^{20 Tevet 5776 | January 1, 2016}

Parshat Shemot

Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler

Dean of Students and Mashgicha Ruchanit

Advanced Kollel: Executive Ordination Track Class of 2018

Here we are at the beginning of a new year, at the beginning of a new book of the Torah and a new chapter in the life of B’nei Yisrael. Parshat Shemot, vast in the scope of its time horizon, both describes the Israelite descent into slavery in Egypt and lays the seeds for the redemption from this captivity. A new Pharaoh rises to power over a new, growing generation of Israelites. Fearing them, he oppresses them. Moshe is born, raised, morally enraged, and self-exiled, all within two chapters. By the third chapter, God appears to Moshe and charges him to save the Israelites from their cruel captivity. What follows tracks what happens when God tries to re-enter lives, both personal and national, after a period of absence.

God reveals Godself to Moshe in the iconic image of the burning bush.

The symbolism is rich and resonant. The medium is the message. As the midrash spells out, invoking Psalms 91:15, "עמו אנוכי בצרה - I am with him in distress." God is close to the Jewish people in their pain and God will not be overcome by it. God's power, having now been sparked, will stay aflame. Alternatively, some see in this symbol a message to Moshe. You, as God's agent, must come close to the suffering of your people yet not be ravaged by it. You must confront it without getting consumed by it. Either way, God's self-disclosure to Moshe highlights that which calls Him into action, namely the suffering of the Jewish people.

Moshe's personal reaction to the voice of God is first to hide and then to question his worthiness to the task. But his reaction on behalf of his people is even more striking:

The people have been out of contact with God for so long that they simply have no frames of reference for who God is or might be in the world. Generations of slavery have stripped them of any spiritual awareness or historical consciousness or hopeful sense of possibility. Born into captivity, they lost the power to dream of alternative realities, to touch transcendence in any way. How, then, might they ever come to know God?

It is difficult to see how this highly abstruse response answers this challenge.

Before unpacking the content of this statement, let us note one intriguing feature of the verse. There appear to be two separate claims made to Moshe: one an announcement of God's name; the other the name as it is to be communicated to the people. To Moshe, God ought to be known as Eheyeh asher eheyeh, but to the people, the truncated form, Eheyeh, shall be used. Why?

The Talmud offers the following dialogue in explanation:

Or, as Rashi more explicitly cites:

In the Talmudic imagination, between the two clauses of our verse (Ex. 3:14), Moshe taught God (whom he had only just met) a profound lesson about humanity. He taught God that there exists an important, necessary gap between who God is and who we need God to be.

When Moshe challenged God to define Godself for the Jewish people, God responded with a sweeping, abstract statement. "Eheyeh asher eheyeh." I am the God who transcends time; who made promises ages ago and will fulfill them in ages to come; who is with you now in your pain and will be with you too in your future troubles, for I am a fire that blazes, that will not burn out. I am a presence in history, a force in nature, a friend to your ancestors, and a guardian to your children. That and so very much more. But Moshe pleads to God: Stop. Stop with the lofty claims and the timeless pronouncements. Stop projecting future troubles and future salvations. Stay local. Stay real. Just be the God of here and now. That's what people can hear. That's what people crave. Not a majestic fire, but a humble hearth to keep them warm and shelter them anew. To save them from this challenge, this moment. And God concedes in what might be described as a second great act of tzimtzum, self-contraction. Eheyeh, the God of today's possibilities, not yesterday's or tomorrow's, is the God who might actually meet a people long starved of divinity and long bereft of hope.

It seems that Moshe's first great act of spiritual leadership was a rather subtle and subversive one. Upon meeting God, he turned around and helped God meet humanity. He did so by discerning and communicating which God the Jewish people needed to meet.

Moshe's charge to God is no less a charge to us to tolerate, even embrace, the gap that so often exists between heady theological speculations about who God might be and our own existential, soulful cravings for a God who already is. Eheyeh asher eheyeh, the God of all times, can continue to shine, but Eheyeh, the personal God of now, is the one who will keep us warm.