March 9, 2026|כ' אדר ה' אלפים תשפ"ו Seeing God's Back: Faith in Times of Uncertainty By Rabbi Jonathan Muskat

All eyes are on Iran, and I find myself doing something I suspect many of us are doing these days: constantly refreshing the news.

Refresh.
Refresh again.

Is there any sign of cracks inside the IRGC?
Have Iranian soldiers begun to defect?
Are protests forming anywhere in the country?
Will the Kurds make any headway in destabilizing the regime?

Refresh.
Refresh again.

We keep looking for the moment when something shifts — when the story suddenly changes direction.

In Israel, more than ninety percent of Jewish Israelis reportedly support the war, while in the United States public support is far more limited according to the polls — and we have Tucker Carlson and his love for Chabad to partially thank for that. But beneath the politics and the military calculations lies something deeper that many people are feeling.

Uncertainty.

No one knows how this will end.
No one knows how long it will last.
No one knows what the consequences will be.

And the real question is not only what will happen.

The deeper question is: how do human beings respond to uncertainty?

In many ways, that may be the deeper struggle at the heart of the story of the Golden Calf.

On the surface, the story seems straightforward. It is about idolatry. It is about worshipping a physical statue, something fundamentally incompatible with the Torah’s vision of God. It is about a nation betraying the second commandment only forty days after standing at Sinai.

Perhaps it is also about a desire for something tangible — some physical representation through which to focus the Divine presence.

The betrayal was so severe that Chazal tell us in Sanhedrin that the consequences of the sin of the Golden Calf reverberated for generations.

But beneath the idolatry lies something much more human and much more familiar: the inability to live with uncertainty.

Moshe went up the mountain and promised to return. But he did not come back when the people expected him.

According to Rashi, they miscalculated the forty days. According to the simple reading of the Torah, Moshe never even gave them a clear timetable.

Either way, the people were left waiting.

Waiting without clarity.
Waiting without leadership.
Waiting without knowing what would happen next.

And eventually, they broke.

They could not tolerate the uncertainty any longer, and in their desperation, they created the Golden Calf.

Moshe understands something profound after this moment. The sin of the Golden Calf was not only about theology. It was about human psychology. The people needed something concrete. They needed something visible. They needed something they could hold onto when the future felt unstable.

And Moshe begins trying to address that need.

Part of the response, according to some meforshim, is the Mishkan — a physical space where God’s presence can be encountered in a tangible way. If the people needed a place where the Divine presence could be experienced in concrete form, the Mishkan would provide that framework.

But Moshe also realizes that the deeper problem was not only the lack of something tangible. It was the inability to live with uncertainty.

And that is why, after pleading for the people’s survival and after securing the continuation of God’s presence among them, Moshe makes one of the most extraordinary requests in the entire Torah.

He says to God:

“Hodi’eini na et derakhekha… har’eini na et kevodekha.”
Teach me Your ways.
Show me Your glory.

What exactly was Moshe asking for?

The Rambam, in the Moreh Nevuchim, explains that Moshe was actually making two requests.

First, Moshe wanted to understand God’s attributes — how God runs the world.
Second, Moshe wanted something even more ambitious: to understand God’s very essence.

Moshe believed that by studying God’s ways — by understanding how God governs history — he might come to a deeper knowledge of who God truly is.

But I think Moshe was not asking this only for himself. In a sense, Moshe was searching for an answer to the crisis that had just unfolded. If the people sinned because they could not tolerate uncertainty, perhaps the solution was greater clarity about how God operates in the world.

Perhaps if humanity could understand how history unfolds under God’s direction, the anxiety that produced the Golden Calf could be overcome.

God’s response is fascinating.

God partially grants the first request.

He reveals to Moshe the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy — the Yud-Gimel Middot — which describe how God acts in the world.

Through these attributes, Moshe can understand, at least partially, how God operates in history.

But the second request is denied.

God tells Moshe:

לֹא תוּכַל לִרְאֹת אֶת פָּנָי כִּי לֹא יִרְאַנִי הָאָדָם וָחָי
“You cannot see My face, for no human can see Me and live.”

A complete understanding of God is impossible.

According to the Rambam and other meforshim, Moshe was not asking to literally see God. God has no body. Moshe was asking for complete intellectual clarity about God’s nature and existence.

And God’s answer was: that level of certainty is beyond human beings.

But then God says something mysterious.

V’ra’ita et achorai — “You will see My back” 

U’fanai lo yai’ra’u — “But My face you will not see”

What does it mean to see God’s back but not His face?

The Chatam Sofer explains: et darchei Hashem v’hanhagotav im habriyot efshar l’hasig u’l’hakir rak acharei ha’ma’aseh — the ways of God and His behavior with creation can only be understood after the fact.

V’ra’ita et achorai — “You will see My back” — at the end of days, you will see and understand.

U’fanai lo yai’ra’u — “My face you will not see” — at the time the events unfold, you cannot perceive Me.

Human beings rarely understand God while events are unfolding.

We live moving forward in uncertainty.

Only afterward — looking backward — do we sometimes begin to see traces of God’s presence in history.

We do not see the face of God in the moment.
We see the back of God after the fact.

And in some ways, we are living through a moment like that right now.

There is such a profound difference between life here in America and life in Israel.

From here, the uncertainty about the war is primarily about oil prices rising, stock markets fluctuating, the financial cost of war, and the danger to members of our armed forces, most of whom we do not know personally.

But Israelis are living with something very different.

They are living with rockets.
They are living with sirens.
They are living with tragedies like the horrific attack in Beit Shemesh, where ordinary civilians — many family members — sitting in the safe room of a shul were killed.

Many of us have family or friends there. I called a friend who lives nearby shortly after the Beit Shemesh attack. He told me he was safe — but when the explosion happened, the blast shattered his windows.

Imagine that happening here.

The uncertainty in Israel right now is overwhelming.

And yet something remarkable happened this week.

Purim arrived.

People went to shul, heard the Megillah — siren.
They ran to the safe room.
Then they came back, finished the Megillah, and went outside to dance.
Another siren — back to the safe room.
And then back out again.

They refused to let uncertainty paralyze them.

Why?

Because they believe they are seeing the back of God in history. They believe that even in the middle of chaos, somehow the hand of God is moving the story forward — even if they cannot yet see the full picture.

Consider what has unfolded since October 7th. Nothing diminishes the enormity of that loss, and no outcome makes the deaths of kedoshim acceptable. But who on October 8th could have foreseen the return of more than a hundred hostages, the fall of Assad’s Syria, the dismantling of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, the exposure of Iran’s vulnerabilities — a reconfiguration of the entire regional order?

History was already moving in ways no one could see.

Only afterward do we begin to glimpse what may have been unfolding beneath the surface.

That, perhaps, is what it means to see the “back” of God in our own time.

Living through history requires patience. The meaning of events often remains hidden from those experiencing them in the moment.

Our avodah is to resist the urge to fill the silence with creations of our own, and instead to trust that the answers are still being directed from atop the mountain — even when we cannot yet see Moshe descending.

And perhaps that is the deeper message of the Golden Calf.

Faith is not certainty about events.
Faith is certainty about the relationship.