Parashat Shemot Exodus 1:1-6:1

Haftarah Isaiah 27:6-28:13 29:22-23

Dear TBE Community,

Maybe the sensation is familiar to you: Before you even set foot into a specific place, you know that you will resonate with that place. You can’t really explain why, you just know it. You feel drawn to a specific place for seemingly no reason; the sound of one city’s name is more alluring or promising than another; as a child, you read a book about a far-away land and the landscape you saw in your imagination stays with you until you finally visit – and when you do, it feels as if you’ve always been there, or have there before.

There are beshert places for our souls.

Other places become significant in hindsight, because something important happened there. A great miracle. A first kiss. A decisive encounter, or a difficult farewell. An epiphany, a revelation. The place begins to loom or figure prominently in the story of one’s life. Thus, an arbitrary patch of soil becomes different, special, set apart – holy, kadosh.

And Adonai saw that he had turned aside to see, and God called to him from the midst of the bush and said “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” And He said, “Come no closer here. Take off your sandals from your feet, for the place you are standing on is holy ground” (Exodus 3:4-5).

Holy ground – אַדְמַת־קֹדֶשׁ, admat kodesh.

In God’s revelation to Moses at the burning bush, the role of time in designating holiness to a place seems suspended: The place is already holy ground before Moses can even wrap his head around what is happening here. And furthermore, it is not Moses who assigns holiness to the place b’diavad, after the fact, after this great sight and life-altering experience. God declares it holy ground. Moses has entered divine space.

But where is that space located? The Hebrew states that it is אַחַר הַמִּדְבָּר, “behind the desert, or wilderness”, near Horeb, the mountain of God.

Commentators have been puzzled over the odd use of the preposition אַחַר, behind – what does “behind” the desert even mean? Or what is the “back side” of the desert, as the King James version has it? Did he go so far that, like in a fantasy novel, he crossed, unbeknownst to him, the boundaries from the regular mundane space into a realm that only a few will be able to cross?

I imagine something like that. I imagine that he did indeed walk very far that day, very deep into the wilderness. Far and deep as in when you drive through the last settlements of civilization before the expanse of the Colorado desert and pass the sign warning that you are on your own now and that there are no gas stations for the next 110 miles. No-man’s-land.

In the folk stories of my native Germany, the forest, the woods, is a place where the human realm of influence dissolves. A place where mysterious or transformative things happen, a place that can give shelter but also feel like a frightening labyrinth. Eastern-European hasids established the practice of going into the solitude of the woods in order to come closer to God.

For a native of the Middle East, the desert might play a similar role: It is familiar but also a place of danger. A place where people can lose or find themselves, a mysterious place of revelations and visions, of divine encounters.

And this is where Moses is in Exodus 3, “behind” the desert, when God reveals God-self to him: No-man’s-land. Maybe, like the patriarchs before him, he is in a state of trance, of solitude, lost in his own thoughts, daydreaming. The desert is hot and empty, he walked for hours, he didn’t pay attention and crossed into the sphere of the holy mountain (in Torah, Horeb and Sinai are different names used by different sources to designate the – or a – holy mountain of God.) As in other passages I have written about in recent newsletters, the whole setting feels once again surreal, in the true sense of the word: Above or beyond what’s real: Behind the desert.

Moses didn’t plan to go to that place. He happened upon it. In fact, he doesn’t resonate much with what this place – this Makom – conveys to him. No, he doesn’t want to become the leader of a people he barely ever knew. But, like Abraham who, in the Midrash, notices the castle burning in the emptiness of the wilderness, Moses notices the burning bush. And like the castle, the bush is not consumed. Truly a great sight; irresistible, alluring, frightening, mysterious, and certainly transformative for Moses. He might not have sought out that holy place on purpose, he might not feel that it was a beshert encounter — but he leaves that holy ground, that divine realm forever changed, with a new purpose, and a new destination.

Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Julia Knobloch