Three Things Moses Could Not Picture Until God Pointed at Them

Moses is standing in front of God on Sinai and he cannot see what he is looking at.

The scene is not from the Torah. It is from a rabbinic reading built out of three verses that nobody normally connects. Rabbi Akiva, the second-century sage who was flayed alive by the Romans for teaching Torah and who is one of the most quoted figures in rabbinic literature, taught that there were three things the greatest prophet in Israel could not visualize on his own. Three images his mind refused to construct. God had to physically point them out to him, the way a parent points to a red button and says, this one, not that one.

The teaching is preserved in the Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael, a tannaitic midrash on Exodus composed in second and third-century Palestine in the academy of Rabbi Ishmael, preserved in Byzantine and medieval manuscripts. In Tractate Pischa, Akiva lays out the three blind spots. The Mekhilta is precise about them, and the precision is where the theology lives.

The first was the new moon.

When God told Moses that the beginning of a new month would be marked by the first sliver of the moon after its disappearance, Moses could not picture which exact phase counted as the new moon. This sounds like a small thing. A sliver is a sliver. But the entire Jewish calendar hangs on that judgment. Mistake the phase and you mistake the date of Passover. Mistake Passover and you mistake the resurrection of the nation. The Mekhilta says God had to show Moses the moon directly. He pointed up into the sky and said, in effect, this one. The phase you are looking at right now is the one that starts the month. Not before. Not after. This.

The second blind spot is stranger. It was the identification of impure swarming creatures.

Leviticus 11:29 says, "And this shall be unclean for you from among all the things that swarm upon the earth." The word this is the entire hinge of Akiva's reading. In rabbinic Hebrew, zeh is a demonstrative. It means the speaker is pointing at something specific. The Mekhilta says the word this would be incoherent unless God was literally gesturing at an animal in front of Moses and saying, this creature here. Not that one. This. The swarming creatures that crawl on the ground, the text says, are too varied to describe in words. There were too many species. Their shapes blurred into one another. Moses could not tell the kosher from the non-kosher by description alone. So God pointed, one creature at a time, until Moses had seen every forbidden species with his own eyes.

The third thing Moses could not see was the menorah.

This one has driven Jewish artists and metalworkers crazy for two thousand years. Numbers 8:4 says, "And this is the work of the menorah." There is the pointing word again, this. Akiva reads the verse and insists that Moses could not build the menorah from verbal instructions. The seven-branched lampstand with its almond blossoms, its cups, its knobs, its flowers, its hammered gold in a single piece, was too complicated to transmit through speech. The Mekhilta says God had to show Moses a model. Some traditions say the model was a menorah of fire that God held up in front of him until Moses understood the shape. Others say God took Moses's own finger and drew the outline in the air. Either way, the point is the same. The menorah could not be described. It had to be seen.

Other sages in the Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael added a fourth item to Akiva's list. They pointed to (Numbers 29:38), which says, "And this is what you shall do upon the altar," using the same demonstrative this. The slaughter of sacrificial animals, they argued, was another thing God had to physically demonstrate, because the precise movements of the knife could not be transmitted through description alone. The Mekhilta keeps the list open. Different rabbis add different items. But all of them are hinging on the same Hebrew word. Zeh. This.

What Akiva is saying through all this is remarkable, and the Mekhilta lets the remark do its quiet work. Moses was the greatest prophet who ever lived. Deuteronomy says God knew him face to face (Deuteronomy 34:10). Nobody before or since reached his level of direct access to the divine mind. Even Moses had limits. Some sacred things could not be transmitted through language. They had to be seen. The Torah itself admits this by using the pointing word four times in four separate places and pretending nothing has happened.

Akiva was pulling the curtain back.

This teaching has massive implications for the rabbinic project as a whole. If even Moses needed God to show him the shape of the menorah, then the idea that the whole of Jewish life can be compressed into written law is impossible. There must always be a physical tradition running alongside the text. A mesorah that is passed from hand to hand, face to face, model to model. Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, published in seven volumes between 1909 and 1938, preserves a long tradition running out of Akiva's teaching which insists that this is the entire rationale for the Oral Torah. Some things have to be shown. Written words will not carry them. The Talmud, the Mishnah, the later halachic commentaries, and the student sitting next to a rabbi watching him lay tefillin for the first time are all the fulfillment of one quiet admission in the Mekhilta. Even Moses needed God to point.

The greatest prophet in the history of Israel was, on three or four specific days, a man squinting at a moon, a worm, a lamp, and a knife, and waiting for God to lift a finger and say this one.