On this Shabbat during Pesach, we pause our regular Torah cycle to read something special for this holiday season. The chosen reading comes from the aftermath of the Golden Calf, directing our attention to the nature of our relationship with God.
It feels particularly fitting during Pesach to reflect on this relationship. Following their Exodus from Egypt, the Israelites were dependent on a God they did not yet know, who had displayed extraordinary power, yet had also allowed them to remain in slavery for many years. And when God did not appear in the way they expected, they sought alternative gods, finding comfort in the material and tangible.
Pesach is one of three pilgrimage festivals in our tradition, a time when our ancestors journeyed to Jerusalem to seek God’s presence through the act of sacrifice. Still today many of us search for God around our seder tables, in the rituals, the music, the food, and the retelling of the story, as we try to grasp the miracles that God performed for our ancestors, and for us.
Yet like Moses, who in this moment asks to see God, but is shown only God’s back, we too often experience only partial revelation. We search for clarity, but what we are truly looking for remains just out of reach.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) wrote about two levels of knowledge: accurate knowledge of an object’s true nature and limited knowledge shaped by our human understandings. Most things in our world we know through direct experience, we see them, touch them and interact with them. But when it comes to something as vast and abstract as God, our knowledge is limited by our own grasp. We can never truly know God’s face.
Even Moses, who knew God more intimately than any other prophet, was shown only God’s back. He came the closest a human being could to grasping the Divine. Not by seeing God directly, but by recognising the presence of God’s actions in the world.
Like Moses, we need to be open to “see” God in our world. We may not encounter God through dramatic revelation, but we can learn to notice God’s presence in the small moments and the everyday miracles. Our tradition teaches that each of us is created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.
One of the clearest glimpses of the Divine is found in human interactions, in kindness, compassion and genuine connection.
We may never know God face to face, but every day we are given the opportunity to glimpse the Divine, to be reminded of God’s presence in our interactions and to walk with God by our side.
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