and make again
Can we find your face
shining within?
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A chapter of restitution, gathering the broken shards of Sinai. "Hew for yourself two tablets of stone, and I will write on the upon the tablets the words that had been on the tablets that you broke." It is not only the Tablets, but the covenant as a whole that is reformed. Moses ascends, and is told a condensed form of the initial explication of Sinai, ending with the same enigmatic: "Do not cook a kid in its mother's milk." Again, he remains for 40 days and 40 nights.
But this recreated covenant is transformed by Moses role as intermediary. If before, Moses was the messenger connecting God and the people, now the covenant is his" "hew for yourself." If initially, the elders of Israel "beheld God and ate and drank," now it is Moses alone who sees God, and "eats no bread, and drinks no water" utterly consumed in this dyad.
The relationship to Israel now flows through Moses. "I know you by name," God says, and Moses "calls the Name of God."It is only be ecause Moses "finds favor in [God's] eyes" that God finally agrees to "walk within you." But the one He is truly within is Moses, whose face shines with the force of the relationship. Now it is only God and Moses who can see each other "face to face." "And when Moses when before God, to speak to Him, he would remove the veil until he left. And when he came out, he spoke to the children of Israel..." Moses has becomes so intertwined with God, that like God, his face cannot be fully seem, but glimpsed only through a veil. ]
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