Too Severe a Punishment?

Question

Moses was punished that he could not enter the promised land, because he hit the rock, not spoke to it. I think the punishment was too severe. He anyway obeyed HaShem. He only missed trivial detail. What did the Jewish sages say about the matter? Why was Moses punished so harshly?

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Answers

  1. The Just Ask! - AskTheRabbi.org Team

    The Rabbis teach that Moses’ hitting the rock was simply an “excuse” to stop him from entering the Land of Israel. There is a dialogue between God and Moses at the end of Moses’s life. Moses’s only aspiration was to enter into the Land of Israel in order to be able to fulfil the Commandments to their optimum. Moses pleads and implores God to let him in but to no avail; Moses offers reason after reason to convince God until finally God answers him that if someone of his spiritual stature were to enter into the Land of Israel, it would be the cause of the final and eternal Temple being built. On hearing this, Moses no longer petitioned God to go in.

    Moses understood that the Jewish People were not on the spiritual level to retain the Holy Temple. He also knew that if the final Temple was built, then when the Jewish People stumbled, it would mean their own destruction, rather than the destruction of the Temple.

    Best wishes from the AskTheRabbi.org Team