Short point to ponder…Every Jewish leader has their characteristic which defined them e.g. Avraham = chesed. Moshe = anava (humility). What is Yehoshua’s?
The gemarra says that Moshe is compared to the Sun, and Joshua to the moon. Now the job of a moon is to reflect the light of the Sun at a time when the sun is not able to shine (night!). So too, Yehoshua’s definition is that he continued what Moshe did. Thus, Yehoshua is described in the Torah as ‘the helper/server of Moshe’ (Shemos 24;13, Bamidbar 11;28) and echoes Moshe’s humility in wanting to punish those who were prophesising that he would take over from Moshe (see Rashi quoting the Sifri there). How many things can you notice that Yehoshua does which Moshe did before? I’ll start you off – splitting of a river, pesach, bris milah, HaShem promises to Yehoshua that He will be with Yehoshua like HaShem was with Moshe (start of sefer yehoshua) , both married converts (tzipporah and rachav respectively), both are called ‘eved HaShem,’ etc. Even the presents that they gave us show this point; Moshe gave us the Torah, and Joshua gave Eretz Yisrael; the job of the Land of Israel is simply to reflect the light of Torah. Thus, the gemarra says (Yevamos 96b) that Yehoshua did not need to prefix the divrei torah he said by saying ‘this is what Moshe told me,’ since everyone knew that it came from Moshe. Now with all this in mind, we can see a new way to understand a great midrash… The midrash says that the reason why Joshua was chosen to lead the Jews after Moshe, was because he used to set up the chairs in the study hall/beis hemedrash in the desert for Moshe to come in and teach Torah. Why should this mean he becomes the next leader; many people did beautiful mitzvos during the desert period? But now we can suggest that Joshua setting up the chairs showed that he was the one to facilitate Moshe’s actions – to continue doing things when Moshe was not there (after the Torah study had ended), and thus he merited to continue as leader as the Jewish people after Moshe. He was the moon and Moshe the sun.
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