God's back? Shabbat chol hamoed Pesach

The pilgrimage festivals of Sukkot and Pesach interrupt the cycle of weekly readings. In addition to a special Torah reading for each day of the festival, there is an assigned reading for the Shabbat that falls during the festival that replaces the weekly parashah. In contrast, the Shabbat in Hanukkah has no special Torah reading, although it has a special Haftarah, the famous “not by might and not by power” selection from Zechariah.

The readings for the first two days of Pesach come from Exodus 12 and 13. They describe the Pesach sacrifice, commandments about the festival, “as an institution for all time, for you and your descendants” (Ex. 12:24), the slaughter of the first-born Egyptians, and the flight from Egypt itself, ending with additional instructions about the festival.

The reading for the Shabbat during Pesach, however, is a problematic passage in which Moses asks to know more about God, even to see the Divine Presence. It’s from parashat Ki Tisa, which was the weekly reading only a month ago. It follows the episode of the golden calf and ends with a second Covenant.

Moses’s instance on learning more about God and seeing God’s presence should remind us of his resistance to being chosen to liberate the Israelites from Egypt earlier in Exodus. There, he argues at length, until God’s anger flares up; here, even though he seems still to need outward signs of God’s favor toward him and Israel, his request is granted. God replies, “I will also do this thing that you have asked: for you have truly gained My favor and I have singled you out by name” (Ex. 33:17).

But Moses will not be allowed to see God’s face, “for man may not see Me and live” (33:20). Instead, it is God’s back that he will see.

God’s back? On the surface, this implies a physical existence for God that Jewish theology rejects. Taken too literally, it may even seem somewhat indelicate. Rabbi J.H. Hertz suggests that God’s presence would be seen in the form of a fire, too intense to look at directly, so Moses will see only an “afterglow.” In contrast, Rabbi Plaut, in the UAHC Torah Commentary, interprets God’s “back” as representing the deeds and actions that reveal God’s nature to us.

This appearance, whatever we take it to be, is accompanied by a text that we repeat as part of the High Holiday liturgy: “The Lord! the Lord! A God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet He does not remit all punishment, but visits the iniquity of fathers upon the children and children’s children, upon the third and fourth generations” (34:6–8).

It is not altogether clear who is speaking, God or Moses, but an ordinary reading of the Hebrew text suggests that it is God, and that is how the JPS version renders it.

Jewish tradition understands these verses as stating thirteen attributes of God—and, unusually, stating them in a positive rather than negative formulation. From the liturgy we are also familiar with other statements of the attributes of God, particularly Yigdal, based on the interpretation of these thirteen attributes by Maimonides.

The Haftarah for this Shabbat, from Ezekiel, is also a famous one: “O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” In addition to it, some communities also read selections from the Song of Songs (I recommend the translation by Marcia Falk).