D’var Torah on Ex. 33:12-23
At Pesach[1] we are called to go ‘up’, physically and metaphorically, to journey beyond our narrowness, and dare to live in our fullness. By the time of today’s reading[2], we’ve travelled into the desert, complained many times, received the Torah, ten commandments, and detailed instructions for building the mishkan, prayed to a Golden Calf, been forgiven, and given another chance.
Now Moses speaks frankly with God. If God is not visibly with us, showing us the way, says Moses, there’s no point in going any further. This is a moment of reckoning: ‘Let me see Your Glory!’ says Moses. But for all God’s promises that He’s there for us, God also says, ‘You won’t be able to see me where I am, only where I have been.’ Some might feel that God’s response is not entirely reassuring, and still leaves Moses—and us—in the dark.
But, there’s always more than one path we can take through any Torah reading. And I think that, through this story, we can learn something about six steps of how to pray.
1. Focus (the hour before prayer)
Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, the founder of Jewish Renewal, taught often of how prayer should draw on every part of ourselves. The morning service especially, is a journey through the four kabbalistic worlds—that is, the physical, emotional-relational, intellectual and spiritual worlds.[3] In one of his books on what he called ‘davennology’ (the art of davenen or praying), Reb Zalman advised that all prayer can usefully begin with choosing a focus.[4] So in this morning’s passage, what does Moses do? Well, first, he summarises what he wants to get from his time with God: ‘Let me know Your ways. I want to know You, to know that You favour me, and that I’m seen by You.’ Actually, Moses spells out the whole four-world experience he wants: ‘Be physically present, emotionally reassure us with your favour and stay in relationship with us, feed our minds through knowledge of Your ways and demonstrating Your covenant with us, and bring us into da’at—a deep union and spiritual ‘knowing’ of You.’
2. The physical world – Assiyah
The second step of our classic morning prayer journey is in the physical world of Assiyah: blessing our bodies, donning tallit and t’fillin, and blessing our entrance to the synagogue with Mah tovu. In the reading, Moses talks about having to take a physical journey, and wondering who will literally go with us. Moses recognises that, for our physical needs to be met, God must be involved. This is the essence of morning blessings, and indeed the formula for every single brachah: the holy connection between ourselves, every physical thing we do or experience, and God at the heart of it all.
3. The emotional-relational world – Yetzirah
Our third step is up into the emotional-social world of Yetzirah: verses of song (p’sukei d’zimra), psalms, the Song of the Sea, and Yishtabach. In our reading, Moses makes a emotional appeal to God: Moses’ language is insistent, theatrical, repetitive; he includes the social dimension, praying for others, as well as himself; and the trop we heard in the leynen is florid and beautiful. After truly opening his heart, Moses gets his first response from God.
4. The intellectual world – B’riah
Fourth, we climb to the intellectual world of B’riah: the Bar’chu call to prayer, the Sh’ma and its blessings that spell out the contract between God and Israel. In verses 14-17, Moses boldly declares that, unless God comes along, there’s no point in proceeding. At the Bar’chu, we formally call the community to call on God before going any further. For those who are not so sure of God’s existence, I always remember Steve Rayner, who said that, for him, life was more worth living when he lived it as if God existed. This is also the Sh’ma moment, and the Adonai yimloch l’olam va’ed moment, when we consciously acknowledge and pledge ourselves to God. And, remarkably, in today’s reading, God makes his own reciprocal pledge using our words, “This thing that you have spoken, I will do!”
5. The spiritual world – Atzilut
In the fifth step of prayer, with the Amidah, we reach into Atzilut for the height of spiritual intimacy. Like Moses, we to step forward into the Presence, and in essence, cry, ‘Let me see Your Glory!’. All the prayers that we can ever utter really come down to this: we want the resolution of all problems and needs that comes from being at One with God. But, the Amidah brings us both ecstasy and agony: it pulls us ever closer to God, all the while confirming that God is impossibly beyond our reach. We cannot, apparently, see God, and live. But, God says, there is a place right up close beside him. If, like Moses, we stand on the rock (a frequent metaphor for God), God will then lovingly place us safely inside the rock—inside Himself. Bringing our whole self in prayer is a way we can approach God, and live.
6. The return to our normal lives
In the sixth stage, stepping back out of the Amidah, we leave the rare spiritual atmosphere of Atzilut and descend the kabbalistic mountain. First B’riah, and the Torah service that links God’s mind with our minds. Then Yetzirah, the emotional-social community prayers and Mourner’s Kaddish. We re-enter physical Assiyah with Aleinu l’shabeiach: ‘it is upon us’, we say, to make a practical commitment to making a better world, strengthened by the Priestly Blessing, so that we can pay it forward and be a blessing to others. After a committed prayer journey like this, we can feel what Joel Grishaver translates in his ‘Stories We Pray’ as the ‘afterwards’ of God[5]. During the final statements of simple faith in Yigdal, Ein Keiloheinu, and Adon Olam, and in the silence after them, we can sense that, though we might not have seen God, we have, hopefully, become more awake to life and what truly matters.
Praying as if God exists, and praying with our whole self, is worthwhile.[6] Unlike Moses, we might not always see where God has been. But after a deep, four-worlds prayer session, we can see and feel where we have been, and be better for having made that journey.
At our Pesach seders[7], we also took a four-worlds journey: bodily, with food and physical re-enactments; emotionally, with stories and songs that join together family, friends, and community; intellectually, with study, questions and debate; and soulfully, with prayers and yearning for healing and shalom in the world. May we all continue to pray and journey well.
Shabbat shalom, and Chag Pesach sameach.
Footnotes
[1] Passover
[2] Ex. 33:12-23 – reading for Chol HaMo’ed at Pesach
[3] Marcia Prager provides a helpful one-page summary of this in the P’nai Or Shabbat Morning Siddur (2008, Philadelphia).
[4] Schachter-Shalomi, Zalman (2010) The Gates of Prayer: twelve talks on davennology, Albion Andalus, p.180
[5] Grishaver, Joel Lurie (2012) Stories We Pray: insights into the inner-work of Jewish worship, Torah Aura Productions
[6] “We cannot make Him [God] visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to Him.” Abraham Joshua Heschel (1945) ‘Prayer’, Review of Religion vol. 9 no. 2, January (1945)
[7] The communal meal to commemorate Passover, with stories, songs and ritual.