“All My Goodness”: God’s Face and Back

As My glory passes by . . . I will cover you with My hand until I have passed by. And I will take away My hand and you will see My back; but My face will not be seen” (Ex. 33:22–23). The Torah paints a wonderfully vivid scene. But of what? Moses in the cleft of a rock—but with what exactly passing by? What is this divine face that passes before Moses “that no human being can see—and live” (Ex. 33:20)? Perhaps even more tantalizing—because seemingly within reach—is the divine back: What is it that Moses does see?

In the first part of his Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides famously claimed that God’s back was a metaphor for his ways in the world, as described in the two-verse divine proclamation made as God passed before Moses, known as “the thirteen attributes”:

The Lord, The Lord, God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in benevolence and faithfulness; keeping benevolence unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin; and who will by no means exonerate; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and unto the fourth generation. (Ex. 34:6–7)

According to Maimonides, when Moses asked God to “make known to me, please, Your ways, that I may know You” (Ex. 33:13), it was the attributes expressed in these verses that he was asking to have revealed to him, a request that God granted when Moses was allowed to see His back, his ways, or effects, in the world.

Maimonides held, further, that when Moses asked next to see “Your glory (k’vodekha)” (Ex. 33:18), he was asking to see God’s face, God’s essence—and it was this that was denied him. So, as Maimonides would have it, when God placed Moses in the cleft of a rock and passed his glory before him (Ex. 33:22), he saw nothing of God’s essence, which is unknowable. What he saw was God’s back, the workings of the universe as governed by the divine attributes.

This is conceptually neat: It fits Maimonides’s negative theology like a glove. But how could Maimonides, who was arguably the most insistent of all the Jewish philosophers on the utter otherness of God, even entertain the possibility that Moses hoped to see, or know, God’s essence?And how plausible is this, really, as a reading of the biblical text?

I think that we should look a little further back in the biblical narrative to determine what—if not God’s essence—Moses wished to see and what he was ultimately permitted to see. In Exodus 32, we encounter a very angry God: While Moses is away on Mount Sinai, the Israelites commit the sin of the golden calf, brazenly proclaiming, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Ex. 32:4). God tells Moses that He will destroy them but relents as a result of Moses’s pleas.

The next day God promises that He will send His angel to go before Moses to lead the people (Ex. 32:34, 33:2). But only ten verses later, Moses complains to God that “You have not made known to me whom You will send with me” (Ex. 33:12). Has Moses so quickly forgotten? No! Apparently, for Moses, an angel won’t do. What he demands is to have God’s face alongside him: “If Your face does not go, then do not bring us up from here” (Ex. 33:15). God acquiesces: His face will accompany the people.

How could Maimonides even entertain the possibility that Moses hoped to see, or know, God’s essence?

What can God’s face do that an angel cannot? Ten chapters earlier in Exodus, God says of His angel: “Take heed of him, and obey him, provoke him not; for He will not pardon your transgressions” (Ex. 23:21). And when God initially proposes to send an angel with Moses, He says, “Behold, My angel shall go before you; in the day that I make My account, I shall bring their sin to account against them” (Ex. 32:34). Angels, these verses tell us, are animated by strict judgment, and, apparently, they lack something that God has in abundance: compassion.

Ironically, the reason God had proposed to send an angel was because His own anger might consume the people. But Moses knows that, even if God becomes angry enough to destroy the Israelites, He can also forgive and relent. Even if an affectless angel cannot get angry enough to eradicate the people, he also is not loving enough to pardon the wicked gratuitously. Moses knows his stiff-necked flock could not survive unadulterated and untempered judgment. Since the Israelites are sure to sin, and sin again, what hope is there for them unless God’s face, His mercy, however unmerited, is at their leader’s side?

The terrifying hiding of His face(hester panim) that God threatens repeatedly in Deuteronomy is, then, the withholding of compassion or mercy. And, of course, the priestly blessing in Numbers signals that God’s grace (chen) and the turning of His face toward us go hand in hand: “May God shine His face upon you and be gracious unto you; may He lift His face toward you and give you peace” (Num. 6:25–26).

What God promises to pass before Moses when he is in the cleft of the rock is not, however, only His face, only His divine mercy, but rather “all My goodness” (kol tuvi) (Ex. 33:19)—that is, God’s back, which Moses will be permitted to see, as well as His face, which will remain concealed. If, as I have argued, God’s face is His compassion or mercy, then His back must be His justice or judgment—in the language of the rabbinic tradition, middat ha-rachamim and middat ha-din, respectively.

Justice, which requites good with good and bad with bad, is surely no less a manifestation of God’s goodness than is His mercy. Justice is good the way the laws of nature are good: It is reliable and, for that reason, good, even when painful. It might seem that mercy, which requites bad with good, is an even greater manifestation of God’s goodness. Yet if the counterpart of divine justice is the laws of nature, wouldn’t the counterpart of divine mercy be a violation of those laws? I am reminded in this connection of a passage from Saint Anselm’s meditation on the divine attributes, the Proslogion:

For although from Your goodness You reward the good with good and the bad with bad, yet it seems that the very definition of justice demands this. But when You give good things to the wicked, one both understands that the supreme Good has willed to do this and one wonders why the supremely just One could have willed it.

What Anselm finds puzzling is not that God rewards the good and punishes the bad—that’s just what justice requires—but that He gives “good things to the wicked,” which is unfathomable.

This is something that God Himself recognizes in the same verse in which He promises to pass all His goodness before Moses: “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy” (ve-chanoti et asher achon, ve-richamti et asher arachem) (Ex. 33:19). This assertion appears to be the moral counterpart of the equally cryptic metaphysical utterance at the burning bush, ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I will be what I will be” (Ex. 3:14). What God will be cannot be known to us, but Moses is assured that God will be. Similarly, “and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious” assures us that God will be gracious, though it implies, too, that the workings of God’s compassion are opaque to us. And so, the text continues: “You will not be able to see My face” (Ex. 33:20). Maimonides notwithstanding, God’s face is not His essence; it is His mercy.

Moses know his stiff-necked flock could not survive unadulterated and untempered judgement.

In telling Moses, then, that it is not possible for human beings—including Moses himself—to see God’s face, God is telling him that the divine attribute of mercy is beyond His power to comprehend. Yet, in permitting Moses—even if no one else—to see His back, God is revealing to Moses the secrets of divine justice. Even if we cannot know or understand the when or the how of God’s justice, we can and do know that God rewards the righteous for their righteousness and punishes the wicked for their wickedness. It is unthinkable that God would have said, “And I will be just to whom I will be just”—for justice is deserved.

By showing Moses His back, God affords him greater insight than ours into divine justice. But in the case of mercy, Moses—like us—can understand nothing: not the when, not the how, not the how much, not the to whom, and not the why. Whereas we all comprehend the principle of reward for righteousness and punishment for evil, our understanding fails us with respect to undeserved kindness. Middat ha-rachamim is as an impenetrable mystery as God’s very being is. And so it must remain.

Indeed, to have knowledge of divine mercy would kill us, for, as Moses is told, “no human being” can see God’s face and live. It would, presumably, overwhelm the human cognitive capacity. Moreover, if we did know, we would know too much: We could not hope, we would not pray, and we would not repent. What enabled Moses to appeal to God’s compassion time and again was precisely his not knowing.

It might be thought that God had already revealed His attribute of mercy—and not just to Moses—in the second utterance of the Ten Commandments, or Decalogue, at Sinai. When God says that He “accords benevolence to the thousandth generation” (Ex. 20:6), isn’t He making known to all of Israel the full measure of His kindness? Perhaps not.

A second look reveals that this is a statement about justice, not mercy. For the text goes on to say, “To those who love Me and keep My commandments.” It is thus no less a matter of justice than “I visit the sin of the fathers upon the children and upon the third and fourth generation to those who hate Me” (Ex. 20:5). The basic principle of din, of judgment, is requiting good with good, bad with bad: recompense in kind—if not always in measure. Divine benevolence here is deserved, however seemingly overabundantly it is bestowed on those who “love Me and keep My commandments.” The God of the Decalogue describes Himself as an el kana. Often translated as “a jealous God” or “a vengeful God,” el kana signifies a God who demands loyalty and does not tolerate being spurned. Such a God is one who punishes betrayal on the one hand but also bountifully rewards love on the other. This aspect of God is squarely within His attribute of judgment.

The middat ha-rachamim that is not present in the Decalogue is present, however, in the famous “The Lord, the Lord” passage in Exodus 34:6–7, quoted above, a passage that, by tradition, is said to list the thirteen divine attributes and is central to our High Holiday liturgy from selichot through Yom Kippur. In this passage, God fulfills the promise He made to Moses to pass all His goodness before him. Here, again, is the complete passage:

And the Lord passed by before him and proclaimed: “The Lord, The Lord, God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in benevolence and faithfulness; keeping benevolence unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin; and who will by no means exonerate; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and unto the fourth generation.” (Ex. 34:6–7)

Although at first glance, this appears to repeat the second of the ten utterances of the Decalogue, it is hardly the same. Whereas in the Decalogue, God says that He will punish those who hate Him and reward those who love Him and keep His commandments, here the divine benevolence that extends to the thousandth generation is one that forgives iniquity and transgression and sin, and the words “to those who love Him” are absent. God no longer presents Himself as a jealous God (el kana); here God is merciful and gracious (el rachum ve-chanun), a warmer, less score-keeping God.

Moses, having seen only God’s back but not His face, is completely in the dark with respect to how divine compassion works.

Not until the latter half of verse 7 does the attribute of judgment surface, when we are told that God will not exonerate the wicked and will punish iniquity to the fourth generation. Not surprisingly, our High Holiday liturgy omits these phrases. It omits as well the emphatic “will by no means exonerate”—ve-nakkeh lo yenakkeh—boldly stopping after the first ve-nakkeh, which, taken singly, means “will exonerate”! We thus delete from our prayers any mention of God’s judgment, confining ourselves to His unfathomable mercy.

When God passes “all My goodness” before Moses, God’s face, the attributes of mercy, pass first. We are to imagine God, as it were, covering Moses with His hand as He calls out His attributes of mercy—that is, as His face goes by—and then removing His hand as He calls out before Moses His attribute of judgment, His back: “And I will take away My hand and you will see My back; but My face shall not be seen” (Ex. 33:33).

Moses, having seen only God’s back but not His face, is completely in the dark with respect to how divine compassion works. Perhaps that is why he so frequently pleads on behalf of the people: Who knows? Perhaps God will relent. Perhaps He will forgive those who do not deserve to be forgiven.

Similarly, at the end of his life, Moses appeals to God’s graciousness (va-etchanan) to allow him to enter the Promised Land. He knows what justice demands—he has sinned and should be punished—but maybe the God of inscrutable mercy will be compassionate. It is precisely Moses’s ignorance of God’s compassion-calculus that opens up a space for him to pray, to plead. In his own case, sadly, pleas fail; God exercises His middat ha-din. Thus, at the end of Moses’s life and as he is about to be buried somewhere on the wrong side of the Jordan, Moses says of God: “All His ways are judgment” (kol d’rakhav mishpat) (Deut. 32:4).

Moses in the end sees not all of God’s goodness, not His benevolence and compassion, not His long-sufferingness, not His forgiving of sin and iniquity, but rather a stern and just judge who delivers strict justice. As the curtain closes on Moses’s life, all he sees of God is His back.