“Man may not see Me and live.”
This scene describes the closest any human ever gets to God. But as the text indicates, closeness to God can be dangerous. At Exodus 3:6, when Moses first encounters God, he is afraid to look and hides his face. Now that he has become better acquainted with God, he is no longer afraid and asks for more: “Now, if I have truly gained Your favor, pray let me know Your ways, that I may know You and continue in Your favor” (Exodus 33:13).1 God answers that Moses has indeed found favor and that God will comply with Moses’s request. Having passed the initial test, Moses continues: “I pray, show me Your glory [kavod]” (Exodus 33:18).2
What does this mean? From what we have seen thus far, it is clear that Moses means something either intimate with or identical to God, something that no other person has seen before and that requires special permission. I therefore take “show me Your glory” to mean something along the lines of “show me what You really are.”
Unfortunately, Moses’s request puts God in a difficult position. On the one hand, Moses has found favor with God. Recall that at 3:12 God promised to be with him when he went before Pharaoh. On the other hand, God is obliged to tell Moses that God cannot grant everything Moses has asked for. It is then that God says: “Man may not see Me and live.”3 In normal parlance, looking at someone’s face means looking directly at them, into their eyes, and possibly gaining insight into their character. So when God says that Moses cannot see his face, it is as if he is saying: “I’m afraid you cannot know me up close and personal.”
Still, God does not turn Moses down flat. Accordingly, he says: “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you the name Lord [YHWH]” (Exodus 33:19). God then tells Moses that if he stands in the cleft of a rock, God will cover him with his hand until he has passed by and allow Moses to see his back side. In other words, if God’s face remains concealed, his back can be revealed, provided certain precautions are taken.
What does it mean for Moses to see God’s back side? Under the circumstances, it is appears to be a consolation prize. The problem is that God goes on to identify his back with his glory, prompting the reader to ask a number of questions, the first of which is: Can Moses see God’s glory or not?
The most natural explanation for the confusion is that the Hebrew word kavod is ambiguous. Sometimes it refers to God himself, as it seems to in Moses’s request, “Show me Your glory.” Sometimes it refers to a blazing light that emanates from God and is too intense for humans to look at directly (e.g., Exodus 24:17). Sometimes it refers to a mask or shield that protects humans from being injured by the light (e.g., 1 Kings 8:10–11, Psalm 104:2, Ezekiel 10:4). Sometimes it refers to the honor or respect that is due God (e.g., 1 Samuel 4.21–22). When Isaiah (6:3) says that the whole earth is full of God’s glory, he does not mean that it is saturated with God as a sponge is saturated with water but that the whole earth reflects or testifies to the greatness of God.
In view of this ambiguity, I take the first use of kavod at Exodus 33:20 to refer to God himself and the second to refer to the qualities that trail God much as the train of a bridal dress trails the bride. In the next chapter, we will learn that these qualities include mercy, graciousness, slowness to anger, steadfast love, and forgiveness of sin.
That prompts the second question: What does it mean for qualities like mercy or graciousness to trail God? Although the text does not answer this question directly, consider an analogy. Suppose that an anonymous donor gives millions of dollars to a community organization that provides food, clothing, and medical care to the poor. Although we can see the beneficial consequences of what the donor has done—her back side—her identity remains a mystery. In the language of Exodus 33, we can know her from afar by looking at the actions she has set in motion, but we do not know her up close and personal.
Let us say, therefore, that Moses can get close to God but not too close. It is not that he will be punished for trying to look directly at God but that anyone who tries to get too close will die, because seeing God’s face is simply too much for any mortal to take in—even someone who, like Moses, has found favor with God.
That leads to the third question: Why does the Torah say that it is dangerous to get too close to a God that most religions—including Judaism—portray as benevolent? If we read the Torah literally, then we are back to the idea that God’s face emits a light so intense that anyone who looks directly at it will die. We have seen, however, that light is often a metaphor for insight or understanding. If we take Exodus 33 as an extended metaphor, then by saying that we cannot see God’s face, the Torah is telling us that the essence or internal nature of God is too much for us to comprehend, that it is and will always remain a mystery.
The mystery goes much deeper than the fact that God sometimes does things that we do not expect. That much could have been said about Zeus or Poseidon. In this case, the point is that while a finite mind like ours can worship an infinite God and engage in religious practices that focus our attention on God, at some point our minds will reach the limit of their ability. When that happens, it is not only futile to push ahead but also, in the language of Exodus 33, self-destructive. We cannot come so close to the infinite that we can look it in the eye, for if we could, it would be at our level and no longer infinite.
Consider another analogy. We need the light that comes from the sun so that we can see. Without it, everything would be lost in a sea of darkness. But if we look directly at the sun, we will damage our eyes and might eventually go blind. It is not that the sun is evil but that its power to illuminate is too much for us to handle directly. What is true of the sun is also true of God. Without God, nothing would exist; but if we try to comprehend the exact nature of the power that makes existence possible, to answer every question that could ever be asked about it, we will be taking on more than we can handle and will suffer as a result.
To repeat: there are aspects of divinity that are accessible to us (the back side) and aspects that are not accessible (the face). While this conclusion is reasonable, it too raises questions. First, how do we deal with that aspect of divinity that is inaccessible? Second, the Torah tells us that we should do our best to imitate God. Leviticus 11 says twice that we should be holy because God is holy. Deuteronomy 5:33 says that we are commanded to walk in God’s ways. How can we imitate something whose true nature is utterly mysterious?
We can begin our consideration of that aspect of divinity that is inaccessible by taking a modest step backward and looking at the implications of monotheism. A monotheistic world is noteworthy for the boundaries it erects: light and darkness, the sacred and the profane, the divine and the human. To try to cross them is to upset the foundation upon which that world is based.
When God banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:22), he complains that “man has become like one of us” and places monsters (cherubim) at the gate and a flaming sword to guard the entrance. Moses is warned not to get too close to God. In a similar way, Exodus 19 warns the people not to look at God and the priests to consecrate themselves lest God break out against them and destroy them. This picture stands in sharp contrast to a mythological world in which gods take on human characteristics, humans take on divine characteristics, and sexual relations between the two are common.
No idea as important as monotheism comes to a people all at once. Along these lines, we have seen that the Torah often ascribes human characteristics to God. Exodus 33 is as good an example as any. Although the first two commandments take an important step in the direction of monotheism, even they leave questions unanswered. The first says that we should have no other God before us. Does this mean that other gods exist but are not as important as the true God, or that they do not exist at all? The second commandment prohibits us from making images of God. Is the reason that God does not want to be worshipped in the way that other gods are, or that it is impossible to make a finite image of something that is infinite?
Looking at the Bible as a whole, it may be that the first person to see the full implications of monotheism was Second Isaiah, a prophet thought to have flourished around the time that Babylonia fell to the Persians in 539 BCE, some five hundred years after Moses and the Exodus from Egypt. At Isaiah 40, he proclaims that even the mightiest nations on earth are as nothing before God and that the great cedars of Lebanon do not have sufficient fuel or animals to provide burnt offerings to God. He sums up his point by asking the critical question for all of Jewish philosophy: “To whom, then, can you liken Me, to whom can I be compared?” (Isaiah 40:25).
How do we characterize something that cannot be compared to anyone or anything else? From a literary standpoint, we can stress the danger of coming too close to God. From a philosophic standpoint, we can say that God cannot be described by subject-predicate propositions. It is this line of thinking that led Maimonides to argue that while praise of God is a necessary part of any religion, we should not forget that any praise we offer is tainted by the fact that we are speaking from a human-centered point of view.4 From a mystical standpoint, we can give God the name Ein Sof but warn people that it refers to something completely beyond the limits of human understanding.
This is all a way of saying that our terms of praise, though heartfelt, cannot do justice to God. The solution is not to put down the prayer book but to recognize that while the praise we offer is the best we can do, in the end God is beyond our ability to praise. This, I submit, is what Exodus 33 is getting at when it says that we cannot see God’s face.
In a moment of eloquence, Maimonides sums up this line of argument with these words: “Glory then to Him who is such that when the intellects contemplate His essence, their apprehension turns into incapacity; and when they contemplate the proceeding of His actions from His will, their knowledge turns into ignorance; and when the tongues aspire to magnify Him by means of attributive qualifications, all eloquence turns into weariness and incapacity!”5 So understood, the effort to know God is not like that involved in discovering a new particle or developing a new process. In the latter cases, knowledge advances when concepts are revised and theories extended. But in this case, knowledge ceases to advance at the point where finitude ends and infinity begins.
The effect of this reading is to replace the physical destruction threatened by a literal reading of Exodus 33 with what might be called conceptual destruction. It is not that we will be blown away by a ball of fire if we try to comprehend the nature of God but that ultimately the categories we use to describe our experience of the world will fall short. If God is comparable to nothing else, then no matter what comparison we come up with, we will miss the mark.
The mention of conceptual destruction brings to mind the thought of the twentieth-century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote that the infinite affects thought by devastating it.6 What he means is that the idea of the infinite is unlike any other idea in our conceptual repertoire because it represents more than a finite being like us can possibly take in. To use an example we encountered earlier, if a number like 10100 is too great for us to imagine, then infinity, which is infinitely greater, is so far beyond our ability to imagine that the mere mention of it cannot help but acquaint us with our own inadequacy.
Behind Levinas’s view is a famous argument of Descartes, according to which the human mind is capable of inventing or fabricating a wide variety of the ideas that it considers. A lively imagination is all that is needed to conjure up characters in novels, creatures in science fiction movies, designs for new cars, or outlines of new cities. But, continues Descartes, there is one idea that is too great for even the liveliest imagination to fabricate: the idea of an infinite being, or God.
Descartes’s point is a theme we have considered before: God is not just a wiser, stronger, or better version of something we have already encountered but a being that is infinitely wise, infinitely strong, and infinitely good. According to Descartes, the only thing that could create such an idea is an infinite being itself. He concludes that an infinite being must exist and must have left a trace of its perfection in the mind of every rational creature.
This is not the place to discuss the validity of this argument. What interests me is Levinas’s take on it: the idea that an infinite being surpasses or overwhelms the person who thinks it.7 As he puts it, the idea of the infinite “aims at what it cannot embrace.”8 In fact, nothing can embrace it, which is part of what we mean by proclaiming it infinite in the first place. From a biblical perspective, one can get a good picture of what it is like to be overwhelmed in Levinas’s sense of the term by looking at Job’s response to the voice from the whirlwind at Job 38:1. Faced with something too vast and mysterious to understand, Job can only repent in silence.
To carry this idea a step further, let us dig more deeply into what infinity means. No matter how formidable, the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology were limited by other forces. Even Zeus had to give way to the Fates. According to one account, the Fates could be subdued by the power of wine. Nothing like this is true of the God of the Torah. As Pharaoh learned, much to his dismay, nothing else in the universe could thwart him or rival him. Let us therefore agree that God is not limited by any natural necessity, by which I mean a force or power that operates independently of God. If God is the creator of heaven and earth, then everything in heaven and earth is subject to God’s will.
Suppose, however, that instead of asking about natural necessity, one were to ask about logical necessity. Could God draw a triangle whose interior angles did not equal 180 degrees? I cannot imagine what such a triangle would be like. From the fact that I cannot imagine it, does it follow that God cannot make it? In the Middle Ages, a variety of Jewish thinkers took up this kind of question and concluded that God cannot do what is logically impossible—not because he lacks the power to do it but because it simply cannot be done.9 Because the question of whether God can draw a triangle that violates the laws of geometry makes no sense, they thought it amounted to a nonquestion.
Suppose, however, that God were listening to this discussion and interrupted by asking: “Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do?” In other words, does the impossibility of drawing such a triangle derive from the fact that it involves a contradiction that nothing can resolve, or does it derive from the fact that the powers of the human mind are limited?
Against the general trend of Jewish philosophy, Descartes opted for the second alternative. In a famous letter, he writes: “The mathematical truths which you call eternal have been laid down by God and depend on Him entirely no less than the rest of his creatures. . . . Indeed to say that these truths are independent of God is to talk of Him as if He were Jupiter or Saturn and to subject Him to the Styx and the Fates.”10 This means that subjecting God to the laws of logic is no different from subjecting him to wind, rain, or disease. If this is true, then what we refer to as “eternal” truths are established by God and dependent on him to the same degree as anything else in the created order.
In other words, God made the theorems of geometry true, and if he had wanted, he could just as easily have made them false. In a way, we are back to Kierkegaard and the claim that in God all things are possible. If God can turn murder into a holy act, why can he not make a triangle whose interior angles equal 150 degrees or 250? According to Descartes, rather than saying that God cannot make such a triangle, I should say that I cannot understand how God can make one, for surely my powers of understanding impose no restriction on God.
Questions like “Can God make such a triangle?” and “Can God turn murder into a holy act?” strike at the heart of our notions of consistency and rationality—precisely the point Levinas made when he said that the infinite affects thought by devastating it. To the objection that if this is true, then Descartes’s position would lead to incoherence, the answer is that indeed it would. Once we agree that God can disregard the laws of logic, the prospect of incoherence stares us in the face. Obviously, a person cannot think about such possibilities all the time. Exodus 33 describes a special moment when Moses confronts God all by himself. Nothing in the passage either says or implies that we should try to relive Moses’s experience on a regular basis.
Still, if I have read the passage correctly, it suggests that on rare occasions a person should ask herself what it would be like to stand before God. Suppose that the everyday matters that take up so much of our time have been attended to. Suppose too that all the required prayers have been said and that no one else is listening in. What would happen? Our discussion of Exodus 33 indicates that the experience would have two dimensions: intimacy if one has found favor in the sight of God mixed with inadequacy insofar as part of God remains inaccessible. On my reading, this is the Torah’s way of telling us that both reactions are essential parts of religious experience.
How we are to cope with the claim that part of God will always be inaccessible? If the human mind cannot come to grips with the essence or inner nature of God, what can? Here we face the danger that if we are overwhelmed with such a thought, we may be tempted to turn to something else, such as extreme or violent behavior. The danger is heightened by asking how an infinite or absolute God could be satisfied with anything less than an infinite or absolute response from us. In short, does an infinite God not demand some form of fanaticism?
One hardly has to mention that fanatical behavior, whether in the form of asceticism, self-mutilation, child sacrifice, or the massacre of innocent people, has played a part in all monotheistic religions. While such behavior is revolting, we should not blind ourselves to the fact that it raises a legitimate question. Why should we suppose that a God who is too dangerous to approach and too mysterious for us to comprehend would be satisfied by normal, law-abiding behavior from us?
If “man may not see my face and live” were all that the Torah had to say about the human effort to know God, it would be difficult to see how it could constitute the foundation of a religion. We would have skepticism and humility in the face of God but no sense of what kind of behavior God wants from us. Fortunately, this is not all we are told. While Moses cannot see God’s face, he can see God’s back side, which consists of mercy, graciousness, slowness to anger, steadfast love, and forgiveness of sin.
Recall the anonymous donor whose work for the community is visible even though her identity remains a mystery. Applying this analogy to God, we can say that mercy, graciousness, and slowness to anger are the best we can do in trying to understand God. Rather than tell us what God is in himself, these qualities tell us how God manifests himself to us. In language introduced by Levinas, they are the traces of divinity that God has left behind. If we cannot understand infinite power, then we can hardly try to imitate it. But we can imitate mercy, graciousness, and everything else that Moses saw.
One point that people often overlook in talking about God’s back side is that he could have revealed a whole different set of qualities. Suppose, for example, that God had revealed heroic virtues like courage, craftiness, and ruthlessness in the face of enemies. There are passages in the Bible that would lead us to expect just this kind of list. At Exodus 15:3, for example, God is described as a warrior ready to lead his people into battle. More abstractly, if God created all of heaven and earth, then he has the power to destroy them just as quickly.
The fact is, however, that Exodus 34 does not mention anything like this. On the contrary, the virtues that God reveals are quiet rather than heroic. The word normally translated as “merciful” or “gracious” in this context is closely connected to the word rechem, which refers to the womb. The idea is that God’s relation to his people resembles a mother’s tenderness and affection for her child. We have seen that chesed, which could also be translated as “merciful,” implies love or devotion. It is one of the greatest paradoxes in all of religious history that when a God whose power is too vast for us to comprehend makes himself available to us, it is the quiet, one might even say feminine, virtues that gain center stage.
While God’s revelation to Moses may have been short-lived, the passage that describes it became central for Judaism from that point on. The vengeful and vindictive aspects of the God of the Hebrew Bible are there for all to see. The importance of Exodus 34 is that it does not allow them to steal the show. In the last analysis, it is mercy and graciousness that carry the day.
Much of this chapter has been a discussion of the implications of monotheism. What has emerged is that, in addition to being a claim about God—that God is infinite or absolute—monotheism is also a claim about us, in fact, several claims. First, there is the claim that to believe in God is to put human achievements in proper perspective. However impressive they may be when viewed from our standpoint on earth, like the cedars of Lebanon, human knowledge and power count as nothing when compared to God. We do not know what the world looks like from God’s perspective, and, like Job, we can only repent in silence before something too vast to understand.
Second, there is the claim that the best we can do by way of drawing near to God is to cultivate not strength or physical prowess but love and compassion. No doubt “strength” is an ambiguous term. In one sense, it takes more strength to forgive those who have offended us than it does to lift a barbell or throw a javelin, more strength to control one’s temper than to conquer an empire.
Finally, there is the claim that the line separating God and humans is not porous. If God’s greatness cannot be measured in human terms, neither can human greatness be measured in divine terms. This should make us suspicious of people who erect huge monuments to themselves or have their pictures plastered on billboards all over town. Although Moses was the greatest prophet who ever lived, we should not forget that he hid his face upon first encountering God. Later (Numbers 12:3) the Torah tells us that he was the meekest of people. Although he was buried in the land of Moab, to this day no one knows exactly where.
Our final questions are: Why has a doctrine that should lead to meekness and humility on our part often led to the opposite? Why have practitioners of monotheism sought to eliminate other forms of religion and, in many cases, to eliminate other forms of monotheism? Why have Jews, Christians, and Muslims not only killed each other but killed fellow Jews, Christians, and Muslims as well? Why have practitioners of all three invoked the concept of a holy war to justify violence?
I suggest that the problem has to do with how we interpret uniqueness. The move from a God who is unique and comparable to nothing to a people or institution that is unique seems simple enough. If humans should seek truth, and if that people or institution is in possession of the greatest truth of all, why should they not take extraordinary measures to get other people to accept their views? Reference has already been made to the fact that at Deuteronomy 7, God tells the people not to show pity to the people they are about to attack and utterly to destroy them. In fact, it goes on to say that the Israelites should tear down the images of their gods and regard them as abominations. We are rightly disdainful when terrorist groups engage in this sort of behavior. But here in the Torah, we seem to have divine sanction for it.
Modern scholars have questioned whether the conquest of Palestine ever took place and suggest instead that the Bible’s account of it is a literary fiction inserted after the events in question were supposed to have happened. Moreover, the command “Show them no pity!” conflicts with the rules of military engagement presented later at Deuteronomy 20:10–14. Whatever the case may be, a modern reader must decide whether the real story is about a God who does not want mercy for those who think and act differently or a God who does. As applied to humans, the vision offered at Exodus 33 is not one of empowerment but of limitation. The tragedy is that so many people claiming to embrace monotheism have completely missed its significance.