One of the most deeply fundamental spiritual questions is how to seek God and where to find Divinity. Moshe, in this week’s parsha, struggles with this question explicitly. In the context of the building of the Tabernacle, in the aftermath of the golden calf, Moshe tries to find God. But it’s a rocky path, and God is not really seeable. Moshe calls out to God, “let me behold Your Presence” (Exodus 33:18) but God responds by saying, “My goodness will pass before you, but you cannot see My face” (Exodus 33:19-20). Moshe’s challenge in seeking the unseeable parallels many of our own challenges and leaves us wondering how one navigates that process.
In the next chapter though, there’s a major shift and Moshe becomes the unseeable one. He has gone back up the mountain to receive the second set of tablets after breaking the first set. When Moses returns to the people, he has transformed. His face was radiant because he had spoken with God, and the people couldn’t look at him. He put a veil over his face whenever he spoke to the people because it was all just too overwhelming.
What’s fascinating to me in these two chapters is that Moshe has gone from seeking the unseeable to being the unseeable. At first, Moshe was looking for God who was overwhelming, and then he himself became changed because of his contact with God. I wonder how he made that transition and how he pushed himself to interact with God even though God was overwhelming. Surely, it changed him. He, too, became unseeable. But I think he became better for that interaction and there was benefit to him continuing to try to see that which is hard to see.
There are things in our lives that are easier to not see, to not pay attention to, in part, out of fear that they will change us. Moshe sought out a relationship with God even though God was unseeable. I find myself challenged to try and seek the hard-to-see, how to not turn the other way, knowing that I will be affected. There are various times where we may feel this, where it’s easier to turn away because of the pain, the way we may be changed.
I have felt this in relation to various subsets of our society, though I realize I have felt this perhaps most profoundly when thinking about the experience of refugees around the world and specifically refugee children. It’s just one of the many “hard-to-see” elements, but I find it so crucial to try and see. The pain at seeing the way those seeking a better life are treated, the horror at the trials they go through that most of us will thank-God never know, the systematic ways that we, as a society, so often choose to not see. Not look at. Not pay attention to.
Moshe, for me, is a model, a dugma, of the necessity of getting proximal to things that are unseeable. We will likely never know, will likely never actually see the true experience. But we can do our best to try, to see the hard-to-see, to become changed. If there are things we find too hard to look at, if there are experiences of people that are too painful for us, we probably owe it to them to look. No doubt, we will be changed. But hopefully, in the long run, when we try and see, we, and them, are changed for the better.
Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Sarit
---- This week, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is bringing folks together to think about refugees and how we relate to the global challenges around refugees specifically as Jews.
