Shabbat Ki Tisa: What does God look like?
The dominant theme of the Torah this Shabbat is the episode of the Golden Calf.
Moses was up the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights. Nobody knew what had happened to him. The people down below start to panic. The two people that were left in charge in Moses’s absence were Aaron and Chur (according to Midrash he was the son of Miriam and Caleb). Chur disappears. This is why tradition says that when the people said they wanted an idol to replace Moses, he tried to stop them and was killed. This was why Aaron reluctantly agreed to make the Golden Calf.
For the Children of Israel, an abstraction was just not enough. Aaron then called for a celebration the following day, which became a pagan orgy. Moses came down the mountain, he saw what was going on, and smashed the two tablets of stone, ground them down, mixed the ashes with water, and made the offenders drink it. What better way to get them to realise the futility of the physical? This is also a motif that will recur later on when the Torah talks about a woman who has betrayed her husband. Here it is symbolic of the idea that God has been betrayed by the children of Israel.
What was the purpose of this idol? They said it was the same God that took them out of Egypt. But they could see that they had just made it themselves. They needed some sort of image. Was this why paganism with its images has remained so pervasive to this day? Or was it why the anthropomorphosis of God as some kind of super-powerful human-like being, remains so popular?
After these events, God’s reaction was to give up on the Children of Israel and start again with Moses. Moses interceded and appealed to God. Who reluctantly seemed to agree (another seemingly human response) and give the Children of Israel a second chance and continue taking them towards the Promised Land. But implied that there would not be the same relationship as before. Moses sensed this and sought reassurance by asking God to show him His glory.
God replies in Exodus 33:20 “you cannot see my face no human being can see no living human being can face but I will find a place amongst the rocks… I will cover you so that you will not be able to see Me as I pass by, but you will only see an afterimage.” And then Moses went back up the mountain to receive the 10 commandments a second time.
We ascribe to God human words, like speak, listen, anger, sadness, and regret. This gives rise to the idea that God is some sort of all-powerful Superman controlling the world. Yet at the same time, the Torah keeps on saying that God is beyond the comprehension of human beings. We cannot know God. Indeed, according to the great Maimonides, we can only say what God is not! What we can derive from what the Torah tells us about God, is what God approves of and what God does not approve of. How we are supposed to behave and how not. God, Torah, is the ultimate authority.
Since God is not physical, I take all these examples of seeing God, experiencing God, not as something that we would understand scientifically but as something that has to be sensed intuitively. How do you describe intuition? How do you describe emotion?
The Torah compromises. One way is to give God different names which reflect the variety of aspects of the spiritual. Each one of us experiences God in a personal way; when we feel happy, sad, guilty, or worried. And then there is the lawgiver, and we don’t need to see a lawgiver to know what the law is. We just need to feel that there is something beyond us that represents what we might call the mystical or the spiritual world, something to aspire to, beyond the mundane. By describing the afterimage of God as in this episode, one avoids the idea of God in a physical sense and yet retains the idea.
Exodus 30:11-34:35
