A burning bush in the Wilderness

This past Shabbat's parsha was Sh'mot, the first book of Exodus. In services this week, we had a guest preacher give the drash. And he really was a preacher, from the Church across the street. He had something very powerful to say about how African Americans can relate readily to the story of the Exodus, because the memory of slavery is still a fresh one in many of their minds.

He had a lot of other interesting things to say, too. One comment had to do with the burning bush. He drew attention to that, and to the wilderness as a place in which to meet God - where God meets us, in fact, and speaks to us. And He uses signs to grab our attention. In this case, it was a bush, consumed by fire, but not being burned.

Here is the text from my copy of the JPS Tanakh:

An Angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. He gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. Moses said, "I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn't the bush burn up?" When HaShem saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: "Moses! Moses!" He answered, "Here I am."

And once I read the text more closely, I got a lot more out of it. For one thing, at the beginning of the section, it doesn't say that God is there - it says "An Angel of the LORD appeared." But we know that "Angel" means messenger. So in this case, the "messenger" is the blazing fire. This is like God's handwriting on the world. Or God sending a text message by way of his wireless, languageless device - the Universe. Or maybe, this wasn't the text just yet, but rather the beep, buzz or ring tone that lets you know you have one.

The thing is, with cell phones, pagers, emails or anything, you have the option to answer or not. You can ignore it. Save it for later. Maybe you're just too busy right now. You don't want to be bothered. But Moses says, Hey, what's this?

I love Torah - you have this ancient text, supposedly about people who have little in common with us, in terms of their daily lives, and yet, they're just people. This is basically how any of us would respond. Like rubberneckers on a highway. Whoa, what happened here? Only here is Moses, out in the wilderness, with no one to corroborate what he is seeing. He is the only one who can describe this vision, and who knows what he was really looking at? Was it a bush? Was it really on fire? Was it something else? Or does it even matter? Because, whatever it was, it got the message across.

So first, you have the bush. And presumably, this bush was not right in front of Moses, because he said, "I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight." So Moses shifted his gaze. He saw something out of the corner of his eye, and he went out of his way to look. He didn't know that God was calling to him. In that moment, he was simply aware of his surroundings, and willing to give something a second look that didn't seem to jive with his usual understanding of the world, i.e. that when bushes are filled with fire, they normally burn up.

And then it says, "When God saw that Moses had turned aside, he called to him out of the bush." And that may seem like a throwaway line. It's what you expect. Moses sees the burning bush, and the next thing you know, God is calling to him out of it. Simple right? But that line is loaded. It says God saw. So what that line is really giving us is a glimpse into the Mind of God. And it also gives us a little kernel of doubt. God sees everything, right? So if Moses had NOT turned to look at the bush, He would have seen that, too. So God was sitting on pins and needles for a while there.

Here is this guy, Moses, out in the wilderness with a flock of sheep, and God wants to call to him and make him the liberator of the Jewish people enslaved in Egypt. So God has to figure out a way of getting Moses' attention, and when he does this, by way of the burning bush (you could make an argument for a better way, but maybe that's all God had at the time) He can't even be sure if Moses is going to look at it, never mind respond. God sends the text, and the beep goes off, but what if Moses doesn't hear it? So there is God, watching to see what Moses does. When he sees that Moses has turned to look at the burning bush, then He speaks to him out of it. Not before he gets Moses' attention. He doesn't speak to get his attention. He only does it after the attention is given.

He says, "Moses! Moses!" And he answers, "Here I am!"

Not, What do you want? Not, Who are you? Just, Here I am.

And I'm thinking, what does this say to me? What does this mean in my life, right now? The pastor, who gave the drash, made a good point that when we get a call from God, or from our neighbors, we should pay attention, and think about what it means to answer, and what it means to Act. I really appreciated him saying that, because action is important to me. It's one of the things I love about Judaism - that it's not a religion of passively sitting by and imbibing philosophy, knowledge or belief, but one, ultimately, of action, and preferably action that benefits an entire community, and/or one's own life and of those close to us.

But I also wondered, and thought about later, what are the burning bushes in my life? What are those things, items, phenomena, dancing in the periphery of my vision that I should be turning my gaze toward and saying, Hey, what's this? I'm going to check this out. What are those things that aren't happening the way they are supposed to that are demanding a closer look? And if I don't look, maybe I am going to miss an important message. If Moses hadn't looked at that burning bush, the entire story of Exodus wouldn't have happened. Or at least Moses wouldn't have been a part of it. Maybe Moses wasn't the first one. Maybe God had tried to reach dozens of other men, or even women, and all of them had been too caught up in their own lives to pay attention to the message God was sending.

So if we don't pay attention to the messages in our own lives - to those burning bushes, those outliers of experience that make us say, Hey, hang on a minute, that's not quite right - we're missing a big piece of the action. We're missing the opportunity to not only have a conversation with God, but to liberate ourselves and possibly many others from the negative forces that are enslaving them.

Shavuah tov.