Copyright 2017 Neal Joseph Loevinger
Torah Portion: Ki Tissa
And he said: “Show me, now, Your glory!” The Holy One replied: “I will let all My goodness pass before you; I will proclaim the Divine Name before you . . . . (Shemot/Exodus 33:18-19)
Good morning! Good to be back. So much going on in this week’s Torah portion, most famously the Golden Calf and the breaking of the Tablets, but also Moshe’s plea, after the post-Calf reckoning, on behalf of the Israelites and himself. Moshe asks God not to destroy the Israelites, reasoning that it would be bad PR to destroy a people that God had just liberated from slavery.
As for himself, Moshe to see God’s “glory,” or kavod, which usually means something like direct or revealed presence. The response, quoted above, is interesting: God says, I will pass my goodness, tuvi, before you, not kavod, glory or immanent presence. Perhaps Moshe was caught up in the same need for some sort of defined external experience or perception of the Holy that caused the people to build the Calf, and God instead redirected him to experience the Holy in internal moral and spiritual qualities. In other words- you need not look for the Holy out there when you can experience the Holy in good and giving relationship.
If that were all these verse taught- dayenu, it would be enough! Yet as usual, our friend Rashi brings a deeper dimension to God’s reply to Moshe’s request. You can find the full translation here, but the basic idea is that God wanted to teach Moshe the order of prayer, which began with Moshe’s invocation of the merit of the ancestors but needed to include the qualities of Divine goodness and mercy, which God proclaimed while Moshe was hidden in the rock. (These are prominently quoted in our prayers on the Days of Awe.) Rashi says that Moshe thought that the “merit of the ancestors,” or zechut avot, was depleted or finished, and therefore there was no more hope, so God revealed Divine goodness and mercy, which doesn’t depend on the merit of our matriarchs and patriarchs.
On the one hand, this is a midrash, or interpretation, which explains the one of our central prayers: you may remember that the Amidah, or standing prayer, begins with calling out to God as the God of our ancestors Avraham, Yitzhak and Yaakov- and in my versions our matriarchs Sarah, Rivka, Rachel and Leah as well- and has a central section, during the week, asking for goodness and various forms of blessing. The idea is Moshe thought that the merit of our ancestors wasn’t enough, so God showed Moshe that there is Divine goodness which doesn’t depend on it. Therefore, our prayers begin with zechut avot, but don’t end there.
On a deeper level, I think Rashi’s comment speaks directly to our greater Jewish experience in the modern world. How many of us do Jewish because it was something our parents or grandparents did, as a way of honoring them and furthering their legacy? How much of contemporary Judaism is taught as a historical practice which obligates merely out of accumulated precedent? Moshe suspected, and in Rashi’s reading, God confirmed- that’s not enough. We also need the experience of the Holy in our own lives, not just in the memory of the lives of those who came before.
Many of us have ancestors who lived extraordinary Jewish lives of courage, devotion and sacrifice- but it may not be enough to sustain a life’s journey. Like Moshe, who suspected that the merit of the ancestors was exhausted, to truly revitalize ourselves and our communities we each have to find and feel the Divine Presence for ourselves, in our lives and our loves and our deeds and our doing, if we’re going to make it on the long journey forward.
Shabbat Shalom,
RNJL
The views expressed are my own and do not reflect that of Vassar Brothers Medical Center or Health-Quest.
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