The Bricks of Heaven - Mishpatim - Mythic Torah

Lucifer published by DC Comics

If you want to read a comic about Lucifer, the fallen angel starred in his own series written by Mike Carey, published by DC comics, from 1999-2006. A spinoff from Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Lucifer followed the story of the devil after he quit his job and left the management of Hell to others.

But if you want to read a comic about God, you're out of luck. With the exception of DC Vertigo's comic Preacher, whose depiction of God is graphic and theologically challenging, the big comic book publishers have chosen to keep God out of there comics.

God clearly exists in the DC universe, for example as seen in Sandman's Season of Mists, but God is never depicted. Both Marvel and DC have chosen to avoid showing God in the flesh, as it were, choosing to have God off the page, if mentioned at all.

While their reasoning may be simply to avoid offending Christians, Muslims or Jews, they are remarkably in-keeping with most of the Bible, that teaches that "you cannot see My face, for no one may see Me and live" (Exodus 33:20).

We may be surprised then to learn that in this week's parasha of Mishpatim, 74 people did just that.



After the Israelites have received the Torah at Sinai, and learnt something of its laws, we read the following three verses that are both tantalising and obscure:

⁹ Moses and Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up ¹⁰ and saw the God of Israel. Under His feet was something like sapphire paving stones, like the essence of the sky for purity. ¹¹ But God did not raise His hand against these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank.

ט וַיַּעַל משֶׁה וְאַהֲרֹן נָדָב וַאֲבִיהוּא וְשִׁבְעִים מִזִּקְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל
י וַיִּרְאוּ אֵת אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְתַחַת רַגְלָיו כְּמַעֲשֵׂה לִבְנַת הַסַּפִּיר וּכְעֶצֶם הַשָּׁמַיִם לָטֹהַר
יא וְאֶל-אֲצִילֵי בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לֹא שָׁלַח יָדוֹ וַיֶּחֱזוּ אֶת-הָאֱלֹהִים וַיֹּאכְלוּ וַיִּשְׁתּוּ

Moses, Aaron, Nadav, Avihu and seventy elders of Israel not only see God, but then eat and drink in God's presence. How are we to understand this vision? What can we learn from the sapphire paving stones?

The Torah starts off with the clear proclamation that they 'saw the God of Israel' but then rapidly becomes more obscure. The vision immediately shifts to God's feet and more importantly what lies underneath them - the sapphire stones, clear like the very essence of the sky.

Instead of describing what God looks like, the Torah quickly shifts to a physical image of precious stones beneath God's feet. It's almost as if looking at God is like trying to look at the sun - your gaze immediately has to move somewhere else as the experience is beyond human endurance.

Rashi (the 11th century French commentator) explains that the paving stones were placed before God during the slavery in Egypt, as a visual reminder of the suffering of the people who were forced to collect the straw to make their own bricks. Now that the people have been freed from slavery, the bricks have turned clear like jewels, transforming the symbol of oppression into a royal image of redemption.

Indeed, bricks are the linking factor between the three crucial moments in the Exodus narrative. The Israelites are forced to make bricks in Egypt. Then, at the moment of the Song of the Sea in Ex 15, the poem is written out in the Torah scroll to look like brickwork. Finally, here at Mount Sinai, God appears above sapphire paving.

I love the image of God sitting in Heaven and looking at the bricks that the Israelites are being forced to make. It teaches us the power of not only hearing about suffering but really seeing it, how imagery can be used to evoke sympathy and righteous anger.

But more than that I believe the Torah is trying to link these 3 moments together, slavery, redemption and revelation, as inter-linked events in the lives of all people. Once you are redeemed from your pain, the next step is revelation, which is to say, learning from your suffering and applying that to making the world a better place.

The bricks themselves teach us that these moments are not monolithic, not composed from a single big event, but are built up in stages, brick by brick. Slavery, redemption and revelation are not just single events that happened in the mythic history of our people, but the whole story built up out of the narratives of our lives.

In the process of construction, bricks may start opaque and only become clear in time, as we finally come to understand our place in the world. Some bricks may never turn to sapphires, and remain formed of ugly, inexplicable clay - unfortunately not all suffering is transformed into redemption and revelation. But it is our duty to keep building the house, continue to engage in the world and construct the narrative of who we are.

This moment of seeing God is more than just a superhuman ability that the elders gained in that moment, seeing that which no mortal can see, but was also an amazing comprehension of the way the universe works. That everything is built out of bricks, small moments that complete a structure we may never fully comprehend.

When we see the paving stones of life transformed into sapphires, sparkling like the essence of the sky for purity, that is an experience of perceiving God.