^{17 Adar I 5776 | February 26, 2016}

Parshat Ki Tissa

Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler

Dean of Students and Mashgicha Ruchanit, Maharat

Advanced Kollel: Executive Ordination Track Class of 2018

This week's parsha, parshat Ki Tissa, is largely about seeing--desires to see, failures to see, prohibitions on seeing, and glorious visions. It is about the deeply human thirst for absolute transparency and the divine insistence upon opacity. And it is about the search for the visible face of God refracted ultimately in the face of the human.

Though this parsha is rich, the central episode, that of the golden calf, begins with an an act of seeing.

In fact, it was what they did not see that gets this narrative going. Eagerly anticipating Moshe's return from his encounter with God on Mount Sinai, the people miscalculate the prescribed date (according to Rashi), despair of their leader and of God, and demand a new one.

With no visible human leader to rely on, Moshe's message of the invisible God became similarly unreliable, and a new, tangible, observable replacement is sought. The result is the undeniably solid calf of gold.

This event is identified by Moshe as a "chata'a gedola," a "great sin" (Exodus 32:30). The people have failed miserably in their traitorous attempt to render God palpably, identifiably real. It is, therefore, quite shocking to find Moshe himself manifest an impulse not all that different from theirs. Soon after begging God for forgiveness on behalf of the people and after witnessing the plague God sent to purge them of their sin, Moshe makes two outrageous requests of God. First:

And then, even more radically,

Moshe wants to see God! He wants an actual visual of the divine.

But God is not forthcoming, saying,

The message seems clear enough: No human being can actually lay eyes on God and survive. Full visual disclosure is simply not in the realm of sustainable possibilities, and so Moshe must settle for second best, a kind of partial disclosure:

God's refusal to share His face, His most clear essence, with Moshe is uniquely interesting, and uniquely perplexing, in light of its surrounding literary context. For this episode is immediately preceded by an unambiguous, and rather famous, characterization of the relationship between Moshe and God through the face! Exodus 33:11 states:

The face, alas, was the locus of their communication. The face was where God met Moshe and where Moshe met God. And yet it is the face that cannot ultimately be seen by Moshe. It is the face that he is denied. How might we understand this paradoxical relationship? How can the place of greatest access also be the place of no access?

In order to address this question, we must take a wider look at the theme of seeing God in the Torah. Though us moderns largely assume the impossibility of this task, we need not look too hard to find references to its possibility in the Torah. Parshat Mishpatim recounts the following mysterious event preceding the revelation at Sinai:

Presaging the vision of Yechezkel much later on, this elite group saw the God of Israel. What they saw is surely mystifying, but that they saw is unequivocally clear.

Yet the revelation of the Law does not take place in the company of this seeing group. Instead God tells Moshe to leave them behind and to ascend still further on his own to receive the Tablets. He does so, entering into the cloud of God. We are told of the vision of those left behind, in Exodus 24:17-18:

The people down below, all of B’nei Yisrael, had an intense visual experience here. They saw, with their very own eyes, the mar'eh, the appearance, of a fiery God. But notice how different Moshe's experience was. He, now in full relation to God, saw neither fire nor sparkling sapphire. He entered a cloud. A place of blurriness, of ambiguity. That's where he found God most closely.

The same remarkable contrast can be detected in parshat Yitro, where we are first introduced to the awesome Sinai experience. In Exodus 20:15 and 18 we are told:

B’nei Yisrael were granted a sensual encounter with the divine. They might not have actually seen the God of Israel here, but they did see manifestations of God's power, images as well as sounds. God's presence could be discerned clearly, without ambiguity. But notice Moshe's profound experience, in contrast. To truly encounter God at Sinai, Moshe had to enter the arafel, the fog, the place without flashing lights and crashing sounds. The place of cloudiness, maybe even a little darkness. For in the absence of absolute seeing, space opened up for real vision. Moshe entered the fog because "שם האלוהים," there God could be found.

So let us return now to our point of departure, where we are told both that Moshe has the most intimate of relationships with God's face and that he may not see God's face. We now know that he, along with others, was able to see different appearances of God in the past, and perhaps this is the "achor," the back of God, that is offered to him directly. But the panim, the face: that is decidedly off limits. It could be intensely engaged, but it could never be unmasked. We are now able to understand why.

It turns out that intimacy is not actually born of seeing, of raw observation, of data collection regarding contours and features. Relationships of the deepest sort do not emerge from perceptions of absolute clarity, of unmistakable transparency. On the contrary, "לֹא־יִרְאַנִי הָאָדָם וָחָי," "Man may not see Me and live," says God. It's not just that one could not sustain a physical life in the face of that kind of visual encounter. Rather, one's spiritual, soulful life would actually be flattened by such a misguided reduction, deadened by the crushing of mystery. For God is not an entity to be seen once and for all, but a relationship to be entered into for eternity. So, yes, Moshe spoke to God panim el panim--face to face, essence to essence--but he truly communed with God in the arafel, in the in-between, in the domain of ambiguity, of fog, in the blurry space of not fully knowing and not fully seeing.

Our story ends with a different set of panim. After having shattered the first set of Tablets in the face of the Golden Calf, Moshe goes up to Mount Sinai again, where he carves, and God engraves, a second set. He returns a changed man.

In being denied God's face, Moshe's own face was transformed. He emerged beaming with light, perhaps carrying some of God's own energy with him as he faced the people. But he had just learned something about the nature of revealing and the profundity of concealing, and so his own face would also not be fully exposed. He covered himself intermittently with a veil.

Through Moshe's own education in not-seeing, bnei Yisrael, lovers of images and idols at the start of our tale, learn a similar lesson. Even a human face ought not be fully transparent, for even, or especially, a human face can itself reveal the glory of God. "הַרְאֵנִי נָא אֶת־כְּבֹדֶך," Moshe had asked God. "Let me see Your glory." "פני לא יראו"--"My face may not be seen"--responded God, but "וְרָאוּ בְנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶת־פְּנֵי מֹשֶׁה," the face of Moshe may be seen. It is through occasional moments of human exposure, unveiled and radiant, that we just might get a glimpse of God.