Parshah Commentary

Chol Hamoed Pesach

This week, Passover interrupts the normal sequence of Torah readings, and we return to the Book of Shemot. But rather than read about the miraculous redemption of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, or anything else obviously tied to Passover’s narrative of liberation, we instead step into the aftermath of the sin of the Golden Calf. Moses, anxious about his leadership role and his people’s future, begs to see God: “Show me, please, Your presence” (Shemot 33:18). In this moment of profound upheaval and uncertainty, he yearns for an intimate vision of divinity, for a glimpse of absolute truth and ultimate meaning. Yet Moses’s desire cannot be fulfilled. “A human being cannot see Me and live,” God responds. Instead, God places Moses in the cleft of a rock, where he is covered by God’s hand, blocking his sight until God walks away.

This non-fulfillment of Moses’s desire has its own distinct power. In his commentary on the reading for this Shabbat, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889–1943) links God’s hand obscuring Moses’s view to a statement God makes to the Jewish people in the Book of Isaiah: “See, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands” (Isaiah 49:16). Shapira explains, “Even when God’s hand conceals, we are still ‘engraved on the palms of God’s hands,’ with the utmost intimacy.” For him, the very mechanism that conceals God from Moses—the barrier between divinity and humanity—is, paradoxically, the site of an intimate union with God.

This teaching comes from a sermon that Shapira delivered in the Warsaw Ghetto on April 27th, 1940, speaking to a community for whom God surely felt agonizingly hidden. During Passover, Shapira must have wondered how to help his congregation experience the holiday’s insistence on freedom when their own liberation seemed so distant. Instead of calling for the optimism of the biblical past or surrendering to the despair of the historic present, he spoke to both by suggesting that we can find God not despite God’s hiddenness but within it. He thus invited his community to experience the grief of God’s absence—in which, he writes, “we suffer physically and spiritually”—as an encounter with God, and an opportunity to find agency within the most helpless circumstances. Facing God’s concealment forces us to consider how a world in which we clearly see God’s presence would look different from this one, and how our longing might spur action to manifest that absent divinity.

In this moment of suffering and hopelessness, when God seems so hidden that even to speak of God can feel absurd if not callous, Shapira reminds us that God’s apparent concealment creates an occasion to become living channels of the divinity we long to see. We can discover, like Moses, that the barrier preventing us from glimpsing God is at the same time a space of intimacy with God, and that the agony of divine absence is an invitation to transform that absence from within.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.