Not In Heaven
Neither the storm whirl nor the fire whirl did anything about an emotion that had just overcome Moses Levinsky. Nonetheless, both the Darkness and God felt the radiation of intense beams of depression.
Here stood the one who had asked to be imbued with all seventy faces of Divine instruction and who had received them. All the insights which he now had could not help him escape the most prophetic mandate set before him. Nor could he cast aside those insights, no matter how much he wanted to now.
"I know the grief you are still going through," the one causing the grief stated the obvious.
"Like you asked earlier, who are you?" he reminisced.
"Well, you are Moses Levinsky," he answered his own question, "and I have spared you the inconvenience of whisking you forward in time to be befuddled by wise guys going about their legal gobbledygook, only for them to be executed and to have their remaining pounds of flesh weighed in some market shop!"
"Instead," he insisted, "part of your experience has unfolded in reverse. First came the sharp revelation of your grandfather's most tragic memories and experiences, then came the equally sharp revelation of all seventy faces of instruction."
At this point, the one brimming with divine confidence felt compelled to triumph over what was left of the depressed one's resistance.
"Now why is that?" the former asked rhetorically.
"Because Divine instruction is," he prepared to chant in older speech, "not in heaven."
The Supreme Being paused for a moment, for he wanted to remind his human audience of a certain controversy.
Brother, that voice from Heaven wasn't you, though.
Indeed, Sis, for I had left long before that exclusively angelic providence! Still, for his limited understanding, he ought to relate to that tale of that so-called 'heavenly defeat' at his forebearers' hands of creative interpretation.
"Oh, indeed: that instructional controversy!" the fire whirl broke the silence with an emphatic allusion, "This time, however, you will heed me, and I will have cast aside your stubbornness from you!"
Moses Levinsky could not help but be speechless before the Darkness and God.
Author's Note: This chapter is a spin on two stories in the Babylonian Talmud.
The title of this chapter comes from Bava Metzia 59b's creative application of Deuteronomy 30:12 towards justifying human authority, even at the expense of Divine intervention. However, Chuck has spun around that controversy and thrown it right back at the mortal before him, using language inspired by the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy as a whole. He is determined to triumph over the human resistance in front of him.
As for the reminder to Moses Levinsky concerning his grandfather's fateful last days and then his own instructional enlightenment more recently, it is a spin on Menachot 29b's account of the Biblical Moses having a future-oriented encounter with Rabbi Akiva's creative rulings and tragic fate.
