Parsha Va’Eschanan: It’s What You Don’t See

Parsha Va’Eschanan: It’s What You Don’t See

 Dedicated to a refuah shelaima for Yehudis bas Leah, Yona Yaakova bas Mina, Chana Zelda bat Gittel Yita, Chaya Sarah bas Esther Leah, Moshe Aaron ben Necha Itta, Binyamin ben Simcha, and Yaakov ben Esther Malka.

Parshas Va’Eschanan is always read on Shabbas Nachamu, the Shabbas after Tisha B’Av. It is the parsha that extols the connection of Hashem and Bnei Yisrael, which should reflect the deeper experience of Tisha B’Av. This is the time when we see Hashem in our pain, when we recognize that our tragedies are a reflection of our distance from Him, and that it is up to us to work on bringing ourselves closer so that Hashem can remove the cloud of hester panim, of His hiding Himself away.

If we are honest with ourselves, we understand that the distance we experience today – the distance from Hashem and the distance from our own inner spirituality – is our own fault. Humanity has such a great desire to assert its independence and to challenge the status quote that we often break away from our spiritual core in our attempt to grasp it. We want proof of God and proof of our neshama because that is, many wrongfully believe, the only way we can understand the Divine. Somewhere deep within us, we have this notion that if we could just “see” the Divine then all of our problems would be solved, but, really, the solution lies in NOT seeing Hashem.

Parshas Vaeschanan contains one of the core prayers of Jewish life: Shema Yisrael Hashem Elokeinu Hashem Echad. HEAR o’ Israel Hashem is our God, Hashem is One. Not See – Hear. The act of seeing is rooted in the physical. If I can see it, I don’t have to have faith since I have evidence. I don’t have to do any internal work to accept and understand.  Hearing, on the other hand, is an internal process. Sound enters our ears, so to speak, and reverberates throughout our being. They say that the eyes are windows to the soul, but you don’t enter through a window. The entry doors, then, are the ears – for they are responsible for hearing, for listening.

Moshe understood the human desire for something physical. Afterall, he remembered the first generation’s reaction to his delayed return from Har Sinai, how they demanded that Aaron create the Golden Calf because they feared that they had lost Moshe, their physically visible connection to Hashem. And so Moshe says to the people gathered at the border of the Promised Land: “For your souls’ sakes, therefore, be most careful—since you saw no shape when Hashem spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire—” (Devarim 4:15) and reminds them of all the prohibitions of creating forms of avodah zarah. This is Moshe warning the people that they will never be able to make Hashem concrete because, as they experienced, He is so much vaster than the visible world.

Rabbeinu Bahya explains this pasuk as a statement of truth: “Seeing that you know clearly that you did not see any phenomenon, image, at the time when Hashem revealed Himself, you must take care in the future never to make such a likeness…”  (Translation from Sefaria). You must take care in the future not to believe that there can ever be such a likeness. A physical likeness of Hashem would be limiting, and Hashem is limitless.

There is an interesting thing about the idea of hester panim, about the hidden face of Hashem. Panim is a plural word, always. Why? There are many responses to this question, but one such answer might be that a face is a reflection. People see in one another’s face mirrors of themselves. When we smile at someone, they most often smile back. When we like someone, they become beautiful. Our neshamos are reflections of Hashem. When Hashem hid His face from us, it also meant we lost something of ourselves, and that something, perhaps, is an understanding of our strength as spiritual creations.

Noting how Devarim 4:15 refers to guarding nefshoseichem, your souls, Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsh draws attention back to the interconnectedness of the soul to the Divine. The emuna that we inherited from Avraham Avinu is not something one can assess in one’s physical DNA. There’s no chromosome. It’s a “mutation” so to speak, in one’s spiritual DNA. It’s a link through that which cannot be seen or touched. This, according to Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsh, can be learned from this pasuk:

“…Besides God, there is only one other being of whose individual reality and personal existence, although invisible and unable to be realised by any of our physical senses, each one of us bears within himself the direct certainty of conviction, and that is our soul, our נפש. It is that, therefore, which reflecting back on oneself makes one comprehend the real existence of something which is invisible and intangible, and by the certainty of the conviction of one’s own self comprehend the conviction of the existence of God. As sure as we are of the existence of our own self so are we of the existence of God.” (translation from Sefaria)

The self of spirituality exists on a plane that we cannot see and we cannot touch. The questioning of God leaves us with the question of how we each are who we are because “nature vs nurture” and gene predictions still can’t explain the whole. But if you are very quiet and you listen, you can start to understand that the very nature of humankind, the very nature of the world itself, is all one and that one is Hashem. This is the truth that we will see – yes, see – in the time of Beis Hamikdash, bmheira biyameinu.

I wish you all a beautiful Shabbas.