how radiant the longed for water

by Lisa Greber


‘When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, "Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that man Moses, who brought us from the land of Egypt — we do not know what has happened to him."’ (Ex. 32.1)

What has happened to Moses? say the people. Where is this God he has promised us? Where is this God we are seeking, that we so desperately long to have with us? We long for God so much we will build God here ourselves, at some personal cost, out of our own gold. This, we learn later, is a sin. What is a sin? The Buddhists say: a sin is a source of suffering. We have been taught to call this particular sort of suffering idolatry: the confusion of an aspect of the divine with the Divine itself.

The Israelites are wandering in the desert, out of the old place and not yet in the new. Who among us has not been there? It is a shaky time, when you are between gods. This is when I myself like to fall in love with the wrong people, who perhaps embody for me something of the old and something of the new. Idolatry here means to see only a person’s true divine perfection, and not their co-existing humanity: their love of moussaka and red wine; their diligence with spreadsheets perhaps or embroidery; their inexplicable absences; their sudden rage; the frailty of their hands early in the morning when their joints are stiff from sleep.

I see, says the Lord, viewing the dancing around the golden calf, that this is a stiffnecked people. […] let Me be, that My anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them, and make of you a great nation." (Ex. 32.9-10) Moses, in his own stubbornness for righteousness, pleads for his people’s lives, and the Lord renounces the punishment. But Moses, on returning to camp, does not renounce his own. He forces the Israelites to drink the ground powder of the golden calf. "Whoever is for the Lord, come here!" he then calls; he insists those who gather slay brother, neighbor, and kin who have not rallied to him. (Ex. 32.26-27)

Three thousand people fall, on the sand, between the old place and the new.

This falling may be the bloody cost of a civil war for control of the new Israelite nation. But I am reading it here metaphorically, remembering the times when I have murdered the internal parts of me dancing in front of a golden calf, in anger that they were not following the rules I had carved into my stone tablet, instead of listening to their longing and gently offering them a perhaps more skillful route to God.

Moses, too, is longing for God, even in the midst of their conversation: "Oh, let me behold Your Presence!" (Ex. 33.13) But no one can see God’s face and live. God shelters Moses in a cleft in a rock, shields him with God’s hand till God has passed by so Moses can see God’s back. Moses will reflect even this glimpse of radiance with his own, though unawares. Moses was not aware that the skin of his face was radiant, since he had spoken with Him. (Ex. 34.29)

Idolatry for me then arises in the midst of paradox – of our longing for a lived connection with the divine, here in the finite, which we must not mistake for the whole, lest we cause harm, and of the impossibility of viewing the Divine in God’s entirety, lest we die. It becomes more of a koan for me than a sin, more an ongoing effort for balance. Balancing my love for my particular beach – the resident great blue heron, the bent grasses of the winter salt marsh, the muddy boardwalk – with the knowledge its water comes also from the larger bay, which in turn reaches out to the sea beyond. Balancing my love for any particular person - the thinness of their arms, even if sinewy, their dislike of sweets, their ferocious vulnerability – with the needs of their work and my own, with the needs of the larger community, with the sacredness of a stranger’s face. Balancing my love for a particular tradition, with the knowledge that others are equally gifts to those who love and practice them.

Idolatry holds another paradox for those of us who are environmentalists. In my work with people from various traditions, I am sometimes asked: is love for the earth itself idolatrous? This view can cut us from the sacred that is in fact present in our finite lives. The heron has grey feathers running to black, a fluff of eyelashes, the thinnest possible legs. Maroon anemones, smaller than my fingernail, embed themselves in the packed mud in the center of the salt marsh. Sanderlings make a net of the incoming tide, herd minnows into the shallows for easy feeding. The tide can be counted on to follow the moon. The divine is here, in the salt water seeping through my jeans when I pray on the sand, in the bite of snow, in the ever present hope of green. On the sand I remember God saw that it was good, perhaps permission or suggestion that we may do likewise. (Gen. 1.12)

Aaron and all the Israelites saw that the skin of Moses' face was radiant; and they shrank from coming near him. (Ex. 34.35) If the radiance of God means to fear punishment for our little loves, the times we have danced around a golden calf and forgotten the calf’s connection to the larger world of soil, grass, sunlight, and its mother’s milk, it is no wonder we would shrink from Moses’ face. If it means we must deny our natural gratitude for gravity or the taste of rain, it prevents us from honoring the small sacredness of our human lives. But perhaps instead we might think of Moses’ radiance descending the mountain as a reminder to bring as much of the presence of the divine as we can bear to our finite dancing selves who so long for it. We are not alone, we can remind ourselves, even in the desert there is the radiance of longed for water and of each and every grain of sand.