Parashat Ki Tisa- Only Hindsight is 20/20
In Parashat Ki-Tisa, Moshe makes a startling request of God: "Har’eni Na Et Kebodecha" ("Show me, please, Your glory" – 33:18). Moshe felt that after having spent so much time atop Mount Sinai studying and then praying to God, he had reached the spiritual level where could understand God’s ways, why calamities befall the righteous while the wicked prosper. He desperately wanted the answer to the question that has vexed all human beings since creation.
God answers with a somewhat obscure response: "You cannot see My face, for no man can see My face and live… Behold, there is a place with Me, and you shall be positioned on the rock. As My glory passes by, I shall place you in the crevice of the rock and cover you with My hand until I pass. I shall then remove My hand and you will see My back, while My face shall not be seen" (33:20-23).
Essentially, God tells Moshe that He is prepared to show him His "back," but not His "face." He will therefore prevent Moshe from seeing the divine glory until after it has passed, at which point Moshe will be allowed to see God "from behind."
What does all this mean?
The Hatam Sofer (Rabbi Moshe Sofer of Pressburg, 1762-1839) explained that God here teaches Moshe – and us – a crucial lesson about understanding God. Namely, we can only understand His ways "from behind," meaning, in retrospect, after the fact. While "God passes," as the events transpire, we have no way of explaining why He allowed circumstances to unfold as they do. It is only after the fact – and sometimes very long after the fact – that we can see the divine glory, we can recognize the clear plan that had been in place all along. Even Moshe Rabbenu, the greatest of all prophets, could not see God from the "front." The only way any person can behold God with 20/20 vision is "from behind," when he examines events retrospectively after they occur.
Though it is often hard to accept, we must realize our limited ability to understand how God’s runs the world. We have to live with certain questions that as yet have no answers, trusting that at some point, the answers will become clear.
The story is a told of a man who visited NASA headquarters in Houston and was given a full-day tour of the premises. Over the course of the day, he went from building to building, seeing all kinds of state-of-the-art machinery, computers, switchboards and expert technicians busy at work. Toward the end of the tour, he saw a small bolt lying on the ground, and picked it up. He showed it to his guide and asked, "What is this for?"
The guide angrily retorted, "You fool! Did you understand anything you saw until now, that you need to know what this bolt does? You saw some of the most advanced machinery in the world, which you know absolutely nothing about. Why do you ask only about this bolt?"
When one questions God, wondering why a certain thing occurred, he implicitly makes the assumption that he understands everything else about God. Do we understand our own bodies, how without any thermostat it regulates its own temperature? Or how the body breaks down the food we ingest? The world is infinite, and whatever little we do understand constitutes but an infinitesimal percentage of God’s world. Asking why a certain event happened is like choosing one minuscule bolt in the NASA headquarters and wondering why it’s there – as if we understand everything else there.
Eventually, perhaps only when we reach the next world, when we can look upon our lives and the world in hindsight, the answers will come. In the meantime, we must live with our questions and recognize our limited ability to comprehend God’s ways.
