God’s Face is His Mercy
To prejudice pride
has to make a low bow;
when mercy’s denied
it is time to kowtow.
Here mercy that falls
as gentle as rain
won’t drop within walls
where Jews suffer pain,
and tables by Portia
are priggishly turned,
till, weighed down by nausea,
the case is adjourned.
Sore spirit’s excised
by the pound from the Jew,
despised and incised
and then turned like a screw,
the pound-of-flesh malice
requited with hate
within the cold palace
where Jews have no weight.
God’s mercy
is the face
of God, pure justice
is its lack,
which is downgraded
in disgrace,
not libeled biblically
when called His back.
In “All My Goodness: God’s Face and Back: Searching for the face of forgiveness,“ Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2026, Roslyn Weiss writes:
“As My glory passes by . . . I will cover you with My hand until I have passed by. And I will take away My hand and you will see My back; but My face will not be seen” (Ex. 33:22–23). The Torah paints a wonderfully vivid scene. But of what? Moses in the cleft of a rock—but with what exactly passing by? What is this divine face that passes before Moses “that no human being can see—and live” (Ex. 33:20)? Perhaps even more tantalizing—because seemingly within reach—is the divine back: What is it that Moses does see?
In the first part of his Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides famously claimed that God’s back was a metaphor for his ways in the world, as described in the two-verse divine proclamation made as God passed before Moses, known as “the thirteen attributes”:
The Lord, The Lord, God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in benevolence and faithfulness; keeping benevolence unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin; and who will by no means exonerate; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and unto the fourth generation. (Ex. 34:6–7)
According to Maimonides, when Moses asked God to “make known to me, please, Your ways, that I may know You” (Ex. 33:13), it was the attributes expressed in these verses that he was asking to have revealed to him, a request that God granted when Moses was allowed to see His back, his ways, or effects, in the world.
Maimonides held, further, that when Moses asked next to see “Your glory (k’vodekha)” (Ex. 33:18), he was asking to see God’s face, God’s essence—and it was this that was denied him. So, as Maimonides would have it, when God placed Moses in the cleft of a rock and passed his glory before him (Ex. 33:22), he saw nothing of God’s essence, which is unknowable. What he saw was God’s back, the workings of the universe as governed by the divine attributes.