Lifting the Veil

On Purim, we wore masks and disguises, but Queen Esther wasn’t hiding anything when she went before King Ahasverous and revealed her true identity, her true origins. Making herself extremely vulnerable, Esther removed all pretenses, all masks. No longer hiding in the safety of the harem, no longer passing as just another woman willing to be used by the powerful king, she revealed a truth that had consequences for herself and for the entire Jewish people. Her act of revelation reversed the cruel decree and saved the Jews from annihilation.

Mordechai urged Esther to declare herself, despite the grave danger of appearing uninvited before the king to make a demand. “Think not that in the king’s palace you shall escape, any more than all the Jews,” Mordechai said. Esther cannot hide forever; she must remove the mask.

We praise Esther for refusing to hide. We crave unmediated, face-to-face relationships. We don’t like people who wear masks, creating a barrier between us and them. But this week’s paresha complicates that picture. Moshe Rabbeinu, our teacher Moses—the man who speaks with God panim el panim, face to face—places a barrier between himself and the people Israel: a מסוה masveh, a veil.
Moses emerges from the fiery cloud on Mount Sinai bearing the Tablets of the Covenant, unaware that his face radiates light. But he soon learns that something about him has changed. Frightened and still reeling from the sin of the Golden Calf and its harsh and swift punishment, the people shrink from Moses until he calls them near and imparts all that God has instructed him on the mountaintop. We read in chapter 34, verse 33, “vay’chal Moshe midaber itam, vayiten al panav masveh”—“When Moses finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face.”

The image here is of a terrified and traumatized people, still new to freedom and certainly new to a relationship with a God who expects much of them. They have experienced the revelation of God first-hand at the foot of Mount Sinai; they have heard the Ten Commandments; they have sinned by worshipping the Golden Calf. Their leader Moses has disappeared into the clouds, returning with more revelation, more Law, more details about this covenant with the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. Moses is physically changed; rays of light emanate from his face as he descends to the people, and they shrink in fear.

Biblical commentators throughout Jewish history have interpreted and reinterpreted this veil that divides Moses’ face, a face that has communed directly with God, from the faces of the wandering Israelites.

One reading asserts that Moses covered his face not to respect his relationship to the frightened Israelites, but to respect his relationship with God, with the sacred. Moses covered his face with a veil to prevent the people from using the light shining from his face for “common purposes,” just as we reserve the lights of Hanukkah for the sole, sacred purpose of remembering the miracles of days past. Moses wears a veil to mark a separation not precisely between himself and his people but between his unique spiritual experience and the quotidian worries of the desert. The veil says, no human being ever attained such a close relationship with God, and none had left the mundane world so far behind as to achieve the “complete” spirituality Moses achieved. Indeed, in our paresha we read, “v’diber adonai el moshe panim el panim ca’asher y’daber ish el re’eh’hu”—“The Eternal would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (33:11). The veil serves to preserve a distinction between the sacred and the profane, to guard Moses’ special relationship with God by withholding so much Divine radiance from the ordinary people who would be overwhelmed.

Here at the Hebrew Union College, we rabbinic students continually examine our own spiritual practice, our own encounter with both God and Torah. Like Moses, we, as future Jewish leaders, must carve out time and space to distinguish between the sacred pursuit of Torah knowledge and the mundane cares of shuk-shopping and bill-paying. We must engage in a relationship with God and with Jewish text and tradition—a relationship that is personal, close, panim-el-panim. Moses’ veil might teach us how, as teachers ourselves, we must also learn.
Indeed, to see the pedagogical and spiritual role of the rabbi as primarily founded in a personal relationship to God and Torah is a common view. Traditionally, rabbis didn’t have practicum courses in visiting the sick, comforting mourners, counseling the troubled, or effectively conducting a community Torah study. But this week’s paresha and the wealth of commentary on Moses’ veil offer us other paradigms on teaching and learning Jewish tradition.

According to medieval commentator Rabbi Levi ben Gershon , Moses puts on the veil in an effort to “bring himself down,” as it were, from his spiritual heights. Otherwise, it would be impossible to communicate with the Israelites. As modern interpreter Nechama Leibowitz explains, this is an image of a Moses aware of his difference from the Israelites: he knows that the people, on their earthly level, cannot relate to his unique spirituality. He puts on the veil not to separate himself from the kahal, the Jewish community, but to separate himself from the “transcendental and holy.” To use a buzzword in today’s Jewish circles, Moses makes an effort to meet the people where they’re at. As a teacher, a rabbi must of course challenge the community to reach new levels of understanding of Jewish text, tradition, and spirituality, but such understanding cannot be reached in a vacuum—it emerges from the real, lived experience of our communities. Moses does not force the people to ascend the mountain with him, to absorb the overwhelming Divine Light. Instead he comes down, and he mitigates the powerful light with a veil.
But does he withhold that light altogether? In our teaching, are we to keep our personal relationship with God and with Torah utterly separate from our community interactions? Does Moses wear the veil for the rest of his life, excluding only his encounters with God panim-el-panim?

Medieval commentator Rashi, in his usual direct manner, says no, and his opinion stems from a verse that also appears in this week’s paresha, chapter 34, verse 34: “Whenever Moses went in before the Eternal to converse, he would leave the veil off until he came out; and when he came out and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, the Israelites would see how radiant the skin of Moses’ face was. Moses would then put the veil back over his face until he went in to speak with God” (34:34). Rashi extrapolates from this verse that Moses always received God’s teachings and relayed God’s teachings to the people without wearing a veil; only when Moses had finished with the business of hearing and transmitting the words of Torah did he replace the veil over his face and cover the glow of the Divine.
God’s revelation of Torah to Moses on Sinai happens panim el panim, face-to-face, our paresha tells us. So, too, does Moses’ teaching of the Torah to the Jewish people happen without barrier, without mediation, face-to-face.

As a rabbinical student and a future teacher of the Jewish people, I am curious about Moses’ pedagogy. What does it mean to teach without the veil—despite the uniqueness of his face-to-face relationship with God and despite the people’s fear?
Perhaps Moses does use the veil to prevent the mixing of the sacred with the profane. Perhaps he wears the veil, as many commentators assert, out of modesty or humility. The 18th century commentary Me’Am Lo’ez notes, “It is true that when [Moses] taught the people he took off the [veil]. He felt that the people would assume that the radiance was a result of the Torah that he was teaching. After he finished teaching he would replace the [veil].”

Teachers can shine with the radiance and the power of the material they present, and this is especially true for those of us who are blessed with the privilege of teaching Jewish tradition. Moses’ face shone with a Divine light, and he does not want the people to think that light comes from him. While he is teaching, the people might safely assume that it is not Moses himself who is so radiant, but the Torah he transmits. Ki va oreich, we sing as we welcome in Shabbat—for your light has come, the light of the Torah. Moses, then, wears the veil to demonstrate to the people that it is the Torah, the Jewish tradition, the lesson he imparts—and not Moses himself—that illuminates their lives.

As I learned from one of my most influential professors, a truly successful and ethical teacher understands that the student ought never to be excited about you but about the material you present, the tools you give her to learn, to discover, and to develop her own voice. Like Moses, a teacher ought to encourage his students to see the brilliance in the subject he transmits.


All this talk about faces and masks and the boundaries between ourselves and the Other revolve not only around pedagogy in a technical sense. This isn’t a lesson on ensuring your students will remember the material for the test. The relationship between teacher and student motivates the student to enact Judaism (or whatever the subject taught) in her own life—to take the kodesh of Torah, of Jewish tradition, into the chol of Olam haZeh, this world in which we live, this world so much in need of repair. That repair, as Jewish philosopher and Biblical scholar Martin Buber taught, begins panim-el-panim. When we look into the face of the Other, we see not a reflection of ourselves. We see an unknown and yet familiar entity: we see a human being with needs, desires, and fears, and, locked in that gaze, we are called to responsibility to this vulnerable Other. Buber sees the relationship with the Other, the relationship that happens panim-el-panim, as part of a relationship with the Other we can never fully comprehend, the Other who is utterly unknowable yet crucial to our lives—the Other who is God.

When Moses thought the people would fail to connect the radiance of his face with the brilliance of the Torah, he veiled himself. Speaking as both a student and as a teacher, I think this is a pretty good way to use a veil—what could be an impediment to human connection becomes a teaching methodology. But, I would also emphasize that Moses did not wear the veil incessantly: he allowed for face-to-face connection with the people Israel, offering opportunities to confirm that sense of responsibility that only happens when we look the Other in the face and see a glimpse of the Divine. As we move from the revelry and the disguises of Purim to Pesach and the Exodus, we ought to take care that our veil not become a mask. We ought to remember that sometimes what people need is for us to reveal ourselves, like Queen Esther, for who we truly are.