Thursday, March 28th | 18 Adar II 5784

Subscribe
March 9, 2023 10:58 am
0

What Does God Look Like? Not What You Think

× [contact-form-7 404 "Not Found"]

avatar by Jeremy Rosen

Opinion

Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (1659), by Rembrandt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The dominant theme of the Torah this Shabbat is the episode of the Golden Calf.

Moses was up on the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights. Nobody knew what had happened to him. The people down below started to panic. The two people that were left were Aaron and Chur (according to the Midrash, he was the son of Miriam and Caleb). Chur disappeared, and 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 turned into 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 realize 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 Israelites.

What was the purpose of this idol? The people 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 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 and gave the Children of Israel a second chance — but also 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 … 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 human words to God, 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, and thus Torah, is the ultimate authority.

Since God is not physical, I take all these examples of seeing God or experiencing God as something that has to be sensed intuitively, not something we understand scientifically.

The Torah compromises. One way is to give God different names that reflect the variety of aspects of the spiritual. Each one of us experiences God in a personal way, such as when we feel happy, sad, guilty, or worried. We don’t need to know who or what the lawgiver 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 in the Torah, one avoids the idea of God in a physical sense and yet retains the idea.

The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York.

The opinions presented by Algemeiner bloggers are solely theirs and do not represent those of The Algemeiner, its publishers or editors. If you would like to share your views with a blog post on The Algemeiner, please be in touch through our Contact page.

Share this Story: Share On Facebook Share On Twitter

Let your voice be heard!

Join the Algemeiner

Algemeiner.com

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.