Take Off Your Shoes

Oct 21, 2020 | By Jadan Anderson MC ‘22

Then he said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” - Exodus 3:5, ESV

God makes strange first impressions. When God introduced himself to Moses, He decided to do so as a bush that was on fire. What’s more, the first thing God said to Moses wasn’t “hello” or “I am God,” but “take off your sandals.” 

When I hear the term “holy ground” I think about the Catholic churches of my childhood. I was taught that people should greet God with their very best, especially in His own space. For that reason, I showered before every Mass, donned my finest clothes, and put on my designated, closed-toed church shoes. It seemed that everyone at Mass did the same. Though I enjoyed dressing up on Sundays, the older I grew the more I perceived an element of hiddenness under all the garb. By the time I was a teenager, I thought those fancy clothes were something of a separation between us and our holy God, or at least symbolized a need to be more or be better in order to approach God. But I kept dressing up because, if I ever arrived at church barefoot, my grandparents would rain fire upon my mom and dad. 

I was also raised to take off my shoes in the house. Practically, this makes keeping the house clean much easier. Symbolically, the practice has come to signal entering a space in which I feel most comfortable. Peeling off [church] shoes at the threshold of my home is like taking off the mask of etiquette and propriety, and allowing my true--if somewhat less sociable--self to breathe and be. 

Lately I’ve been asking myself if God is the kind of God that asks us to take off our shoes at holy ground the same way I take off my shoes at home. A likely reason God asked Moses to take off his sandals is because they were fashioned with animal skins, making them ritually impure. The other main sources of ritual impurity are sicknesses, blood, and sexual fluids–all things expected of humans, especially in their homes, and God’s holiness is contrasted over and over with our humanness. If God’s main concern in his request that Moses remove his shoes is ritual purity, then the answer to my question is “no.”

But we know through the teachings of Jesus that God’s concern is not with ritual purity but rather with what obedience to His law and standards of purity imply about our character, our hearts toward Him, and our hearts toward other people. Obedience signals trust and humility. For Moses and for any of us, to take off our shoes–whether or not comfort accompanies the act–is to put on vulnerability and a willingness to let the space we are in shape us. 

Rabbis S.R. Hirsch and Joseph Soloveithchik interpreted the act of removing one’s shoes as giving oneself unto the purpose of the space, unto holiness. Hirsch wrote that “taking off one’s shoes expressed giving oneself up entirely to the meaning of a place, to let your personality get its standing and take up its position entirely and directly on it without any intermediary.” Soloveithschik wrote that “the shoe is the symbol of vulgarity and uncouthness, of superficiality, of raw power...To understand holiness, to gain sensitivity, a person must remove his shoes.” The answer to my question is “yes.” God is the kind of God that asks us to take off our shoes in such a way that we give ourselves to the purpose of holy ground–that is, to be shaped, molded, affected. We take off our shoes at holy ground the same way we do at our homes not with the flippancy and sense of domination we have in our homes, but with our hiddenness relinquished. 

Perhaps the whole scene is like leaving your shoes at a good, wise neighbor’s front door. You are, even if in a solely physical sense (though I don’t think this is ever truly the case), letting your guard down. You are giving yourself up to the space that you’ve entered and to the wisdom of your hosts. That is, after all, why you are there. And while you are there, you are on holy ground. Take off your shoes so that your feet are more sensitive to the ground.

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