SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE:

The Passover story finds the Jews in Egypt.

God once again asks Moses to enter Pharaoh’s court. Raised there from childhood and having fled to avoid Pharaoh’s anger, Moses returns to demand the liberation of his people. Formerly a slave to the Egyptians and adopted grandson to the Pharaoh, Moses must transform himself to stand in a new role in court.

In preparing Moses for his mission, God tells him: “I place you in the role of God to Pharaoh, with your brother Aaron as your prophet.” The act of “playing God” implies arrogating powers or feigning a certainty which is beyond the proper purview of any human being.

Certainly, Jews throughout the millennia have worked hard to cultivate their own humility, their own sense of being “mere dust and ashes.” Yet God instructs Moses to “play God” as a necessary step in our historic liberation from slavery. What is going on?

Perhaps Moses and Pharaoh provide a lesson in seeing God in every encounter with another human being. After all, the Bible reminds us that all people are made in the Divine image. And the book of Psalms tells us that we are “made little lower than the angels.”

If that is so, that God’s image is found reflected in the humanity of other human beings, then each encounter with another person is potentially an encounter with God. Each conversation, each opportunity to interact with someone else, with anyone else, is no less than an act of revelation.

To experience revelation, however, takes a certain inner openness. All of us have the ability to come face to face with God in our contacts with each other. The Midrash tells us that Moses had to confront Pharaoh so that the self-obsessed monarch would be able to look upon a former slave and say, “This is God.”

Can we teach ourselves to regard everybody regardless of race, religion, or color to treat them with the same dignity as ourselves and thus find God in ourselves and others?

MARC RUBENSTEIN is the rabbi at Temple Isaiah of Newport Beach.