Why God Told Israel to Look Away From Its Own Arrogance

God looked away first.

That is the startling claim of Shir HaShirim Rabbah, the rabbinic commentary on the Song of Songs compiled around the sixth century CE. The verse being interpreted is (Song of Songs 6:5): "Avert your eyes from me, as they excite my arrogance." Most readings take this as a love poem, God and Israel in intimate dialogue. The rabbis read it as something more uncomfortable: God telling Israel that their spiritual intensity had become too much to bear. Look away. You are overwhelming me. Your own righteousness is making you dangerous.

A nation that had survived Egypt, received the Torah at Sinai, watched the sea divide, eaten bread from heaven, and drunk water from a rock. This nation had accumulated so much evidence of divine favor that it began to mistake the favor for the condition. As if the miracles were the natural state, and the desert was the aberration, and nothing could ever really go wrong.

Then came the golden calves.

Legends of the Jews, Ginzberg's monumental synthesis of rabbinic tradition, completed in the early twentieth century, records that it wasn't one calf. It was thirteen. One for each of the twelve tribes, and one for all of Israel together. The people who had been fed manna. The miraculous daily bread whose character, the tradition says, changed to match whatever the eater desired. Stopped the manna from falling the day they built the calf. They had traded infinite provision for a thing they had made with their own hands. And the thing they had made looked nothing like the God who had fed them.

Bamidbar Rabbah, the midrash on Numbers compiled around the eleventh century CE, preserves God's own lament: "Have I been a wilderness for Israel, or a land of deep darkness?" (Jeremiah 2:31). After everything, Egypt rescued, sea split, Torah given, enemies defeated. The question God asks is not a legal one. It is the question of someone who did everything and still found themselves doubted. "Did I leave you in a wasteland? Was I ever absent when you needed something?"

The same midrashic tradition took the verse from Numbers 5:2, "Command the children of Israel". And read it as a prophecy of exile. Bamidbar Rabbah 7 argues that banishment was not punishment from outside. It was the logical consequence of the commandments themselves: when Israel violated the mitzvot, they violated their own identity. The exile was already implicit in the covenant. Not as a trap, but as a structure: you are what you practice, and if you stop practicing, you stop being recognizably yourself.

The circumcision before the Exodus. The one Moses struggled to get the Israelites to undergo before they left Egypt. Is recorded in Legends of the Jews with a detail that sounds almost absurd until you sit with it: what finally convinced the holdouts was the smell of the Passover sacrifice. The aroma reached them before the theological argument did. The body understood what the mind was resisting. They submitted to the covenant through their senses.

That is the pattern Shir HaShirim Rabbah is trying to describe when it quotes God saying: avert your eyes. The nation that came out smelling the sacrifice, that watched the sea, that ate the bread, that stood at Sinai and trembled. This nation could move God with its intensity. And it could also, in the same motion, become so drunk on its own spiritual power that it built thirteen golden calves and couldn't see the contradiction.

The exile that followed was not the end of the relationship. It was the correction. God looked away. Israel, eventually, learned to look inward. The arrogance that had excited God's love and endangered God's trust was the same capacity that would later, redirected, produce the entire tradition of prayer: the substitute for sacrifice, the way of coming before God with empty hands and full attention.

Look away. Look inward. The eyes open again.

The final word of Shir HaShirim Rabbah's teaching on this verse is not exile but return. The eyes averted come back. The relationship does not end; it waits. God does not look away forever; the turning aside is itself a form of mercy, a refusal to watch the nation destroy itself in its own certainty, a waiting for the moment when the arrogance burns off and something clearer takes its place. The entire arc of the wilderness, from Egypt to Sinai to the golden calves to the forty years of wandering, was the working out of that waiting. A people who had seen everything slowly learned to see themselves. And when the eyes opened again, on both sides of the relationship, the covenant was still there, intact, waiting to be resumed. The arrogance that had once made God look away became, after the wilderness, the intensity that drove the entire tradition of prayer and return.