Jan 13/07 — Parashat Shemot

Commentary by Rabbi Lawrence Pinsker

Today’s Torah portion includes the famous encounter between Moses and the burning bush. Theologians, philosophers and historians of religion, poets, and artists have offered many explanations of the meaning of this symbol over the millennia, but the fundamental question is why God—who later will speak to the entire Jewish people from the smoke-shrouded peak of Mt. Sinai with a voice of thunder, lightning, and the ascending sound of a shofar—choose to address Moses from the midst of a burning bush? Why does God, so often associated with spectacular events and displays of power address Moses from a s’neh, a thorn bush of a kind that is found ubiquitously throughout the wilderness?

Is the use of the thorn bush to teach us that God appears not only in awe-inspiring events, but also in humble places? Or does the bush represent the situation of the Israelites, who face suffering in the furnace of Egyptian slavery, but will never be consumed? Perhaps the burning bush represents a warning about the nature of Egypt: just as it’s possible to insert one’s hands into a thorn bush to pluck out a flower deep within its branches, so it was easy for the Israelites to enter Egypt. But once you have reached into the bush, it’s almost impossible to withdraw your hand without the thorns piercing flesh and entrapping you.

For all that some explanations may be emotionally or intellectually satisfying, they seem to miss an important point: what matters is not that the bush appeared to Moses at a crucial time in his life, but rather that Moses noticed the bush at all. Having fled Egypt and lost his status as a prince of Egypt, having lost contact with his family and the plight of his people, it is easy to imagine that he would have welcomed the amnesia that comes with the routines of life. A shepherd spends his days tending the flocks under his guidance; it must have been tempting to let everything that happened back in Egypt become a distant, dreamlike memory.

Rabbinic midrash says that the bush in the wilderness was not ignited as Moses approached; instead, it stood there in flame, unconsumed for a long time. Many others simply walked passed it, making no effort to approach. Lost in private thought, they simply never noticed God’s Presence in that remote location.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, a contemporary author of many works on Jewish mysticism and spirituality, offers an interesting interpretation of the burning bush. He says that it isn’t a symbol—it’s a test of whether Moses is worthy of becoming the leader of the Israelites’ liberation from Egypt. Does Moses have the patience and the vision to seek and discover God in unexpected places? How long is the gap between arriving at a place and the recognition that God is present? Would Moses—unlike other shepherds and travelers—pause and look deeply at the burning bush? Would he be moved to get closer and try to understand a phenomenon that was truly outside of everyday experience?

Most of us are in too much of a hurry and don’t have the patience to search for God in this way. Our calendars drive our days from appointment to appointment. Who has the time to look for God in hidden corners of our lives? Yet this quality is what makes Moses a worthwhile spiritual leader. He has already shown that he is compassionate and caring toward his own people, courageous in opposing those who inflict pain and suffering, and protective toward those who are vulnerable, even when they are strangers.

But compassion is not enough to make Moses a spiritual leader. A true leader must also have patience and the vision to see the hidden potential for holiness in all things.

Perhaps most important of all, according to Rabbi Kushner, Moses proves that he can be fully present in the moment in order to see the hidden God around him. The burning bush, then, tests Moses’ inner spiritual qualities.

To some extent, all of us are tested in this fashion throughout our lives. We may not be faced with one burning bush after another, but surely we are all aware of whether we make an effort to see God in our everyday encounters.

Moses, seeing the bush on fire, says, “Asura-nah v’ ereh et ha-mareh ha-gadol hazeh—maduah loh-yiv’ar ha-s’neh?!”—“I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight—why doesn’t the bush burn up?!”

He is awestruck by this sight—and it evokes a question about what he is seeing—so much so that he is moved to satisfy his curiosity. How sad to think that so few are prompted to understand better what they see before them.

What if we are all surrounded by similar opportunities—each of us faced with a burning bush, whether its form is the beauty of a sunrise or the stillness of the city following a snowstorm? More likely, our burning bush is something taking place between ourselves and people with whom we work or live, people we love, someone or something we encounter in daily life. Do we look upon another’s face as evidence of divine creativity worthy of our respect? Can we acknowledge the miracle of life in them?

God is not only in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary, yet we often fail to notice this. Taken to its extreme, this way of understanding the story of the burning bush is a reminder that God was not especially invested and present in the burning bush. Rather, the point is that Moses chose to really look at it.

The lesson is that in order to find God we must seek out the divine in all things and acknowledge their presence. Whether it is a loaf of bread, a bridge we traverse that depends on an engineer’s careful attention to detail to determine that it is safe for us to travel—everything in life can contain a message to someone seeking meaning. A meal shared by friends, a simple greeting extended to an unfamiliar person, or a hand placed on the arm of someone lonely or dying become a manifestation of God’s presence. Such ordinary acts represent the outcome of our acting on our perceptions of another’s circumstances.

William Lebeau, has been the Dean of the Rabbinic School of the Jewish Theological Seminary for some twenty years. He once shared the story of how he became a rabbinical student. To his chagrin, he arrived late for his most important interview at the JTS campus at 3080 Broadway in Manhattan. His seminary admissions committee was led by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the greatest religious thinkers and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century.

Rabbi Heschel posed the first question: “Mr. Lebeau, have you seen God today?”

The question shook Mr. Lebeau, so he decided to answer it as honestly as possible: “Professor Heschel, actually I overslept this morning and I rushed here from my dorm room. I can’t say I really saw God today.”

“But, Mr. Lebeau,” said Rabbi Heschel, “When you were walking down Broadway didn’t you notice that in the middle of the street amid all the concrete and steel that there is a median and that there are trees and grass growing right in the middle of Manhattan? And didn’t you look into the eyes of the people you passed on the way here? Didn’t you see the sacred image of God in each of them?”

Mr. Lebeau was by then convinced that he had failed the interview and would never be admitted to rabbinical school. Of course the committee welcomed him and he became one of the finest, most compassionate, and articulate rabbis of our time. But you can be sure that he never took things quite so for granted again.

And whenever he tells the story of his seminary admissions interview, he reminds us that we have to find the time to look for the burning bushes that surround us. At its best, religion not only teaches us what to do, but also how to look for the things that will really matter in our daily lives. God doesn’t hand us an audience with the Divine without first seeing that we are prepared to make an effort to discover God is present.

Shabbat Shalom.