MOSES
What can we learn
about God by looking at what the Zohar says about Moses and Noah? Both persons figure largely in the Zohar, but
Moses supremely so. Known also as The
Faithful Shepherd, he visits the rabbis frequently and interjects his knowledge
into their conversations. He is
supremely revered in the text as the greatest of all prophets, the only man
ever to speak with God face to face. The
one aspect that really set him apart from other prophets was his refusal to
deal with any of God’s messengers; he was the only one to be unafraid to look
directly at God’s splendor and to hear His voice directly.
In the Zohar an
interesting comparison is made between Moses and Noah, both of whom took a
pivotal role at those two times when God wished to destroy the world because of
the sins of its inhabitants. Noah was
given a good deal of advance warning of the flood, and was shown how to save
himself and his family, which he duly managed to accomplish. He was also entrusted with the seeds of all
the existing species of animals.
In Moses’ time
after the Israelites made the golden calf to worship, God also threatened to
destroy the world. But unlike Noah,
Moses put himself in the path of the bulldozer.
He prayed fervently and repeatedly to God so that He would not destroy
the world. He offered his own life
first, saying, “Take me, then, for if you destroy them you destroy me
too.” It was for Moses’ sake then that
God restrained his anger.
And it does seem a
bit strange that with all the forewarning Noah was given he never fell on his
knees and pleaded for the safety of the world.
His chief concern was for his own family — as long as they were safe he
was satisfied.
When the Zohar so
often says that the world is saved through the actions of righteous men, Moses’
example is exactly what it is talking about.
For the sake of one wholly righteous man God might spare the world. Why?
Because that KIND of righteousness, that total selflessness, is evidence
of the loving spirit of God wholly incarnate in man. It is evidence that God’s spirit, His
Shechinah, is TRULY present on earth — and God will never destroy the earth
while His Shechinah is there.
However
allegorical these tales might be, there is a powerful moral message to be found
here, and that is that it is only through our greater love and care for others
that we bring the Holy Spirit within ourselves.
It is a little
mysterious that a message such as this should be obscured within the Zohar and
not spoken plainly. Yet most of the best
lessons in the Zohar have to be extricated from the thousands of words that
surround them. The reason seems to be
that the true seeker is improved by the search itself, and that she will always
find the treasure, just as it says in the Buddhist text The Dhammapada: “as the
clever man finds the right flower.”
How can we from
these events deduce anything about the nature of God Himself? The surface message is that if people sin,
God will destroy them completely. And
the strict rule of the law, the legalistic interpretation of the Torah, has
always reinforced this idea. But I think
that God’s radically different response to Moses and to Noah in the two stories
says something quite different.
I think it says
that God values above all else our willingness to put aside our own interests
and our own egos in a whole-hearted attempt to help and protect others. From this I deduce that His chief characteristic
is His care and protection of us. He
rewarded Moses’ righteousness with direct communication, and allowed that
fiercely beautiful joining between Moses’ spirit and His own. From this I deduce that this is what God
wishes ultimately to happen. And we can
take every word in the Zohar that talks about the Shechinah and apply it to
this one image: the Shechinah within Moses being the very essence of God that
allowed Moses to join with God, because the Shechinah dwelt within him as a
result of his selfless actions. It’s all
very plain, very real, very simple. It moves the focus from punishment to love
and communion, from ego to selflessness.
And the one message we can bear in our hearts as we think in the future
about this is that we must strive to act as Moses did, not as Noah did, for we
save our own souls only at the cost of all the world.