Seventh Sunday of Easter Sermon
By Rabbi Getzel Davis
Director of Interfaith Engagement
Harvard University
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, May 17, 2026)
It is a profound honor to be with you all today. Standing in this sacred place, I'm reminded of the names who have those who have come before us. I'm reminded of our shared human pursuit. Whether we call it God, Hashem, Krishna, love, or simply the force that drives us, we are all attempting to make sense of the same magnificent reality, that we all have a deep human need to be found.
Friends, in my daily work and as the director of interfaith engagement here at Harvard, I witness a beautiful and sometimes painful tension. We invite students, faculty, and staff from wildly different backgrounds to sit together in the same room. Harvard strives to be a place where wildly different communities can learn, live, and sometimes even love together, forming one shared society, one Harvard.
But in moments of acute anxiety when the world feels unpredictable, and the news is exhausting, it is incredibly tempting to retreat into our corners. Each of us is susceptible to this trap of defensiveness. We simplify the world into neat, separate categories. We close ourselves off from nuance, yet the work of interfaith engagement demands something harder. It requires us to step out of the collective anxiety to listen and to seek out the ultimate human dignity of the person sitting across from us. In moments of acute anxiety, when the world feels unpredictable, and the news is exhausting, we all can fall into that trap.
In our shared Jewish-Christian canon, we read a remarkable story in the Book of Exodus. Moses has just led the people through an agonizing crisis after the sin of the golden calf. The community is fractured. Trust has been severely broken and people are frightened. In the midst of this instability, Moses ascends the mountain. He makes a deeply vulnerable request of the divine. Show me, please, your glory." This is not a casual request. It is a plea for absolute clarity in a time of confusion.
Now, each and every one of us, we all have in us the quality of Moses. We possess the same inner drive. It is a profound desire for ultimate intimacy, to be seen and loved. For many of us, this drives our spiritual pursuit to God and leads us to church, to mosque, to Hindu temples. Sometimes, though, the exact same drive can drive us to math and sciences. Albert Einstein pointed out this core motivation when he said, "I want to know God's thoughts. All the rest are details."
It's the same spiritual and relational energy when we want relational intimacy with a partner. As a family systems therapist who works with couples navigating the transition to marriage, I often see this longing. There's a profound human desire to see another person's naked truth and to be fully seen in return. We want the masks to come off. We each want to experience this profound and physical relief of dropping our defenses to strip away the pretense and finally rest in the absolute truth of another person. The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut called this deep human craving the need for mirroring. He taught that we do not simply want to be observed. We desperately need the face of another human being to look back at us accurately and to reflect back our human inherent worth. "Without a mirroring presence," he says, "our sense of self fragments."
In the Jewish tradition, we are taught that humans are created b'tzelem Elohim in the image of God. Because we are each created in that image, the ultimate mirror that we search for is actually the face of God. We long for the divine face to look at us and reflect back our fundamental unblemished goodness. Whether, like Moses, we call that reflection the face of God or the ultimate affirmation of human dignity. Moses is asking for what we all secretly want. Moses calls to look in the ultimate mirror. He wants to see the face of God.
But here's the problem with this beautiful and, on one level, universal request. An unmediated encounter with the divine is incredibly bright. It is so intense. It is such a raw experience that it is actually dangerous. As God tells Moses in the same chapter, You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live." So Moses is placed in the cleft of the rock. He's permitted only to see the back of the divine. This is not a second-best consolation, but a profound place of both safety and limitation. And paradoxically, simultaneously, it's also the only way to have perpetual contact.
Even with Moses's limited exposure, the encounter leaves a permanent mark. When Moses comes down the mountain, his own face, the Torah says, shines so brightly that he is forced to wear a veil. A close reading of this text reveals something beautiful about Moses's veil. He only wears it when interacting with people, but when he turns to the Tent of Meeting to speak with the divine, he takes the veil off.
Tragically though, the tone would suggest that this veil creates a profound distance in his most intimate relationship, that with his wife Zipporah. She's left feeling unseen by a man who's seen God. Unable to fully see God's face and simultaneously unable to be fully seen by humans, Moses lives the rest of his life almost like a tragic hero stuck between two worlds. This offers us all a pastoral warning. Pursuing the universal truth of God must never lead us to a failure to see the particular human dignities standing in front of us. We learn from this that all of us must live our communal lives through a veil. Veils, according to the Jewish mystical tradition, are not necessarily bad things. They do not only obfuscate. They also paradoxically serve as a bridge that makes connection possible because they simultaneously allow and prevent our seeing and being seen.
The 19th century mystical master Yehuda Aryeh Leib Alter of Ger, following the traditional Hasidic interpretive tradition, converts the metaphor of a veil from a vertical metaphor to an internal one. Instead of Moses and, by extension, all of us searching for God up on the heavens on Mount Sinai, Rabbi Yehuda Leib reads our dynamic internally in our own internal search for our soul. He calls our internal core our nekudah penimit, our innermost seed of a soul, which is itself a shard of divinity. He taught that the external world can be a harsh shell, but inside of each person, there's an indestructible pure seed of the divine.
Think about the soil beneath our feet. Anyone who's ever tried to garden learns quickly that you do not expose delicate seeds to a scorching, unfiltered sun. To cultivate a resilient garden, to have a farm, to just sprout flowers on our window sill, we actually have to add topsoil. We mulch. We build organic matter. We shape an environment so the light and water are filtered to the exact degree that allows for growth, as opposed for the harsh destruction that would come from unmediated light. The same is true in our souls. We need veils to protect ourselves and also to allow for relationship. Healthy relation communities also require boundaries. Relentless, unfiltered honesty can destroy fragile connections. We need the shade of tact, the mulch of patience, and the filtration of empathy. The veil that is the mulch makes life and relationship possible. It is the grace of a boundary.
Now, until now, I've spoken about veils as the paradoxical intermediary between us and God and our souls, and between us and our loved ones. The types of veils that both allow connection and also impede it. There is also a more painful type of veil, one that is so opaque that actually you cannot see through it. This is what Deuteronomy warns us about in chapter 31, where it says, 'And I,' God says, 'will surely hide my face on that day.'" The Talmud calls this phenomenon hester panim, the hiding of the divine face, a state where the source of mirroring feels totally absent.
Unlike the veils that both reveal and conceal, Deuteronomy refers to the experience of veil that is so thick that absolutely nothing can pass through it. The Hebrew actually has a doubling in the verb hester astir, which translates sometimes in English as, "I shall surely hide." But if you were to read it hyper-literally, what it literally says is, "I will hide my hiding on that day."
The Baal Shem Tov, a founder of Hasidic movement, offers a psychological insight to this phrase. He says that it's one thing to know that someone is hiding and to look for them, but sometimes the hiding itself is hidden, and it's impossible to know and be known through this thick veil. This disaster occurs where we forget that God is hiding or we call out and we get nothing back, or in relationship we don't feel seen even through our veils. And in this moment, we become so numb that sometimes we no longer even notice that there's something sacred missing in our lives.
Why would the divine hide God's face? Well, one simple answer is that it's a form of punishment. Like a disapproving parent, God withdraws from us when we hurt each other or the world. Perhaps this is designed to pedagogically correct our mistakes, or maybe it's designed to somehow... I don't know, it breaks my heart. It's used in the rabbinic tradition to explain why a benevolent God, an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent God could not be found in this world. It comes as a rabbinic answer to theodicy. How could a good God be unavailable in the worst moments? Well, the veil itself is so thick that the hiding itself is hidden.
The Baal Shem Tov's primary student, the Maggid of Mezritch, had a son in his older age, and he likes to bring stories about encounters with his son. He tells a story that his son once asked to play hide and seek with him. And his son hid and he closed his eyes, he says, and he went out to hide and he got distracted and he forgot about his son. And suddenly, he heard his son crying. And he went and he saw his son and he said, "Why are you crying?" And he said, "No one has come and looked for me." The Maggid says he, too, broke down and cried as he saw his son's tears, but suddenly he saw also all of ours and he said, "Perhaps this is the experience of God." Maybe God, God's self, cries and says, "I'm hiding. I'm playing a game of hide and seek. And you all, we've forgotten to look for you, that we've become distracted and the veil was so thick that we forgot that there was a game."
When that boy hid, he was waiting to see if he was loved enough to be sought. The truth is that our deepest cravings are not for power, for wealth, or for accolades. Our most deepest need is simply to know that we are the object of someone else's desire. We want to be wanted. Friends, this is the tragedy of much of our modern world. We are so caught up in the frantic scroll of our newsfeeds and the tyranny of the urgent and the node and the noise of the perpetually busy, we forget the game.
Harvard is not only distracted, but we're also exhausted after years of crisis and fractured trust. We stop seeking not just because seeking requires spiritual energy that we don't just have, but we have often become victim to double hiding. We have altogether forgotten to look. The child psychologist, Donald Winnicott, once profoundly observed, "It is a joy to hide and a disaster not to be found.
When a partner in a marriage goes quiet and withdraws, they're often hiding, secretly hoping that their spouse loves them enough to come looking, really looking. They want to know that they are worth the pursuit. And when any of us puts up a wall of defensiveness, often we are hiding, waiting for someone to care enough to seek out the vulnerable person hiding behind rhetoric. By choosing to seek, we become the mirror. And when we act as the mirror, we are not just helping them, we are giving the divine a place to be refracted in this modern world. We help people see themselves. We help people feel seen. We allow a place for the divine that might otherwise be hidden behind a double hiding a place out. And sometimes all it takes is a gentle question, a genuine question that can pierce through the thickest veil. What is on your heart that you're afraid to share?
Now, we all actually find real joy in having private inner worlds, but it is a disaster to feel like we are unseen by those who are dearest to us. And this brings us back to the universal experience of Moses, of the need to be seen, and our place here on Harvard's campus. Though we all approach the divine or this need through different angles and have different meaning systems and different God language, we all have a universal human yearning. Their shared humanity is what makes the work of interfaith engagement so important. What we do is to try to create containers where we can finally be found by someone standing on the other side of a perceived divide.
At the close of an interfaith fellowship in this fall, an Orthodox Jewish student shared a profound realization. He recounted before arriving at college, he was warned to hide his religious identity and garb because he was told that it would be unsafe in this campus environment to be explicit about his faith. And he didn't tell anyone. But during one of our gatherings, he found himself listening to a Muslim peer, and to his absolute surprise, she shared that her family had given her the exact same warning, that she had been told not to wear hijab coming to campus because of fear of bullying and being unsafe. And in this moment of shared vulnerability, a heavy veil was lifted and two students realized that they were carrying the same burden and the same fear. They weren't abstractions for each other anymore. They became each other's mirrors.
This realization led to a partnership. This spring, these two students hosted a listening session for religious life on campus, inviting administrators to hear their stories and those of other religious students, not as separate interest groups, but a unified body of religious students speaking to administrators. During this session, a Muslim student shared a moment of deep vulnerability. He recounted a painful misunderstanding regarding a suhoor meal, the pre-dawn Ramadan breakfast. Due to the miscommunication, the food that was provided to him violated his religious dietary restrictions. He wasn't speaking out of anger at university logistics. He was speaking from a place of profound exhaustion. For a student fasting and far from his family, it didn't feel like a clerical error. It felt like a dignity violation, an unintentional but painful eraser of his identity in a space that was supposed to be his home.
And in sharing this in this group, something remarkable happened. The Jewish students in the room didn't just politely listen. They were visibly moved themselves. They didn't see a political rival. They saw a mirror of their own exhausting struggle to keep kosher in a world that often forgets to make room for their sacred, just as the Muslim student had recognized their fears of antisemitism earlier in the semester. Despite ongoing campus polarization, their choice was to be upset for him. It wasn't just a display of cultural competency or compassion. It was a spontaneous holy act of pastoral care. In that moment of shared vulnerability, the Muslim student was no longer hiding his disappointment. He had actually been found and seen by his peers.
Our Harvard community has been through a lot. We are carrying the weight of a fractured world, and we are in a profound time of trying desperately to rebuild trust in the face of a whirlwind. The emotional labor of connecting across differences feels quite daunting even now. But we must remember that beneath all of our veils, we're still engaged in a divine game of hide-and-seek, that we are all waiting for someone to care enough to look.
Therefore, my challenge to you is simple. Before you leave campus for the summer as graduates or just on break before the church reconvenes next fall, become a seeker. Don't let the people around you linger in that state of double hiding and that disaster of not being found. Seek out a peer, a classmate, a neighbor, a student, a child, a parent. You don't have to immediately demand profound vulnerability. Simply offer them the topsoil of your trust and the mulch of your patience. Ask them a genuine question about their life. "What is something you carry that makes you feel unseen?" And then when they answer, just listen. Hold steady. Don't jump to problem-solve. Simply sit with the person before you, knowing and believing their experience in this moment.
I know that it's counter-cultural here at Harvard to be asked not to fix. We are often trained to be problem solvers. We are rewarded for fixing things. But sometimes all it takes is to lay down those tools and not fix and not debate and not clean up, but just to listen, to witness, and not to fix, to be the mirror, to reflect back their inherent unblemished dignity.
When we seek out the vulnerable person hiding behind rhetoric, we are quite literally pulling the divine out of hiding because when you hold that space, you're not just comforting the friend. By being a mirror for another's human dignity, you are answering Moses's original plea. You're reflecting God's presence for the world. You are doing the quiet, radical, long work of repairing our fractured community.
May we have the courage to seek the divine in our lives and the wisdom to don the protective veil when its protection is necessary. If we encounter moments of double hiding, may we find the fortitude to remember that the divine and our souls' nekudah penimit, the hidden spark, is still worth searching out. And when the organ plays and you walk out these doors into Harvard Yard, may you become a mirror for the world in need, a seeker of the hidden heart, a reflection of the unblemished dignity doing the sacred work of building a community where everyone is eventually found.
Amen.