Moses Wept and the Shekhinah Wept With Him

The Basket Opens at the River

The basket had been sealed with pitch and set among the reeds at the edge of the Nile. His mother had made it watertight and let go of it, which was the hardest part. Pharaoh's daughter came down to bathe and saw it. She sent her maidservant to bring it to her, and when she opened it, she saw the child. He was weeping.

Three Hebrew words in Exodus describe the moment: vayifteach vatireh et hayeled vehinei naar bocheh. She opened, she saw the child, and behold, a weeping boy. The text moves on quickly. Pharaoh's daughter takes pity, finds a Hebrew nurse, arranges everything. But the Tikkunei Zohar, the mystical compilation of thirteenth-century Castile, stopped at those three words and refused to let them go. Who is the she who opened? And why is the child weeping?

The Shekhinah Looks Into the Basket

The Tikkunei Zohar's reading of this moment is exact and strange. The she who opened is not only Pharaoh's daughter. It is the Shekhinah, the divine presence, the feminine aspect of God that dwells with Israel wherever Israel dwells. The basket opens to both at once: to the human princess who will raise the boy as her son, and to the divine presence that has been following the people through Egypt and has found them here, in the water, in the pitch-sealed vessel of a condemned child.

And the child is weeping not from hunger or cold or fear. He is weeping because he can feel her. The Shekhinah is in exile. She descended with the family of Jacob when they came down to Egypt, and she has been in exile with them through the generations of slavery, through the brickmaking and the beatings and the drownings of male infants. Moses, at three months old, already knows this. He can feel her condition as if it is his own condition, because it is his own condition. His exile is her exile. His redemption will be her redemption.

What a Three-Month-Old Knows About Exile

The midrashic tradition describes Moses as marked from birth by divine presence. His mother saw that he was tov, good, when he was born, and the rabbis read that word to mean more than beautiful: filled with light, already inhabited by something that exceeded the ordinary. The house filled with light when he was born, according to midrash. The light that his mother perceived was the sign that this child carried the Shekhinah in a particular way from his first breath.

His weeping in the basket is the first act of that particular intimacy. He weeps as a prophet weeps before he knows he is a prophet, in response to something real that others around him do not yet perceive. Pharaoh's daughter sees the weeping and feels compassion. She does not understand its source. But she responds to it correctly, and the Tikkunei Zohar reads her compassion as itself a reflex of the Shekhinah's presence: even a Pharaoh's daughter, standing at the border between Egyptian power and Hebrew suffering, is moved to mercy when she encounters the divine weeping that she cannot name.

The Two Shekhinahs and the One Moses

The Tikkunei Zohar preserves a distinction between two aspects of the Shekhinah: one upper and one lower, one that never descends into the conditions of exile and one that does. The lower Shekhinah, called Malkhut in the structure of the sefirot, is the divine presence that goes with the people into every darkness they enter. She does not stay above in safety while the people suffer below. She goes down with them. She was in Egypt. She is in Babylon. She is wherever the exiles are.

Moses, from the moment of the basket, is bound to this lower Shekhinah in a way the text never fully explains but never stops gesturing toward. His weeping is her weeping. Later, when he descends from Sinai with his face radiating light, that light is hers. When the people sin and God threatens to withdraw, Moses places himself between the divine anger and the people with a ferocity that reads less like diplomacy and more like a man defending something that is part of himself. The Tikkunei Zohar says he found grace in the eyes of all of life, that the natural world responded to his presence as it responds to the presence of the Shekhinah. He carried her. He had been carrying her since the basket.