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January 9, 2026 Parashat Sh'mot - Seeing & Believing
Dear Friends, When the 3-time defending AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs were eliminated from playoff contention this year, a video from last spring resurfaced. It showed Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes on a golf course, and a fan shouting, "Watch out for [rival Chargers' quarterback] Justin Herbert next year!" To which Mahomes replied, "I'll see it when I believe it." Not only did the fan's warning come to fruition, as the Chargers made the playoffs, while Mahomes now has some more time for golfing, but many of us enjoyed his seeming mangling of a popular phrase. Rather than uttering, "I'll believe it when I see it," he reversed it, adding, for us, a chuckle to a prognostication come true. But as I looked at this week's portion, Sh'mot, beginning the second book of Torah, of the same name, I thought a little differently. In looking at the moment God calls upon Moses from the Burning Bush, I thought, much to my own surprise and chagrin, that maybe Mahomes was onto something, unwittingly though it may have been. A bush is burning but isn't consumed, so Moses turns aside to look at it. And we read: 'When יהוה saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: “Moses! Moses!” He answered, “Here I am.” And [God] said, “Do not come closer! Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground!”...I am the God of your father’s [house]—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob...I have marked well the plight of My people in Egypt and have heeded their outcry because of their taskmasters; yes, I am mindful of their sufferings...I have come down to rescue them from the Egyptians and to bring them out of that land to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey...Come, therefore, I will send you to Pharaoh, and you shall free My people, the Israelites, from Egypt."' Moses is able to see the works of God in the unconsumed Burning Bush, and was able to hear God's voice call to him from it, because he believed. He believed in something beyond himself, and in a calling to a divine labor that would free his entire people. The proof is that he turned aside. The proof is that he responded to God's twice calling his name, with the prophetic one-word statement of presence and dedication: “Hineni (Here I am)." Had he not believed, somewhere in the recesses of his heart, he would have kept walking by that bush. He would have rationalized away the voice calling to him, assuring himself it was an illusion or hallucination. And kept walking. But he didn't. So maybe he saw it when he believed it. The original expression certainly makes sense, arising from the human desire to see and witness something before proclaiming a belief in its existence. And yet, sometimes, without believing something first, we may not see it at all. If it's not in our minds or souls to know it's there, then it could be standing in front of us, and we wouldn't know, because we wouldn't recognize it. Interestingly, even as Moses both believes and sees, his follow-up questions show that he knows he has his work cut out for him to convince a lot of others - both Egyptians and Israelites - to see and to believe as well. May we be like Moses, both believing in order to see, and seeing in order to believe; in following our hearts and souls just as much as, if not more so than, our heads. Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Joshua Strom
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