In the past couple of weeks, we were immersed in one thing in our Torah calendar: the sacrifices, the korbanot which were brought every day to the Tabernacle or, later on, the Temple. The descriptions of the korbanote, you will recall, were the meat of worship – pun intended. But this week, on Chol HaMoed Pesach we take a break from all that and immerse ourselves into one of the most beautiful and comforting passages in all of Scripture. It is the image of Moses some time after the Exodus being cradled gently in the hand of God and Moses gets to see something we can’t even imagine. It is the Presence of God as it shows itself for but a moment (Exodus 33:21-23).
As a colleague once noted, ‘This vision is one of the most unabashedly human representations of God as can be found anywhere in the Bible. God has a face, which Moses cannot see. God has a hand, which protects Moses until the moment when God’s shining Presence has passed by. And God has a back, which Moses glimpses momentarily, though we have precious little description of what this vision of “God from behind” may have looked like.’
Our commentators, especially people like Maimonidies, had a real problem with such anthropomorphisms. I recall teach a chapter of Maimonidies at a Christian school in Mississippi and we delved into this subject. The first question I got was from a young 19 year old student who asked, ‘Why not believe the literal description of God’s back in the Bible?’ I know exactly where she was coming from. The Bible was literally the word of God and so when it says ‘God’s back,’ that’s what it meant – spine, ribs and shoulders. What’s so hard about that? It was then that I had to change my entire lesson about the use of metaphor and symbolism in the Torah.
And what was true for that young student, was also true for our commentators, although from different angles. Our commentators would not confine God to a flesh and bone body. And so they saw these physical descriptions as literary devices to describe something indescribable. For the rabbis, to portray God as having a body and a shape would be in direct contradiction to the second commandment not to make a graven image of God or represent God in any physical way.
Still, there is a wondrous beauty in looking at these verses, perhaps not literally, but taking them as they are and appreciating the poetry of the experience. For the experience was real and the Torah is confined to language which, by its very definition, is limiting. After all, how do you describe an emotion or a color? The feelings are real, the perceptions are profound but they are intensely personal. So I suggest reading these verses as a diary of Moses’ experience in the Presence of God. Listen to these words:
And the Eternal said, “See, there is a place near Me. Station yourself on the rock and, as My Presence passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock and shield you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I will take My hand away and you will see My back; but My face must not be seen.” (Exodus 33:21-23)
The language is the language of poetry but, as I said earlier, language limits the fullness of what we want to convey. The poet’s struggle is to convey emotion but, ironically, the reader must have experienced the same emotion or the poetry falls flat. Moses writes this in his diary but maybe knows that his experience is unique. He can describe it but, without similar experiences, how can we truly relate? We may have similar experiences to one degree or another but Moses’s words are primarily for Moses’ diary.
But the words Moses puts in his diary are interesting and the discerning reader will pick up on them right away. And even though his experience was unique, there are layers of it that each of us can relate to.
And those meanings can be found in God’s response which is, to Moses, a expression of the special relationship he has with God but also for us because in the language are layers intended double metaphors and double meanings. Those double meanings are for us.
Take a listen to the first line: “See there is a place near Me”- The word ‘place’ evokes something you will remember: Jacob’s ladder and when Jacob wakes up, what does he say? “Truly, the Eternal is in this place, and I did not know it!” (Genesis 28:16). The word for “place,” makom, can be taken both as a name for God and as a description of a place. That word, makom, is still used today liturgically and it means God. It is as if HaMakom, “the God of Israel,” answers Moses: “Stand with Me and I will stand with you. We will be in the same place.”
The next verse: “Station yourself on the rock.” You can see where I am going with this. ‘Rock’ is not simply a physical stone of granite or basalt. ‘Rock’ is another term for God. The Rock is God’s assurance that Moses will be protected as a stone wall protects the inhabitants of the town.
And finally the last verse: “I will put you in a cleft of the rock and shield you with My hand”- What a beautiful image this is. Moses is cradled in God’s hand as imaged by the Rock. The hand is open. Moses finds comfort in there. There is an intimacy that even the poetry of King David in the Psalms does not have.
But it is incomplete because even Moses cannot see God’s face, what the Torah presents as the true image of God. Even our rabbis would never describe God’s characteristics fully. Rather than describe what God looks like, they teach us to delve on what God wants. Knowledge of the Ain Sof – the thing without end, is the limit of who we are. Like the dilemma in modern astrophysics which postulates what is beyond the edge of the universe or what is the bottom layer of reality below quarks and quantum functions, there are some things we can never know and will never know. We simply have to get used to not knowing and learning to live with what we can know. But the Ain Sof is not one of those things.
Still, the rabbis know that every word in the Torah means something. And so they created a midrash, a spiritual insight from the vision of God’s back. And, in a beautiful Talmudic passage that my Talmud class recently read, what Moses saw was not just God’s back. Rather what we saw was the knot of God’s head tefillin. The thing many Jews put on in the morning in prayer is also worn by God. And that means that God prays.
Consider the image in this midrash. God wears tefillin. God prays. And why the tefillin? Because the tefillin has within it the Shma – the statement of God’s oneness. God wants to be one with Moses and Moses wants to be one with God. The tefillin carries the message that, indeed, they are bound by covenant and love to each other.
And what else is in the tefillin? The v’ahavta passage. That is the passage that teaches us that it is we who must carry God’s words with us everywhere we go and, in this context, that God carries us with Him everywhere He goes.
On this Shabbat Chol Ha-Moed Pesach, this portion is a renewal of vows between God and the Jewish people. We walk together toward Shavuot, the giving of the Torah, but we must remember that none of us ever walks truly alone. We may not glimpse the Ein Sof but we can certainly feel God’s presence in each of our steps.
