DEUT1743 [M]ore than any other religious literature, the Torah makes an absolute distinction between heaven and earth, between God and human beings. Because God is God, there is space for humans to be human. In Judaism the line dividing them is never blurred. How rare this is was pointed out by Walter Kaufmann: "in India, Jina and the Buddha, founders of two new religions in the sixth century BCE, came to be worshiped later by their followers. In China, Confucius and Lao-tze came to be deified. To the non-Christian, Jesus seems to represent a parallel case. In Greece, the heroes of the past were held to have been sired by a God or to have been born of Goddesses, and the dividing line between Gods and men became fluid. In Egypt, the Pharaoh was considered divine." (The Faith of a Heretic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 187-8). In Israel, says Kaufmann, "no man was ever worshiped or accorded even semi-divine status. This is one of the most extraordinary facts about the religion of the Old Testament." (Ibid., 188). There never was a cult of Moses or any other biblical figure. That is why "no man knows Moses' burial place to this day" [this verse] so that it could never become a place of pilgrimage. No religion has held a higher view of humanity than the book that tells us we are each in the image and likeness of God. Yet none has been more honest about the failings of even the greatest. God does not ask us to be perfect. He asks us, instead, to take risks in pursuit of the right and the good, and to acknowledge the mistakes we will inevitably make. In Judaism the moral life is about learning and growing, knowing that even the greatest have feelings and even the worst of saving graces. It calls for humility about ourselves and generosity toward others. This unique blend of idealism and realism is morality at its most demanding and mature.