Pointing upward

Stand at the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza and look up.

Your eyes do not have a choice. The entire structure, more than two million blocks of stone, drives your gaze toward a single point in the sky. Whatever else it was, the pyramid is a machine for directing attention.

A mountain aimed at the stars

The precision is staggering. The builders of Khufu’s pyramid aligned it to the cardinal directions with an error of only a few minutes of arc, a small fraction of a degree, more than four and a half thousand years ago.⁶ Scholars still debate exactly how they did it, likely by sighting stars.

Why would anyone go to such trouble?

The answer may lie in Egyptian beliefs about eternity. The Pyramid Texts, carved inside royal pyramids some two centuries later, describe the dead king going forth “to the sky among the Imperishable Ones.” These were the circumpolar stars, the stars near the celestial pole that never set below the horizon.⁷ In many pyramids, the entrance passage descends from the north side at an angle pointed toward that region of the sky.

Picture what that means. The tomb itself is aimed. The structure assumes that what matters most is not here, on the ground, but toward something that does not set.

The Egyptian vision of the afterlife is not The Godward Way, and the pharaoh’s ascent is not the soul’s turning toward the Father. But the architecture asks the right question. In a world where everything rises and sets, what do you orient toward that does not?

Two triangles

The six-pointed star, the Magen David or Shield of David, is often explained as two triangles: one pointing up, one pointing down. Heaven and earth. The human reaching upward and grace descending.

It is a beautiful reading. It is also worth being honest about its history.

The great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem showed that the hexagram was used for centuries as a decorative and protective symbol, by Jews and non-Jews alike, before it became a distinctively Jewish emblem. Prague’s Jewish community displayed it on a flag in the fourteenth century, and the Zionist movement adopted it in the late nineteenth century.⁸ Scholem was openly impatient with confident claims about its “true” ancient meaning.

So the two triangles are not an ancient doctrine. They are a reading, and that is how they are offered here.

As a reading, they hold something precious. The upward triangle is the soul’s direction: a wide base in the world, narrowing toward one point beyond it. The downward triangle is the movement from above. The star exists only where the two overlap. The soul does not climb to God by its own construction. It turns, and receives.

When Israel looked upward

The clearest statement of this idea in Jewish tradition is not about a building at all.

In the Book of Exodus, Israel fights Amalek. As long as Moses holds up his hands, Israel prevails. When his hands drop, Amalek prevails. The Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE, asks the obvious question: did the hands of Moses really make or break a battle?

Its answer: no. Rather, as long as Israel looked upward and directed their hearts to their Father in Heaven, they prevailed. When they did not, they fell.⁹

The Mishnah gives the same reading to the bronze serpent Moses raised in the wilderness. It was not the bronze that healed. It was the turning of the heart upward.

It was not the hands of Moses. It was where Israel was looking.

The Psalms are full of the same gesture. “I lift up my eyes to the hills.” “To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul.”¹⁰

The Godward reading

Pyramid, star, raised hands: each one is a device for pointing attention upward. And each one carries a danger. The device can become the object.

The pyramid becomes a monument to the king. The star becomes a flag. The raised hands become a ritual, and the bronze serpent, as the Bible itself records, eventually became an idol that King Hezekiah had to destroy.

The Godward Way keeps the gesture and refuses the idol. “Upward” is not a place in the sky. The Father is not located above the clouds. Upward is a direction of the soul, away from the self as the center and toward the One who cannot be pictured.

The Mishnah’s answer is the whole teaching of this chapter. Not the stone. Not the symbol. Not the hands.

The heart, and where it faces.