(Originally published in January 2021)
“And he [Moshe] looked and behold the bush [sneh] was ablaze with fire, but the bush was not consumed.” (Exodus 3:2)
This vision is Moshe’s first encounter with God, a prelude to being asked to be God’s messenger in redeeming the people from Egypt.
The vision lends itself to many possible interpretations. At this moment it speaks to me of a place of invulnerability inside each of us that can withstand any blaze.
Moshe — having fled Egypt as a wanted man — is now poised to re-enter the fire; indeed, from here on, his whole life will be one fire after another — the many plagues and continued obstinacy of Pharaoh as well as the neverending battle for the hearts and trust of the people through the redemption and the long sojourn in the desert. The fire won’t go out; there will always be another task, another problem, another “fire” to put out, endless suffering and dissent and difficulty.
But what God is showing Moshe here is that through all that fire, he, little humble Moshe, who probably thinks of himself as about as big and strong as a thorn bush (a sneh is a thorn bush) — that this little guy will be able to withstand it all, not just all the blazing suffering and difficulty around him, but also the full blaze of the Presence of God inside him, itself a powerful and frightening force. Yes, you, Moshe, the little thorn bush, you can handle it. You can handle the anger of Pharaoh and the people, and you can even handle My — God’s — own fiery anger, as we will see time and again through the people’s desert sins. And not just the anger of God, but also God’s intimacy, God’s full presence, God’s love and gifts and teaching on Sinai and beyond. You, Moshe, can withstand all that fire. You are the thorn bush — you will blaze brightly with all that energy and difficulty — but you will not be consumed by it; it will not eat you up; you will still stand steady amidst it all. Feel your strength and find that place of invulnerability inside you; know that it is real, for “I am with you” (3:12) — this place inside you is a divine place; it is a piece of heaven on earth; it does not succumb to the rules of nature — by those rules the thorn bush should indeed have been consumed — but exists on a plane beyond this world, a plane where the flow never ceases and no harm can come to you.
Moshe will need to remember this strength. What courage it must have taken to appear before the all-powerful Pharaoh first, out of the blue, and then, antagonistically, again and again, with the divine message of deliverance. Yes, after a while, the tides seemed to turn, but in the beginning, as this parsha ends, things only seem to be getting worse for the Israelites — the fire of Israelite suffering is only blazing hotter — and yet, Moshe has to continue to hold steady, to not be consumed by the flames of external suffering and of internal discouragement and despair, to hold steady amidst the flames and continue the fight.
This vision was not meant for Moshe alone. As God makes clear right away, the sign of the mission’s success will be that the people will return to this very same mountain and worship. The sign of success will be that the whole mountaintop — Mount Sinai, sounding a lot like sneh — will turn into a kind of burning bush, what Deuteronomy describes as vehahar bo’er ba’esh, “and the mountain was ablaze with fire” (Deuteronomy 4:11). (These are the only two events in the Torah where this phrase is used.) The whole mountaintop will be a burning bush to be witnessed by a whole nation, a nation that is to carry the message of divinity into the world through the Torah.
So I want to take a minute to spell out how this burning bush image might speak to us personally, as well as to Moshe. First, note that you don’t have to be on a great spiritual plane to be able to carry and contain the blaze in this way; the vision is of a lowly thorn bush. The only requirement is that you know that you are a thorn bush, difficult and full of thorns and resistance, and lowly enough to actually feel the need for divine assistance. It turns out that God chooses precisely such thorny types to dwell among — He is called shokhni sneh (Devarim 33:16) – the One who dwells in a thorn bush. Tradition famously speaks of a similar lowliness ascribed to Mount Sinai; it is here that God dwells, among the not-greats, the difficult thorny ones, among us in all our weakness and prickliness.
And so, letting go of any perception of yourself as not good enough, imagine what it might be like to be such a thorn bush — to be able to carry the burning fire and yet not be consumed by it, to find inside yourself that divine place that holds steady through it all and can never be touched. The fire we carry comes in many forms — external difficulties and suffering, internal blazes of anxiety, anger, fear, and the intense pain of hurt and loneliness, as well as the energy of creativity and desire and love and even yearning for and connection to God. All of those fires blaze inside us; we are often thrown about by the intensity of their flames, by our changing situations and moods, by the breaking news and the crying child, by the work stress and the pang of some old sadness. We are thrown about by all of these flames like a leaf in a windstorm, this way and that, often, yes, completely “consumed” by the moment’s mood, blended with the flame itself, with no sense of space at all, but completely caught up in the intensity of the heat, losing ourselves in the process, eaten up by the fire.
The image of the burning bush that is not consumed suggests there is an alternative to this way of being; we can allow the blaze inside us in all its intensity, while at the same time not being consumed by it. We do have the God-given capacity to remain whole and steady amidst the raging fire, to maintain some place inside us that is untouched and always still, a place that is not subject to the weather or the news or our successes or failures, but always secure and at peace in its connection to the divine. The world may rage — inside us and outside us — and we can carry that flame, but we don’t have to be taken over by it; we can always keep some sacred space that is untouched. Even when we think we can’t handle it anymore — we have reached the end of our rope; we are exhausted and spent — still, there is somewhere inside us a divinely implanted point that is tireless and unperturbed.
To know that there is such a place inside us — a place that is always whole and at peace — actually allows us to carry the flames more fully; we no longer need to fear the outbursts inside or outside us; we know we can handle them and survive. Let them come — let the panic and anxiety and despair come; we know we can live through it and not be consumed, and so the flames are free to rage, but a little more calmly now, with the relief that comes from knowing that they are contained, that they are held by a container that itself will never give way.
The burning bush represents a meeting of the divine and the human in a paradoxical relationship. On the one hand, the raging fire represents divine energy, and the thorn bush, the human vessel for that flow. On the other hand, the flames represent the very human suffering in this world, with all its intensity and heat and pain, while the thorn bush, with its ability to withstand consumption, represents the divine element inside us that can hold all of that this-worldly pain in a sea of otherworldly invulnerability. Mount Sinai is the place where the divine and the human will meet in a few parshas time in the grandest of all revelations. In this mini-Sinai-sneh revelation, we have a taste of what such a partnership might look like, with vulnerable and invulnerable, raging and still, human and divine, all wrapped up together in one image and one heart.
