With your implicit permission, I want to look back at last week's parsha. It was only in the very last minutes of this past Shabbat that I had an idea about what naase v'nishma (24:7) might be about. This famous line is commonly translated as "we will do and we will hear," but it can also be understood as "we will do and then we will understand." But why would Am Yisrael accept something they didn't yet understand? How can anyone accept something he or she doesn't fully know? (The truth is, we all do this all the time, but here it's serious.)
A bit of understanding came to me when celebrating a Shabbat kala (prenuptial celebration) with Bat Ayin's most recent bride (for those who don't know, we are in the middle of a wedding spree here). Contemplating the bedecken (groom's inspection of the bride before the wedding) that would take place the following day, I remembered a teaching about the placing of the veil over the kala's face. If the bedecken is about, as one teaching holds, the chatan (groom) checking that his bride is Rachel, the bride he'd chosen, and not Leah, the bride he first got, then it would make more sense for him to uncover her face. Instead, he comes, he looks at his bride, and then he covers her face. Why? Because he is acknowledging that he is getting Rachel, the bride he loves, and Leah, the bride he doesn't know. In his one bride, every chatan is getting someone he loves and has chosen, and someone he doesn't know. For how can he know who this person will be tomorrow, much less in fifty years?
It's maybe like this with Am Yisrael and G-d. We chose, and b'ezrat HaShem each day we continue to choose to accept G-d's Torah because we love G-d. We have a sense of what Torah is about, but we don't always and we can't always know what that means, or why G-d wants certain things of us. We can't know what our relationship with G-d will look like tomorrow, or what further role we will be called to perform. I say this with a sense that there is truth in it, but I myself am still struggling to accept this union with G-d. I feel as if I am still in the dating stage of this relationship- not knowing if I will truly be able to stand under the chupah.
The Anaf Yosef teaches that G-d is our bride. We sing to Her every week when we welcome the Shabbat with Lecha Dodi. We are singing to the Shechina, to G-d's presence. We should all have the blessing to be able to see G-d as our bride, to love Her and to accept all of Her, just as a chatan and a kala accept all of one another.