Mishpatim: Perceiving God
9 And Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel ascended,
10 and they perceived the God of Israel…
11. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel [God] did not lay its hand, and they perceived God, and ate and drank.
Exodus, Chapter 24
In these verses, after Moses delivers the words of law to the Israelites and the Israelites promise “to do, and to hear,” Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy elders are so spiritually open and aware that they walk a ways up the mountain. Once there, they perceive or see or gaze at God, they eat and drink, and the powerful God energy to which they have opened does not kill them.
Why is it mentioned that God doesn’t kill them? Was feasting at that moment of spiritual awe inappropriate? What were they actually doing, “perceiving God” while eating and drinking?
Robert Schwartz argues that the verse “God did not lay its hand” is in the text not because what the elders did was wrong, but because death was narrowly avoided through the feasting. By eating and drinking in this moment of radical awe and openness, the elders fused the physical and the spiritual in a way that anchored them to their bodies and to life. Schwartz writes:
It was not only proper, but obligatory, that the elders ate and drank to celebrate receiving the Torah. But their feast was a spiritual one: They ate the peace offerings, sanctified food that was eaten with spiritual concentration…Receiving the Torah was such an intense spiritual experience that were it not anchored to physicality, those present would likely have yearned so deeply for G-d that their souls would have left their bodies.
Schwartz uses the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s analogy of a candle with a flame that constantly strives upwards while its base keeps it tethered to the world. The souls of the elders at this powerful moment had the desire to fly out of their bodies, but the
eating and drinking integrated the experience in their bodies and helped them to stay radically present.
How does this work in our own lives? How do we integrate moments of awe and divine insight so that they are not just witnessed and forgotten, but deeply perceived, penetrated, and understood?
In a very famous early Buddhist sutra in which the Buddha lays out the Four Noble Truths, he also introduces a concept called the Three Insights. The Three Insights describe three different ways we perceive truth. First, we intellectually understand it. Second, we can see it happening with the eye of an observer, but we have not fully penetrated it. Finally, we experience it deeply within our kishkes, our insides, without separation, as a fundamental truth.
One way to think about this is with the concept of electricity. First, think about electricity – the equations that underlie it, the way it powers our daily life. In this realm, electricity is an intellectual concept that we rely on, even if we don’t truly understand it or think about it very often.
Then bring to mind times when you’ve seen a spark fly out from a plug, or seen this happen at a science museum. We witness electricity directly in these moments, even if it is still a more detached way. It becomes harder to deny its truth, but still relatively easy to forget about in the course of daily life.
Finally, bring to mind a time you have received an electric shock or felt your hair fly up from static electricity. Can you viscerally feel the energy of the electricity in your body? Can you feel the heat, the shock, the power? In these moments, electricity isn’t an idea. It’s life. It is in us, and we are in it. If someone asked us, “do you believe in electricity?” we would think they were being crazy. “We don’t believe in electricity,” we would answer, “it just is.” That is the deepest level of knowing – a sense of just is-ness.
The elders at Sinai perceived God, but rather than keep the experience at the level of the second insight, gazing at the truth of life from the outside, they ate and drank it, literally ingesting and merging with the experience so it would be in their bodies, and it would be deeply known and understood.
In my personal experience with insights, whether gained suddenly, while walking down the street, or more intentionally, through therapy or meditation, years often pass between the time I think I intellectually understand an issue (“I have a fear of abandonment”) to the time I can recognize the feelings and conditioned responses as they are happening (“Look at that, I’m pushing people away so they won’t abandon me”). Only with a few precious things in my life, I feel like the insight has penetrated so deeply that the same triggers don’t bring on the same responses again, or the feelings do arise, but without great disruption to my life (“feelings of
abandonment arising…feelings of abandonment are just like this…feelings of abandonment passing away”).
My experience has been that meditation and mindfulness practice helps move the process of knowing (knowing God, knowing life, knowing the truth) from the first insight to the third. Meditation helps us to become flush with life, sinking into the sensory experiences of being alive, of feeling our own suffering or awe or joy deeply, without running away. In the process, artificial separations fall away between ourselves and the world and God and we feel, and taste, it all.
As a bonus, here is Norman Fischer’s interpretation of a Zen meal chant/blessing before eating food:
As we make ready to eat this food
We remember with gratitude
The people, animals, plants, insects, Creatures of the sky and sea
Air and water, fire and earth
All turning in the wheel of living and dying
Whose joyful exertion
Not separate from ours
Provides our sustenance this day.
May we with the blessing of this food
Join our hearts
To the one heart of the world
In awareness and love
And may we together with everyone
Realize the path of awakening
And never stop making effort
For the benefit of others.
The Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s mission is to develop and teach Jewish spiritual practices so that individuals and communities may experience greater awareness, purpose, and interconnection.
Learn more at jewishspirituality.org
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