The Burning Bush: The Torah of Noticing

"Into the wilderness" can also be translated as: far away into the desert (Jerusalem Bible), to the edge of the desert (R. Aryeh Kaplan), behind the wilderness (Everett Fox), to the farthest end of the wilderness (J.H. Hertz).
What do these translations add to your understanding of where Moses is when he encounters the Burning Bush?
--Rabbi Elana Zelony

The text says, Moses ‘saw, and look, the bush was burning with fire and the bush was not consumed. ‘ Now, this takes place in wilderness....And this wilderness Moses wanders with his sheep is huge and empty, so there is no need to put it out for fear of wider fire, just steer clear of it.
But Moses doesn’t steer clear, he looks; long enough to see that the bush is not only burning, but it is not consumed. And the text says, ‘ And Moses thought, “Let me, pray, turn aside that I may see this great sight, why the bush does not burn up.’” This bush is clearly none of his business, out of his way, but he just has to turn aside and look at it. And that reveals something deep about the man. He is a seeker, not just a seeker after justice, but a man seeking his destiny. He is living contentedly as a shepherd, with a loving father-in- law, a wife, a son, a nice job. He could just settle. But something is driving him to turn aside, to pay attention to oddities, possibilities, omens.... And, in the manner of this manifestation, appearing as a burning bush, God is also revealed as one who appears not only in high drama, but also sets subtle signs for us. Most of God’s appearances are in dramatic forms with big production values -- a pillar of fire or on a mountain top in lightning and clouds. But here, Rashi points out, God is manifest in a bush, the humblest of plants – just a lousy little bush in the wilderness … burning. It took someone special to notice it.
Moses notices, and in that noticing ignites the engine of our entire history. How many other shepherds walked that way and either missed the bush or saw it was burning but didn’t look long enough to see the miraculous in it? --Rabbi Arthur Strimling, Kolot Chayeinu

We miss a whole host of things in our day-to-day lives...So common is this phenomenon that there’s a name for it: “inattentional blindness.” In other words, we all have blind spots that prevent us from seeing things that should be obvious, but, because we are focused on something else, we miss. It is a fact of all our lives. The researchers...highlight what they call the most fascinating aspect of human attention. “Not that we don’t notice so many things, but that we think that we DO [notice them].” “We vividly experience some aspects of our world,” they write, which leads to “the erroneous belief that we process all of the detailed information around us. In essence…we are completely unaware of those aspects of our world that fall outside [our] current focus of attention.” --Rabbi Michelle Robinson, Temple Emanu-El

1. Why is it significant that this encounter took place in the wilderness?
2. What qualities about Moses led him to notice the burning bush? Why might those qualities make him a good leader?
3. What conditions do we personally need in order to "notice" or be present?
4. What hinders our ability to notice or be present?
5. How can we, as a teaching community, foster a culture of noticing?