Chavarah- Jewish Community Learning

A blog of Jewish study and traditions. Notes from classes: Torah Study with Rabbi Marder, Toledot and Shabbaton as well as other details found of interest.

IF you want to be part of our Chavarah email group let me know at carol@traditionsrenewed.com

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

God Will Hide His Face!

Rabbi Yoshi was in good spirits as he gave us a vivid look at the scene in Deuteronomy 31:16

Moses is about to die when God tells him that his speech was good but not good enough to assure that the people will not go astray. And God is going to be very angry and is not going to keep on coming to their rescue. There is one last thing Moses has to do. That is to document and read the poem that is the next parasha.

So we spoke of ‘going astray’ and what that means.
People will worship the idols and not follow the mitzvot. AND God is not going to be happy about that.

(it was here that an interesting thought about Christianity was inserted: "Christianity is like paganism put through the carwash of Judaism")

And what it means when God says he will ‘hide God’s face’. Which led to a bigger discussion of many mentions of ‘God’s face’ in Torah. Especially the emphasis on it in the Priestly Benediction which wishes for the radiance of God’s face to shine on us.

Hal interjected a comment about the poem that follows: This is God's way of saying "I told you so" whenever the passage is read in the future!

Suggested Book: The Hidden Face of God, by Richard E. Friedman
Amazon description
The Hidden Face of God is a record of biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman's attempts to understand why, after God tells Moses in Deuteronomy, "I shall hide my face from them," God proceeds to disappear from the face of the earth. "Gradually through the course of the Hebrew Bible ... the deity appears less and less to humans, speaks less and less. Miracles, angels, and all other signs of divine presence become rarer and finally cease," Friedman writes. This freewheeling work of biblical and cultural criticism considers the ways modern writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche have continued to develop the idea that "we are finally utterly on our own," wrestles with the insecurities, moral ambiguities, and spiritual doubts that modernism has aggravated, and looks to contemporary science and Jewish mysticism for some clues as to how God's absence may in fact be His way of showing His presence. Without ever lapsing into intellectual laziness or maudlin sentiment, Friedman provides an accessible survey of some of this century's biggest moral dilemmas. And within those dilemmas themselves, Friedman finds hope. --Michael Joseph Gross

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