Living in Two Worlds

This week’s Torah portion begins the Book of Exodus, or Shemot, which means, names. It tells of the first instance of Anti-Semitism, of our persecution and enslavement in Egypt, of the birth of Moses, God’s call to Moses to take the Israelites out of Egypt, and Moses’ first encounter with Pharaoh. In this portion, Moses sees a burning bush. God speaks to him and gives him the task of being an intermediary between God, Pharaoh, and the Israelites; and of securing the people’s release from Pharaoh by being the voice of God.

Moses was our most important and holy prophet. The way a person becomes a prophet is through God’s contact. God spoke to Abraham & Sarah, then Isaac & Rebecca, then Jacob. After these Patriarchs and Matriarchs, the first contact with a prophet was typically by means of a vision. Each person is contacted in the way most fit for him. People from priestly families, the commentators have said, who were used to seeing grandeur, have grand visions. Much later, after Moses, God gives grand visions to Isaiah, who saw angels flying about singing praises, and to Ezekiel, who sees angelic four-faced creatures gleaming, moving about on wheels with eyes on the sides of the wheels: a sound and light show. Moses is contacted very differently.

The Torah says, “Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian; and he led the flock far away into the wilderness, and came to the mountain of God, at Horeb. And an angel of God appeared to him in a flame of fire in the midst of a bush; and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when God saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I. And God said, Do not come any closer; take off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.” (Ex. 3:1-5)

Moses is contacted without a vision. He is presented with a strange occurrence in real life, similarly, in fact, to the way God contacts each of us: through the occurrences in our lives. Moses is asked to notice something, and then to try to figure it out. Being brought up as a prince in the palace of Egypt, we would expect that Moses would have been given a grand vision, something opulent. But Moses is contacted not primarily through his senses, but through his intelligence. This tells us that Moses was very smart. He can be seen as the first modern man. He is fully literate: he reads and writes, which will be important skills for him later, when he must write the Torah. He has had the finest secular education of the time, and little does he know that he is being tapped not only to lead the people out of bondage in Egypt, but really to be a philosopher-king.

It is to Moses that God reveals the Divine name twice: yud, hei, vav, hei, the realization of which is to usher in a new understanding of morality, existence, and Divinity. Moses is a pre-scientific man, called upon to begin not only a new age of morality, but an age of morality fused with a scientific approach to the life of the spirit. It is through Moses that God will bring a new understanding of the way reality is structured, as outlined in the Torah.

In a sense, we live in a similar time, only we approach our task from the opposite direction. Moses came out of a spiritual time, when all the features of the natural world – the rocks, the sun, the wind, the sea, the trees – were thought to have their own gods and spirits. The people lived in a kind of spirit world. We live at the end of the age of reason, which has culminated in the information age. It is our task to return to the world of the soul and bring it into our scientific age, making a synthesis, as Moses was to bring the science of morality, the science of Oneness, and the science of cause and effect to the spirit word of his time. How can we do this?

As Moses noticed an oddity, we are called upon to notice the oddities that occur in our lives: the strange coincidences and the way our lives seem to work out and connect them back to the world of the spirit. As Moses taught the laws of cause and effect, we can test the principles in the Torah according to the laws of action and result, choosing the good, the kind, the peaceful, that which is patient, forgiving, and generous; and see the results, almost as if we are conducting a scientific experiment. We can also notice how our lesser choices produce the opposite: difficulty and lack of ease in moving through life. By bringing our scientific world view into the spiritual realm, and the spiritual realm into scientific realty, we learn, as Moses knew, how to navigate in both worlds simultaneously. This is where we are meant to live. We owe this knowledge to God, but also to Moses, whose noticing, questioning, and choosing is still our model today. We are meant to be both rational and spiritual creatures. As we have become more scientific and rational so may we also be more spiritual. May we live fully in both worlds, being equally at ease in each.