This is Life as a Sacred Text, an expansive, loving, everybody-celebrating, nobody-diminished, justice-centered voyage into one of the world’s most ancient and holy books. We’re working our way through Exodus these days. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here.

Passover is almost here! Of course, this project has covered the story of the Exodus already; you can find all those posts in the archives, or find a roundup linked in this Twitter thread. Hag Sameach, Yidden! Sending big Easter blessings to those of you celebrating that holy day as well! In any case, we continue on where we have been, in the middle of Exodus.

In my early 20s, I began having a certain kind of experience that was so intense, remarkable and strange—call them mystical encounters or whatever other label you’d prefer—that I found myself calling into question what was, by that point, a long-held and deeply entrenched atheism.

What was true then remains true for me now: my understanding and relationship with the divine is completely inextricable from my experience of the divine. This, philosophically, puts me in the camp known as “phenomenology”—I don’t believe we can talk about God without talking about our own experiences of God. Otherwise, what are we talking about? What are we trying to say?

And yet, of course, we need to understand how limiting each of our experiences of God are. An experience of some aspect of the divine, filtered through our feeble and limited human perceptions, is by its very nature going to be insufficient.

Moses had gone up to the top of Mt. Sinai, had profound, intimate connection with God as part of the receiving of Torah, but still felt like there was so much of God that he did not understand.

In a moment of longing, he cried, “Oh, please, show me Your glory!” (Exodus 33:18)

He begged God to reveal Godself to him—even just once—in fullness, not shrouded by pillars of smoke or fire.