Who is God?

“When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him: Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that fellow Moses—the man who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him.” (Exodus 32:1)

So begins the story of the golden calf. Reading this English translation, it seems as if the people suffer from a shortfall of patience. Moses took too long… 

But the Hebrew is a little more interesting. The word translated as “was so long” is boshesh, which in almost every other circumstance means “embarrass, shame, confound.” The people see that Moses is embarrassing them! Or perhaps they project their deep insecurity onto his absence. Theabsence of clear and present leadership thrusts them into an unbearable existential worry, and so they turn to Aaron and ask him to replace their leader (Moses and/or God, it is unclear) with something tangible and static. The golden calf isn’t just a foolish misunderstanding of God, it is perhaps an intentional grasping for something that won’t disappear, won’t change, won’t abandon the people like they fear Moses has. The people see Moses’ absence and in their need to see something at all they make the golden calf. 

Moses himself suffers a crisis of wanting to see in another story later in theparashah. “Moses cries out, ‘Oh let me see your Presence!’ And [God] answered, ‘I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you the name YHVH, and I will grant the grace that I will grant and show the compassion that I will show…But you cannot see My face, for a human being may not see Me and live… you will see My back; but My face must not be seen.” (Exodus 33:19-20, 23) 

God tells Moses: Seeing Me isn’t possible. But you will hear My name, Yud Hey Vav Hey. 

When Moses first encountered God at the bush that was aflame, God told him that YHVH would now be the name the people of Israel should use. In explaining its significance, God says “Ehyeh asher ehyeh - I will be what I will be, I am that which is ever-becoming.” (Exodus 3:14) 

Moses’ task is to be an agent of the living Source of all Being, to bring the Israelites into relationship not with dead, static idols but with the unimage-able, irreducibly complex, ever-changing, animating force of everything, and the ethical call to live in right relationship as a unique part of the web of life. Naturally, both Moses and the Israelites are sometimes exhausted by the ongoing effort to expand their minds beyond the ego’s hungry eye and surrender to the impermanent flux of being. They want answers. They want ease - a full picture, even if a small and pale imitation of Reality. “For your own sake, therefore, be most careful—since you saw no image when YHVH spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire…” (Deuteronomy 4:15).

At the heart of these texts is the (often frustrated) human yearning to know the divine. Who is God? In the first episode of what promises to be a wonderful new podcast series from Rabbi Shai Held of Hadar, Answers WithHeld, he discusses exactly this question with Rabbi Avi Killip. She has a beautiful sense of what is behind the question when a child asks: Who is God? “You know, what I think is so amazing, and beautiful, and even inspiring by hearing these questions from kids, for the first time in particular, is seeing that first spark, that first inkling of what we hope will grow into a real, full, mature spiritual life… Why is it so scary for us when a child asks us who is God? And one of the answers is because it feels like maybe what they are asking is “How does the world work” or “Why do bad things happen” or [Shai Held interjects: “Am I safe?”]”

A child, like the Israelites at Sinai, builds a spiritual life around a kernel of existential not-knowing. Each one of us moves forward with a different mixture of curiosity, fear, embarrassment, and hopeful yearning. We build idols and life smashes them, and sometimes the broken image of what we thought we knew is painful. 

When, as adults, we ask who God is, the Torah offers insight into mature spiritual knowing of God. It is dynamic (ever changing like the divine name),reflective (when we glimpse backward like Moses does), and humbling(when we remember our inability to fully picture God and indeed each being). All of these practices - dynamic, reflective, and humbling - move us frommochin d’katnut (the normal, egocentric way of being) to mochin d’gadlut, a state of mind where we don’t grasp for permanence, we don’t try to perfectly predict the future but rather glean wisdom and comfort from reflective presence, and maintain the respect for other people’s perspectives that comes when we know we don’t have the full picture.

Shabbat shalom!