Physicality of G-d

At shul yesterday my old buddy Marv asked me the following question:   In Torah we are told that G-d appears in a burning bush, that he's in the cloud over the mishkan, there's the finger of G-d, and that Moses sees his back.  What are we to make of this physicality of G-d?

Well, it's a good question.  There are a couple of things that we need to keep in mind when we approach this kind of a discussion.  The first is that every person perceives things differently.  When the children of Israel heard the voice of G-d, each person heard the voice as the voice of his own father.  So one encounter with G-d filtered out through human minds into 600,000 unique experiences.

The second thing to understand is that words limit our ability to understand mystical ideas.  The purpose of a word is to define something.  An infinite G-d cannot be describe in finite terms.

When I was a kid we lived in Hawaii.  If a kid ever came from the mainland, we would surround them and ask them questions about snow.  We had learned to make paper snowflakes in school, but we didn't really have a good idea about the whole snow experience.  Frankly, we were often more confused after grilling the main-lander than we had been at the start.  Snow is more of a puzzle than you might first think.  It's wet or dry, big or little, soft or sharp, fun or miserable, crunchy or slippery, etc.  Now that I have more snow experience under my belt, I understand that they were all correct in their descriptions.

The challenge of describing an encounter with G-d is three-fold.  The person who has had the encounter has to figure out how to define it enough to be understood, understand his audience well enough to know what kind of concepts they would actually get their heads around.  So imagine someone saying, "I didn't see all of G-d, I just saw a finger of G-d," as perhaps being a way to convey the limits of a holy experience.  [DISCLAIMER:  I'm not saying that's what Moses was thinking.  I don't know what Moses was thinking.  I'm just using this example to try to further my argument.]  So now the third part of the equation comes in.  That's the part where other people try to understand what exactly happened in this mystical encounter.  That's the part that gets us every time.  We can't possibly understand "exactly" what happened.  The person who is trying to tell us is going out on a limb in the first place to try to describe it.  What we end up with is, "That person saw the finger of G-d."  Yes.  That is correct.  But it probably doesn't mean what we think it means.