suggested a slightly different interpretation. Perhaps the Rambam in Hilkhot Teshuvah, he declared, was only claiming that theoretically anyone could utilize their freedom of choice (to make correct decisions) every second of their lives and consequently reach the heights that Moshe Rabbenu did. In actually however, no one else did so, and no one else will ever do so. Consequently, no one became, and no one else will ever become, as great as Moshe. The 7^th iqqar, in this view, expresses the situation based upon the reality of the imperfection of the rest of humanity vis a vis Moshe Rabbenu.

Whether one follows the standard explanations or this last one, I think that this notion is ultimately bound up with the notion of the principle of plenitude, which various philosophers, including Rambam, subscribed to. This principle teaches that if the universe is to be as perfect as possible it must be as full as possible, in the sense that it contains as many kinds of things as it possibly could contain. For example, the world of nature must be as rich as possible. This is connected with the idea, used by various philosophers, as part of the ontological argument for God's existence. That is, there must be a most Perfect Being possible, that existence is a perfection, and hence what we call God is that most Perfect Being. Another version of the principle refers to events rather than to kinds of objects. It says that there can be no possibilities that remain as possibilities (and are not foreclosed) but are unrealized throughout eternity; in this form, the notion goes back at least to Aristotle.

It would seem that there is a principle of plenitude regarding human beings as well. There had to have been (and there was!) a greatest human being ever, and according to Jewish dogma, that one is Moses. (For an important scholarly article on the general topic, see Charles Manekin, “Problems of Plenitude in Maimonides and Gersonides,” in A Straight Path: Studies in Medieval Philosophy and Culture. Essays in Honor of Arthur Hyman, edited by Ruth Link-Salinger. [Washington, D.C., 1988] , pp. 183-94.)

But if this is all correct, I think that there are repercussions regarding how we as thinking, religious Jews, look at the biblical narratives regarding Moshe. None of us, no matter how talented and brilliant, will approach Moshe. Our human qualities of emotion and imagination, which itself is a function of our corporeality, preclude that. We might try to approach his intellectual qualities as presented in the Maimonidean texts, but we must recognize that we will not do so. At the most, just as our imperative of Imitatio Dei (the imitation of God: just as He is kind, we should be kind, etc.) concerns, as Rambam teaches us, not God’s essence (which is absolutely unfathomable), but God’s actions in this world, we can only try to imitate Moshe’s actions. That is all. More importantly, our fealty towards Moshe is the fealty towards the Law that he bequeathed us, the Torah, with its commands and prohibitions. And at the end of the day, our intellectual energies must be primarily absorbed in understanding that Law. Moses charged us with the Teaching; as the heritage of the congregation of Jacob (Deuteronomy 33:4).