Ki Tissa
He (Moshe) said: “Let me, I pray, behold Your
glory!” God said: “I will let all My goodness pass before your face; I will proclaim God by
name before you; I will favor whomever I will favor and I will have compassion
upon whoever I will have compassion.
33:18 – 19
Moses first request was that he might be given an
understanding of the ways of God so that he might attain an understanding of
god Himself…Moses’ second request is on a higher level. He now seeks to obtain a direct perception of
God from which an understanding of God’s ways would naturally follow…The
diversity of human nature, resulting from the moral freedom with which man is
endowed, necessitates the same diversity in the ways of God that are intended
to train him for his own well-being.
Samson Raphael Hirsch (19th Century)
Moses sought to learn the secrets of how God manages
the world, the solution to the question that has troubled men since time
immemorial – the problem of theodicy, of Divine reward, retribution and
justice…
Yair Barkai (Contemporary)
Moses asks for a personal favor, an act of grace for
himself, when he says “Please show me Your
glory.” He wanted to be shown this at
once, not to have to wait until some future national crisis would trigger the
need for that kind of revelation of God’s majesty…God responds by saying that
You (Moses) will understand the relationship of all the things that exist, and
how they are all traced back to Me, the original Cause of all existence and all
happenings…When God says “You cannot see My face,” this is not to be construed
as a denial of Moses’ request, but as a teaching and an instruction. The ultimate wisdom of the sage is to know
what element of theology needs to remain beyond his understand.
Akedat Yitzchak (15th Century)
What Moses seems to yearn for above all is an intimate
relationship with God…Moses uses his unique relationship with God to ask the
question that has troubled believers to this day: “What kind of God are you? What are you like?...He wants to know God’s ways…
Neil Gillman (Contemporary)
God must be understood as the Infinite, the Absolute,
whereas Moses is simply a human being.
If Moses is to look at the face of God, he will be able to see only what
he thinks God looks like, just as our eyes present to us only a representation
of what we look at. In everyday life
that is good enough, but this is God, and an
approximation will not be sufficient or even helpful. We would be doomed to
have only another human vision of the divine and would lose the greatness only
of Moses’s prophetic clarity. According
to the Midrash, when the torah says that Moses knew God “face to face,” it does
not mean that they could look across the cosmos at each other, but, instead,
that their faces fit one into the other facing the same direction, seeing the
same reality. When Moses sees the back
of God, he does not see the unseeable divine, but instead looks as it were,
over the shoulder of the divine and so sees the world from an absolute perspective.
Michael Paley (Contemporary)
Torah and faith are the main aspects of Jewish faith,
and all the sanctities – Israel, Jerusalem and the Temple – are but details of
the Torah and were sanctified through the holiness of the torah…There is no
difference for all Torah matters either in regard to place or time. It is the same in Eretz
Meir Simcha Hakohen of Dvinsk (20th
Century)