Noticing God

This week’s Torah portion is Va’eira, which means, and He appeared. God speaks to Moses about the Divine Name and promises to redeem the Israelites and take them out of Egypt, leading them to the Land. Moses has doubts about the success of his mission and voices his frustration to God, who instructs Moses and Aaron to go to Pharaoh and demand that the people be freed. Pharaoh repeatedly refuses, bringing upon himself and his people the plagues of blood, frogs, lice, swarms of beasts, and fiery hail. Each plague brings Pharaoh to consider freeing the people, only to go back on his word and reconsider, once the plagues have been removed.

In this Torah portion, the theme of knowing is introduced in the very beginning, the 3rd verse, which reads: “through my name God I did not become known to them.” Then, as the portion proceeds, this theme is restated eight more times. The Torah says, “so that you will know that I am God.” It’s repeated a few different ways to include Moses, the Israelites, Pharaoh, and the Egyptians. Anything repeated in the Torah has significance and something that appears eight times bears further investigation. So we might ask, what does God want us to know and why does God want us to know it?

The “what” is fairly easy: there was no monotheism at that time, except among us, the Hebrews. God wanted a universal truth to come into the stream of human knowledge, that there is one God and that all other “gods” are not real. This God did through what we now call plagues. The Women’s Torah Commentary points out that the phrase, 10 Plagues, eser makkot, does not appear anywhere in the Torah. God calls these events signs, otot, or wonders, moftim, and not plagues. One would think that the seven years of plenty and seven years of famine in Joseph’s time would have ushered in a period of monotheism. It’s possible that it did, but 200-400 years later, Egypt was again a polytheistic society. The Ten Wonders were designed then, to get our attention, get Pharaoh’s attention, and get the Egyptians’ attention, which they certainly did. We should remember that the first few wonders were merely annoying and not life threatening: the Nile turning to blood so that the Egyptians had to dig to find fresh water, frogs, lice, and insects; later boils, hail, and darkness. Only cattle disease, and the final plague, killing of the firstborn destroyed animal and then also human life.

When God first appeared to Moses, the Torah says: “God saw that Moses turned aside to see and God called out to him from amid the bush.” Moses’ capacity to notice something unusual, to be aware of the inconsistencies of life, was what recommended him for a special spiritual relationship with God. The painter Eugene Delacroix once said, “The eyes of many people are dull or false; they see objects literally; of the exquisite, they see nothing.” And a writer, the Reverend Erie Chapman, who contributed to an online site for caregivers commented: “The decision to see with "dull eyes" or to open to "the exquisite" is very personal. It takes work to learn the appreciation of the sacred.” This is what God wants us to do: to be able to notice and see beyond the obvious. Everything that we encounter has the potential, like the wonders, to educate us: to allow us to see and understand more of the underlying truth of God’s existence and our place within it. The Apter Rebbe, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of Apt once asked, “Why do we need such a strong reminder from God?” I might also ask, Why isn’t truth evident to us and why can’t we automatically notice God’s presence in the everyday occurrences of out lives? If everyone could realize truth innately, there might be no need for a Torah to tell us what is real and what is only an illusion. But also, there would be no progress for us: no learning, no spiritual attainment. We would already be living in the messianic era, called the end of days.

That we have the capability, like Moses to notice and learn from the marvels of our everyday lives is a great gift that we are asked to develop and use: to become aware of more than just the physical and receive the knowledge that is being sent to us. This was said ever so much more elegantly in the Reform movement’s siddur, Gates of Prayer: “Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. Eternal One, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing; let there be moments when Your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder: How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it! Blessed is the Eternal One, the holy God!” May we become more and more aware of the Divine Presence, who now as then, wants to be known and to bless us with knowledge and wisdom.