Now it was when Moshe came down from Mount Sinai... -now Moshe did not know that the skin of his face was radiating! So they were afraid to approach him. Moshe called to them...and he commanded them all that YHWH had spoken with him on Mount Sinai. Now when Moshe had finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face. (Shmot 29-33)
After once again remaining 40 days and 40 nights on Mount Sinai, during which “bread he did not eat and water he did not drink,” but -- serving as the amanuensis of YHWH -- “wrote the words of the covenant, the Ten Words,” Moshe, at last, descends. The experience has transformed him; it has set him even more profoundly apart from the community of Israel than he has been. Now, after the “great sin” of having forged “gods of gold” (32:31) and Moshe’s smashing of the first set of tablets, even Moshe’s own brother Aharon is initially frightened to approach him. For Moshe has been visibly marked by his most recent, and most intense, sojourn with God: “the skin of his face was radiating” (34:30). When Aharon, the “exalted of the community” and the masses do approach, they are too frightened by that radiance to come too close, for Moshe’s face continues “radiating” as he relates to them “all that YHWH had spoken with him on Mount Sinai.”
No sooner does Moshe complete speaking than, Torah says, “he put a veil on his face.” And so it goes from then on: Moshe takes off his veil to speak with God, the intensity of the contact with the blockquoteine makes his face radiant, and once the Israelites see that radiance Moshe replaces the veil. Do the Israelites ever again see their leader’s face when he is imparting the words of God?
In ancient cultures of the world, the shamanic interceder between humans and the spirit world assumes a mask as an expression of the transformation of identity implicated in the encounter with the blockquoteine. But the “transformation of identity” that Moshe undergoes radically differs from that of the traditional shaman. On the one hand, the Torah’s depiction of Moshe enduring forty days and forty nights with neither food nor water evokes a sense of his having attained a state of nearly angelic spiritual intensity while in communion with God. On the other, in the aftermath of that experience, it is Moshe’s relationship with the human community which is irrevocably altered, for from then on, a good deal of the time they cannot see his face.
In fact, though, while the veil takes material form only after Moshe has his lengthy encounter with YHWH preparing the second set of tablets, throughout the text of Shmot the “real,” the existential, the human, identity of Moshe is continually, if metaphorically, veiled. From the moment of his birth, indeed, this ish elohim was “hidden” by his mother. After he flees Egypt, his identity is uncertain: is he an Egyptian, for example, as the daughters of Re’uel/Yitro believe him to be (2:19), or is he a Hebrew? In Sinai, he goes up and down the mountain so many times, that we inevitably become confused about where he actually is. Crucially, Moshe communes with a deity who Himself cannot be seen, who indeed warns of the dangers of trying to see Him: “Go down, warn the people, lest they break through to YHWH to see and many of them fall” (Shmot 19:21). When God does appear, it is in “veiled” form: “I am coming to you in a thick cloud, so that the people may hear when I speak with you, and also that they may have trust in you for ever” (19:9).
Similarly, the very place of the communion between Moshe and YHWH is “clouded”: So Moshe went up the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain; the Glory of YHWH took up dwelling on Mount Sinai. The cloud covered it for six days, and he called to Moshe on the seventh day from amidst the cloud (24: 15-16). And once the tabernacle is built, “the cloud covered the Tent of [Meeting] and the Glory of YHWH filled the Dwelling” (40:34).
Finally, in the climax to Shmot, it is the very position of the “cloud” which is described as determining the future movements of Israel: “Whenever the cloud goes up from the Dwelling/ the Children of Israel march on…/if the cloud does not go up, they do not march on…” (40:36-7).
I’d like to suggest that the veiling of Moshe before the community of Israel has a vital narrative purpose, for it is also a way of suggesting how “veiled” Moshe must remain for us as well. There is an implicit continuity between the ancient Israelites and ourselves, for the story is constructed to prevent us, too, from ever seeing Moshe clearly – any more than the ancient Israelites, or we ourselves, are able to see God. From the moment of his birth, the ordinary human/Israelite history is interrupted; we sense that the story of the Hebrews is about to take an abruptly different turn, to sense, as well, that the new character on the scene will hover in the liminal space between the historical and the legendary, or, put another way, between the human and the blockquoteine.
For, as I suggested, from the moment Moshe appears on the scene, from the moment he is revealed, he is also “hidden.” At the outset, it is literally so, and with dramatic justification: his birth quickly follows upon the description of Pharoah’s edict that every Hebrew son born must be thrown “into the Nile.” But it is also metaphorically so, for like his parents, he remains anonymous: “A man from the house of Levi” marries “a daughter of Levi” (2:1), who then gives birth to a son whom, the text tells us, she perceives as ki tov -- a term that evokes the way God himself perceived the blockquoteine Creation in Genesis. When her son can no longer be “hidden” at home, his mother places him in a little papyrus ark amongst the Nile reeds. The princess, of course, discovers the ark. But what is it that she sees when she looks within (2:6)?: “She opened it as saw him, the yeled – here, a na’ar weeping!”
This brief sentence is rich with significance for at the very moment when the princess gazes in the ark -- at the very moment, that is to say, when the narrator positions the reader to be shown what is within the ark -- to be told what the princess sees, to have the child revealed to us -- the text clouds our ability to see clearly. She looks into the ark, sees the “child” and behold – a “youth” cries. Does he move from yeled to naar because, as Ibn Ezra suggests, his limbs are already as big as a youth’s? Is it because, as Rashi suggests, his voice is as strong as a youth’s? That the angel Gabriel intervened, as Ramban argues? Whatever the explanations of the meforshim, the abrupt switch from yeled to naar functions to confuse and to cloud our vision; it makes it impossible for the reader to visualize the three-month-old infant. The switch acts as a veil: the little being floating in an ark constructed of the same materials as the paper of biblical texts alters from yeled to na’ar before the eyes of the reader just as it does before the eyes of the princess. We may use what the visionary poet William Blake called our “spiritual imagination” to “see” Moshe within the ark, but not our “vegetable eye,” which the text undermines. Long before Moshe veils himself, the text veils him from the reader.
One way to regard this linguistic veiling of Moshe is to see it as a strategy at once both to honor and to “diminish” him. The very nearness of Moshe to YHWH, his intimacy with the blockquoteine, may potentially pose so great a theological challenge that as a figure he must also subtly and continually elude us. Thus later, though Moshe oracularly embodies YHWH’s words before Pharoah and then before the Israelites; resides with YHWH on the mountain in a manner suggesting that he has transcended the demands of the human body; “soothed the face of YHWH” (32:11); speaks to the Godhead “face to face, as a man speaks to his neighbor” (33:11) and, in answer to his plea, beholds the “back” of God’s “Glory” on the mountain (33:22-23), tradition insists in an almost compensatory manner on his humility. Moshe, insists Bamidbar, was “exceedingly humble, more than any (other) human who is on the face of the earth” (12:3). The motif is later echoed in the traditional liturgy: in the Shabbat Amidah, the powerfully rousing angelic choir of the Kedushah is immediately followed with a humble image of Moshe: Moshe rejoiced in the gift of his portion; a loyal servant you called him. Through the ages the liturgy recalls not what Moshe transmitted, but rather what is “written in Your Torah.”
Ultimately, our inability to see Moshe directly and clearly metaphorically mirrors the portrayal of the blockquoteine Presence, which is at once revealed and concealed to us by appearing as a “cloud.” The face of Moshe eludes us, just as sustained intimate contact with the blockquoteine also eludes us. The best we more ordinary humans can do is see the “cloud” and, like the ancient Israelites, go forth in our lives in response to our perception of that “cloud.” In the end, as Moshe disappears beyond our view beyond the plains of Moav to Mount Nevo, the words of Devarim serve as both a tribute to him and as an admonition to future generations: “There arose no further prophet in Israel like Moshe, whom YHWH knew face to face” (34:10).
“The hidden things are for YHWH our God” (Devarim 29:28): Perhaps it is also the case that just as only God could see the true face of Moshe, so whether or not we ourselves have the courage to remove the veils we may wear in our own lives, God strongly sees the true face of each of us.