The Priestly Blessing has three lines. I want to look at the middle line, what you might call its heart. Ya’er Hashem panav elekha. May God shine God’s face upon you.
Rashi explains this to mean that God shows us a laughing, smiling, bright face. Panim sokhakot, panim tzehubot. “A laughing face, a yellow face.” God is happy to see us; it makes God so happy to see us, it lights up God’s face, like the way someone greets you when they haven’t seen you in a while and they are genuinely excited to see you, and you can see it on their face, their whole face aglow with pleasure at your presence – like – wow! you’re here! I’m so happy that you’re here!
Or it is like the face of a parent gazing in awe at a newborn baby. Total delight and amazement and warmth. No judgment. A sense of great delight at this creature in front of you.
That’s how God feels when God looks upon us – delight. Delight is a fitting word here because the first word of our phrase is ya’er, which comes from the word or meaning light. God’s face is de-lighted, full of a light that is both caused by and directed towards us.
This word or, light – the Torah describes this as the first thing that God created, this or – and also the first thing that God looked at and saw was good. Vayar Elokim et ha’or ki tov. On that first day of creation, God looked at the or, at the light, and saw that it was good. This is a particular type of seeing, a divine way of seeing, seeing the good in creation. And now, in the Priestly Blessing, in turning God’s face full of this light towards us, surely what is happening is that God is seeing the goodness, the light, in us. God is delighted with us because God sees that we, too, are good, full of light. In the light of God’s loving gaze, we, too, become full of light.
Can we take that in? Most of us don’t walk around feeling this shining face of God smiling down upon us. We have demons. We have critics. We have plenty of internal judgment. We have issues with self worth and self love.
But what if we did? Seriously. What if we really felt this at least some of the time, maybe all the time? What if we really internalized this shining loving gaze of God upon us, really internalized the sense of delight that God feels in relation to us, maybe even imagined feeling that about ourselves, delighted with ourselves. Have you ever witnessed a young child with great purity and innocence delighted with themselves? What a beautiful sight. Perhaps this is how we are meant to be, knowing at all times that we are made of this light, that we are essentially good, feeling the strength of that inner knowledge that comes from keeping that loving face of God inside us.
This delight that God feels in relation to us, the light that God sees in us, it is not conditional. We do not need to earn it or deserve it, nor is it even possible to earn it or deserve it. The last word of that middle line of the Priestly Blessing is veyekhuneka. God will deal with you with hen, grace. Hen comes hinam, for free, as a pure gift of divine grace, given steadily and without conditions. You can do many things that people, yourself included, might call “wrong” in some way, and God would still, in God’s grace, still look at you with delight, still see the light in you. There is no way to ever lose that. We don’t earn it and we can’t lose it. It is something that we can rest in. Perhaps this is what leads to the next line, the culmination of the Priestly Blessing – the blessing of shalom, of peace.
Photo by William Fortunato at Pexels
