Why have a good excuse when you can have a “God excuse”?
The idea that one can invoke God and get away with anything has been around for as long as people have believed in God, and it has been a deadly dangerous idea for just as long. The Torah’s framing of the Sabbath, as found in this week’s reading, departs from that path in a way that was radical in its day, remains radical today, and is never more needed.
Having gathered the Israelites to tell them what “God commands them to do” (Exodus 35:1), which we soon discover involves gathering the resources for and starting constructing the Tabernacle, Moses first lets the people know that there should be a Sabbath in a two-verse introduction: “For six days you should do your work, but on the seventh you should rest.” The verse also shares what may be the Sabbath’s paradigmatic prohibition: not kindling a fire (Exodus 35:2-3).
Why does Moses interrupt himself? He has gathered the people to tell them about the need and obligation to build the Tabernacle—“God’s house,” or more accurately, the house where people could most directly encounter God. Why does he go off topic? Rashi asks the same question, and he shares the following answer: “Moses told them the warning about keeping the Sabbath prior to instructing them to construct the Tabernacle, in order to convey to them the fact that work on the Tabernacle does not override the Sabbath.”
But in fact, while Rashi notices that Moses interrupts what seems to have been his original purpose, I don’t think Rashi actually gets at why Moses does so. Why does building the Tabernacle not override the Sabbath? And why would we have thought it did, such that Moses needed to address that presumption from the very beginning of the community’s central construction project?
Why? Because throughout antiquity, the building of God’s house—regardless of the God, the people doing the building, and irrespective of the house or its location—that project was used to justify pretty much anything and everything. Disrupt all notions of time? Why not? God wills it! Usurp land to build the holy place? Why not? God wills it! Conquer another people? Why not? God wills it! Enslave other people in order to achieve your people’s needs? Why not? God wills it!
In fact, what hasn’t been justified by people throughout time, including today, with the cry of “God wills it!” The people doing the shouting changes, the causes change, and the Gods being invoked change too, but using the “God excuse” remains. Therein we may find the deeper reason for Moses seeming to interrupt himself when he gathers the people to tell them about building the Tabernacle: He isn’t interrupting himself at all! He is responding to the human proclivity for making God excuses before the Israelites even try to do so.
Moses appreciates the seductive nature of building for God—how it can be used to justify anything. He knows that it is precisely the most sacred intentions and projects in life that lend themselves to the most dangerous excuse-making. He understands how quickly people turn God into a self-valorizing idol. Moses understands it, but do we? I wonder.
When do we pursue God and build structures that bring us together, without realizing that even those lofty goals must have limits? It doesn’t matter what god we pursue or which institutions offer the connection, there is something bigger—something larger than even the most sacred tasks—that reminds us to take a break, to interrupt our most sacred pursuits for something that may be even more sacred, or at least bigger than even the biggest of our goals.
Moses knows that even God can become a dangerous idolatry, served and pursued with no limits, and so he builds in a corrective: the Sabbath. The endless unfolding of time, the shifting contexts and realities that it will bring, and the fact that those things will outlive us all, are all ways of teaching people to be very careful about invoking the God excuse.
Whether we call it God’s work or good work—or both—there will always be sacred work to be done. The question is how we create limits that correct for the seductive nature of those sacred pursuits, because without those limits, gods become idols, and “God excuses” crowd out the very God we claim to pursue.