Ari Levisohn
The Thirteen Attributes of Mercy stand at the center of our language of forgiveness. They form the heart of Selichot, return again and again throughout Yom Kippur, and have become the words we instinctively reach for when we ask God to meet us with compassion.
But when these words first appear in the Torah, they are not introduced as a formula. They emerge from a mysterious and highly visual encounter between God and Moses. Before the attributes are proclaimed, the Torah lingers over the strange circumstances in which they are revealed, drawing our attention not only to what Moses heard, but to what he experienced.
That alone should make us wonder: Why was the revelation of mercy conveyed through an encounter rather than through words alone? What did God need Moses to see? The Torah seems to suggest that Moses needed more than information. He needed to undergo something.
To understand what God was teaching Moses about mercy, we need to begin not only with the words God says, but with the scene that surrounds them. The setting itself may be the key to interpreting what the Thirteen Attributes were meant to reveal.
Moses’s Request
Let us set the scene: The Israelites, convinced that Moses would never return from Sinai, fashioned a golden calf to serve as their god. Angered, God threatened to destroy them and begin anew with Moses, but after Moses rose to their defense, God relented and forgave them. This led Moses to make a bold request:
God said to Moses, ‘Also this thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in My eyes and I have known you by name.’ He said, ‘Show me, please, Your glory.’ (Exodus 33:17–18)
What was it, exactly, that Moses was seeking? He had fought hard to defend the people. It was quite an uphill battle given how badly they had erred. So when it actually worked, when God actually forgave them, Moses must have been somewhat taken aback. Moses marveled at God’s mercy and wondered how God had such capacity to forgive.
As much as forgiveness was Moses’s desired result, it also proved that God does not operate the world through a strict system of justice, raising a deep mystery about the nature of God’s governance. The Talmud explains Moses as asking, “Why are there righteous who suffer and wicked who prosper?” (Berachot 7a). If God does not exclusively reward the righteous and punish the wicked, adds the Midrash, “by what principle does God run the world?” (Tanchuma Va’etchanan 3)
God’s initial response may at first seem somewhat dismissive:
He said, ‘I will pass all My goodness before you, and I will proclaim by name, ‘God’ before you, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy.’ (Exodus 33:19)
Instead of revealing any principle governing His mercy, God seems to retreat into an assertion of absolute sovereignty: He will bestow grace and mercy wherever He chooses, on whomever He chooses, for reasons He does not disclose.
Berakhot 7a expands upon this: “‘I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious,’ even though he is not worthy. ‘I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy,’ even though he is not worthy.” God’s mercy, on this reading, does not merely operate independently of justice; it subverts it, extending grace precisely where it has not been earned. The Midrash sharpens this further by saying that even when God does good for the righteous, He is doing it as a favor, not as a reward for their virtue (Tanchuma Va’etchanan 3). Essentially, after Moses asks for the principle by which God’s mercy can be understood, God responds by rejecting the premise that mercy follows any fixed moral calculus at all, or that there is any logic by which Moses might predict its workings.
But then God continues talking. In fact, the Torah introduces this with a second va-yomer — “and He said…” a formulation that, according to the Sages, “always requires interpretation.”[1] Commentators interpret a second va-yomer as introducing a separate speech, often assuming that the speaker is changing their approach, when they realize what they originally said did not land with their audience. Occasionally they even suggest that the successive speeches conceal an implied reply in between, as if we are only being presented with one side of the conversation.[2] We can imagine what Moses might have said or thought, after God brushed off his first request to understand Him: God, You have tasked me with leading this people, You have to give me some sense of how You run the world, of the rules of the game that I am playing. Surely, there is at least something You can tell me about the way You run the world!
What’s important is not Moses’s exact words, but that God felt the need to explain Himself further:
He said, ‘You won’t be able to see My face, because man cannot see Me and live.’ (Exodus 33:20)
Perhaps God means to explain to Moses that it is not just that His mercy defies logic. God’s essence, “His face,” is fundamentally beyond human understanding. It is incompatible with our earthly existence.
This, too, must not have satisfied Moses, because God continues with yet a third va-yomer, a third speech. Apparently there is still something God can say, or perhaps show, about his mercy:
God said, ‘Behold, there is room by Me; you shall station yourself on the rock, and when My glory passes, I will place you in the crevice of the rock, and I will screen you with My palm until I pass. When I remove My palm, you shall see my back; but My face shall not be seen.’ (Exodus 33:21–23)
This moment will ultimately be Moses’s greatest personal revelation, but for some reason God can’t just come out and tell Moses what he needs to hear. Instead, it will require a mysterious dance, mostly revolving around a rock. If we actually stop to think about what God said, it raises a number of questions. Let’s break down His instructions one step at a time:
“There is space here with Me,” says God. This is an odd thing for God to say. For one thing, God isn’t usually thought of as having a physical place. God is everywhere. Moreover, what does it mean for Moses to join God in this “place?”
Question One: What is this place with God?
“And you should stand yourself on the rock.” The rock? Which rock? Are we supposed to know which rock God is talking about? Is Moses supposed to know?
Question Two: What rock?
And why is Moses supposed to stand on this rock? Is the standing important? What if he wants to sit on it? Can he stand next to it? Why do we need this rock anyway?
Question Three: Why stand on the rock?
None of this is relevant for very long, however, because God will then move him inside the rock: “I shall put you in the cleft of the rock.” What is with this whole dance and what does any of it have to do with what God needs to tell Moses? While some commentators suggest God positioned Moses into a corner in order to shield his eyes, that would have been redundant as the next thing God says is: “I shall screen you with my palm.”
Question Four: Why the cleft?
God’s mysterious response to Moses is, in fact, the culmination of a story that is chapters in the making, and one whose echoes resonate through the final words of the Torah. Ultimately, this story is central to our understanding of God and the role He plays in our world.
The Real Tzur
The clue to the hidden story lies in the fact that God doesn’t just talk about any rock. He talks about the rock, “ha-tzur.” Are we supposed to know which rock God is referring to? There are dozens of rocks throughout the Torah, far too many to choose from. However, almost all of those rocks have one thing in common: they are referred to with the word “even.” No fewer than 88 times does the word even appear in the Chumash alone. The word tzur, by contrast, which the Torah uses here, is extremely rare. So rare, in fact, that there are only two rocks called a tzur in the entire Torah. (In Ha’azinu it is used as a nickname for God, but we will return to that.) The first, and only other, tzur is the rock that provided water to the Israelites throughout their time in the wilderness.[3]
Could these two rocks be connected? The story in Parashat Beshalah may provide an answer.
The entire congregation of the Children of Israel traveled from the Wilderness of Sin, on their journeys at the directive of God, and they camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses and said, ‘Give us water that we may drink.’ Moses said to them, ‘Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test God?’ The people thirsted there for water, and the people grumbled against Moses and said, ‘Why have you brought us up from Egypt to kill me and my children and my livestock with thirst?’ Moses cried out to God, saying, ‘What shall I do for this people? A little longer and they will stone me!’ God said to Moses, ‘Pass before the people, and take with you from the elders of Israel; and the staff with which you struck the river, take in your hand and go. Behold, I am standing before you there, by the rock (ha-tzur) at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock, and waters will go forth from it, and the nation will drink.’ And Moses did so before the eyes of the elders of Israel. He named the place Massah and Merivah, because of the quarrel of the Children of Israel and because of their testing of God, saying, ‘Is God among us or not?’ (Exodus 17:1–7)
It is easy to overlook the fact that Moses did not hit this rock in front of the people. He and the elders traveled a great distance from Rephidim to Horeb where the rock was waiting for him. Horeb is the name of the place where Mount Sinai stood and is often used as a descriptor for the mountain.[4] Once again we see someone standing on a tzur, only this time instead of Moses it is God, Himself.
It is also easy to overlook the fact that the rock was at Mount Sinai, probably because this detail seems so unnecessary. Why does Moses have to travel all the way to Sinai just to find a magical rock? Were there no rocks in Rephidim that Moses could have hit? There is also something else strange: Here, too, God refers to “the rock” as if everyone is supposed to know which rock he is referring to.
The evidence so far can be summarized as follows:
- Moses goes all the way to Mount Sinai to find “the” tzur that, apparently, everyone is supposed to know about.
- Later, we find God referencing “the” tzur at Mount Sinai that, again, everyone seems to know about.
Now for the final piece of evidence:
3. Tzur does not simply mean a rock.
As noted above, the Torah already has a go-to word for rock: even. What does tzur mean? Across Tanakh, it generally refers to a mountain face or a cliff. Not surprisingly, this is exactly how the BDB dictionary defines it:
Tzur: 1. a. rocky wall, cliff. (F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs Dictionary, s.v. “tzur”)
Was there one massive mountain face in Horeb that everybody knew about? The answer, of course, is Mount Sinai.
To spell it out, the tzur was not a small boulder but Mount Sinai itself. Moses did not make water squirt out of a rock like a magic water fountain. He struck the side of the mountain, where a waterfall gushed forth. It’s an entirely natural scene that most hikers have seen at some point: water flowing through the rocky mountainside. The miracle may have been a lot more about when God provided the Israelites with water than how.[5]
How Did the Water Get to Them?
The implications for the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy will become clear shortly, but first one challenge remains. If the tzur was not a mobile boulder—if they couldn’t throw it on the back of a wagon while they traveled—then how did they continue to drink from it throughout their journey of forty years? Naturally, the water must have flowed from Mount Sinai down to the people via a river.
But surely such a river flowing from Sinai would have been mentioned. Is there any evidence to support such a claim? Well, right after sin of the Golden Calf, look what we read:
He took the calf that they made and burned it in fire, and he ground it until it was fine. He scattered it on the surface of the water and gave to the Children of Israel to drink. (Exodus 32:20)
The water? Which water? They were in the middle of the wilderness. It is not like there were random bodies of water everywhere.
The retelling of this story in Deuteronomy explains:
I took your sin, the calf which you had made, and burnt it with fire, and crushed it, grinding it very small, until it was as fine as dust: and I cast its dust into the river that descended out of the mountain. (Deuteronomy 9:21)
There it is, clear as day: a river descended from Mount Sinai. This was their water source for forty years. It must have followed the Israelites (or perhaps vice versa) wherever they traveled. Every time they went to get a drink, their eyes must have traced the river back all the way to the distant mountain on the horizon. The Israelites always knew exactly where their water was coming from. It was exactly the same place they received the Torah. As Abarbanel puts it:
The Lord came from Sinai to give the Torah to Israel, and from Sinai He came to give them water. The Torah came forth from ‘the Rock, perfect is His work (God)’, blessed be He — and the water likewise came forth from the rock that was at Sinai. (Abarbanel on Exodus 17:1)
Water and Torah, both flowing from the same mountain, one nourishing them physically, the other spiritually. Throughout rabbinic literature, water becomes a central metaphor for Torah: it quenches thirst (Taanit 7a), serves as a vehicle for kindness (Bava Kamma 17a; Avodah Zarah 5b), wears away even what is hard (Sukkah 52b), sustains life (Kiddushin 40b), and flows naturally to the lowest places (Taanit 7a). Strikingly, the Talmud derives this metaphor from the very water Israel thirsted for in the wilderness:
It is taught in a baraita: and they went three days in the wilderness, and found no water (Exodus 15:22). Those who interpret verses said that water is referring to nothing other than Torah, as it is stated, ‘Ho, everyone who thirsts, come for water’ (Isaiah 55:1). (Bava Kamma 82a)
Poisoned Water
What exactly did Moses do when he threw the ashes of the Golden Calf into the water, and how did he force the Israelites to drink it? Moses did not go around and, one by one, hold people’s mouths open and pour water down their throats. That would have been far too difficult. Instead, he simply went to their water source and contaminated it. They had no choice but to consume the dust of the Golden Calf.
The significance of Moses’s action becomes clearer from how Moses himself described this water in Parshat Ha’azinu:
He found him in a desert land, in the waste howling wilderness. He surrounded him. He cared for him. He kept him as the pupil of his eye. As a griffon vulture that stirs up her nest, that flutters over her young, He spread abroad his wings, He took them, He bore them on his feathers. God alone led him. There was no foreign god with him. He made him ride on the high places of the earth. He ate the produce of the field. He caused him to suckle honey out of the cliff, oil out of the flinty tzur…
You are unmindful of the Tzur who fathered you and have forgotten God who gave you birth. (Deuteronomy 32:10–13, 18)
God is described here as a mother bird caring for her helpless young, like a mother nursing her baby from the tzur. There is no greater picture of love than of a mother breastfeeding her baby. This water[6] was the symbol of God’s love for the Israelites.
It is shocking, then, that Moses would go ahead and poison that very water, the metaphorical mother’s milk, with the ashes of the Golden Calf. Even God, who considered wiping out the nation, wouldn’t have hurt them through His beloved water. We even have a rule about doing things like this. It’s called not cooking a kid in its mother’s milk. A mother’s milk is a symbol of love, it is there to nourish the baby. Slaughter whatever animal you want to slaughter, but don’t boil it in its own mother’s milk. Don’t use this object of supreme love against it.[7]
This is the backdrop against which the scene of the Thirteen Attributes can now be reconsidered.
Moses’s Personal Revelation
When Moses first asked to understand why God forgave the Israelites, God was initially dismissive: “I will be merciful to whomever I am merciful to.” Then he doubles down: “It is impossible to see my face.” His essence is beyond understanding.
But then God continues. Moses may never be able to understand God’s mercy, but maybe, through a hands-on experience, he can learn to intuit it. God does this by giving Moses a chance to view the Israelites through God’s own eyes. Here is what God does:
“There is space here with Me.” In other words, there is space here on My throne. I will scoot over to share the seat so you can see what it is like to be Me.
“And you should stand yourself on the tzur.” God invites Moses to stand in the exact same place as He did when He responded to the Israelites’ cry for water.
“I shall put you in the cleft of the tzur.” Why was there a cleft in this tzur? Because not long ago, Moses stood on this same mountain and struck this same tzur. This must have been the very hole out of which the water flowed. Imagine what it would have been like, for Moses, for God to place him inside that crack. You turn to look out at the view from the mountain. Water rushes by you as you gaze down through the mist at the people you have shepherded out of Egypt. It must have felt as if the water was flowing from Moses himself, as if he was the one breastfeeding the Israelites. God allowed Moses to view the world from the shoes of a heavenly nursing mother. This was Moses’s personal revelation.
God had first tried to explain to Moses that His love for Israel is irrational, that there is no logical principle that could fully account for it, and that to explain it would be impossible. But when that left Moses unsatisfied, God provided him with a metaphor—the closest human analogue: the love of a parent. A parent does not love a child because the child has earned that love, nor does that love disappear when the child has done something terribly wrong. It simply persists. Parental love exerts a claim more powerful than logic. It is not something that can be justified or reduced to reasons, but something any parent knows from experience. It may be impossible to explain, but it is remarkably simple to experience. And so, rather than rationalize or justify His love to Moses, God allowed Moses to experience it from His own point of view.
God does not exactly call Himself a parent. Whatever Moses experienced in that quiet moment on top of Mount Sinai was something beyond words, something that God could only explain through experience. But at the end of Moses’s life, as he is delivering his parting words to the Israelites, trying to impress upon them the years of wisdom he has accumulated, he lands upon this formulation. What he saw—or maybe even felt—when he stood in God’s shoes could only be described as parental love, and this is the metaphor Moses returns to over and over again throughout Deuteronomy.[8] To understand God, or at least to intuit Him, requires thinking of God as a loving parent.
Finally, in Moses’s final message in Ha’azinu, he employs a new nickname for God, never before seen throughout the Torah. Moses calls God The Tzur. Throughout everything God taught Moses, that tzur left the most lasting impression. Moses saw past all the scariness at Mount Sinai, and understood that nothing describes God better than this.
[1] Megillah 16a, Eichah Rabbah 1, Vayikra Rabbah 26, Tanchuma Emor 3
[2] See Berachot 9b, Rashi on Shemot 16:8, Abarbanel on Bereishit 15:3; 37:12, Shemot 32:7–9, Bamidbar 32:1, Ha’amek Davar on Bereishit 37:21–22
[3] While this is often referred to as the “Well of Miriam,” the well is only a midrashic concept and Bamidbar Rabbah 1:2 explains that this “well” was a proverbial description of the rock itself (“Of what was the well constituted? It was a boulder.”). See also Tanchuma, Bamidbar 2:1.
[4] See Shabbat 89b; see also Ramban, Ibn Ezra and Abarbanel on Exodus 17:6.
[5] We are not the first to suggest that the two tzurs are one in the same and, in fact, refer to the mountain itself. Ibn Ezra comments: “‘In the cleft of the rock’ — a place hollowed out in the rock, and this is Mount Sinai. And likewise it is written: ‘Behold, I will stand before you there upon the rock at Horeb’” (Ibn Ezra [katzar] on Exodus 33:22).
[6] The water in this metaphor is replaced by oil and honey to demonstrate how precious it is.
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