Vaera (Torah)

“For the Lord has remembered his people”

This week’s Torah portion begins with God’s solemn, dramatic declaration to the people of their imminent redemption from slavery: “I will take you out from under the burden of Egypt… I will deliver you from their bondage… I will redeem you with an outstretched hand… and I will take you for my people…” (Exod 6: 6-7). This declaration, known in the halakhic tradition as “the four languages of redemption,” is among other things seen as the source for the four cups of wine drunk at the Passover Seder.

Before analyzing this verse, why it was chosen to head this parshah, and various problems relating it, we need to backtrack to Parashat Shemot, as this verse really comes very much in the middle of the subject. The central body of the account of events leading up to the Exodus, in whose heart lies the ongoing confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh, spans the second half of Shemot, all of Va’era, and the first half of Bo (Exod 4:18-11:10). This follows upon the introductory section of the Book of Exodus, showing how the Jewish people came to be enslaved (Ch. 1), Moses’ early life (Ch. 2), and the decisive change that came about at the experience at the burning bush (Ch 3-4:17). Moses returns from the latter a changed person, charged with a sense of mission.

A few words about this meeting. God so-to-speak works hard to convince Moses to accept this role. There is no simple acceptance of the mission, as there is with other prophets (Isaiah’s “here I am; send me” [Isa 6:8] being the best-known example; but compare Jer 1:4-10; Ezek 2:1-7, 10); his reluctance to prophesy is surpassed only by that of Jonah, who fled away on a ship. Moses raises objection after objection: “who am I that I should go?” (3:11), “whom shall I say this God of their fathers is?” (v. 12), “but they won’t listen to me and won’t believe me” (4:1), etc. To each objection God reiterates, each time with a slightly different wording and emphases, the central message: I am the God of their fathers who has come to redeem them from Egypt and to bring them to a good land, flowing with milk and honey.

A brief comment about the last of these objections: “I am not a man of words... for I am heavy of speech and of tongue” (4:10). What is the significance of the ineloquence, even clumsiness, of Moses’ speech? A charming old Jewish legend that many of us learned as children [Exodus Rabbah 1.26] tells that Pharaoh, fearing the child’s signs of preternatural intelligence, showed the small Moses a lump of gold and lump of burning coal. Moses—a normalische Judische wunderkind, a “normal Jewish prodigy”—reached his hand out to take the gold, but an angel came along and guided his hand to the coal, which he then touched to his palate. This saved his life, but left him with a life-long speech impediment.

I would suggest another, more elegant and mature explanation. I perceive Moses as a retiring personality by nature—an intellectual, a mystic, or a combination of both. For years he had been accustomed to spending long hours in his own company, given over to thought and contemplation. As a result of this isolation from others, it did not come naturally to him to talk with “ordinary” people. He simply lacked the smoothness, savoir faire, and fluency of the natural politician.

God’s response is interesting. On the one hand, there is a theological statement: “who enables a person able to speak, or mute or deaf, sighted or blind, if not I, the Lord” (4:11). But immediately thereafter He comes up with a practical solution, essentially accepting Moses’ complaint: Moses will be the real prophet and leader, in direct communication with the Divine, but Aaron will function as his spokesman to the public, and even in part in his negotiations with Pharaoh. God plays a dual role here: on the one hand, he insists on making a principled doctrinal point about the proper understanding of the relation between God’s power and human action; on the other, as a pragmatic figure, He is concerned with accomplishing the practical task at hand in the best and most efficient way, and comes up with what seems the best plan to further this goal.

Upon his return to Egypt, Moses faces a two-pronged mission: to convince the people, and to convince Pharaoh. In his first tentative gropings, he meets little success in either task. Pharaoh’s response is typical of all tyrants: “Let them work harder… Let them not turn to lying things… They are lazy… therefore they say, Let us go sacrifice to our God…” (5:9-10, 17). He increases the burden on the people, by not providing them with the straw needed to make bricks; those who by chance encounter Moses and Aaron while they are leaving Pharaoh criticize them for making things worse and “giving us a bad name.” By this point in their history, the people have been so beaten down by oppression that they cannot even dream of things being different. Their psychology is one of slaves; what the Zohar refers to as “the voice being in exile”—a state where they cannot even cry out. The midrash sees their “groaning” beneath their labors (2:23-24) as the first, albeit inarticulate, sign of change. The people’s scepticism and mistrust, combined with Moses’ own sense of unworthiness and uncertainty about the fulfillment of the Divine promises, create the need for repeated reassurances—the four languages of redemption.

At this point God announces the fulfillment of the ancient promise made to redeem the people, preserved in traditions passed down from olden times: “I will surely remember you.” The people withdraw to the background and, until the Exodus, the dialogue is almost exclusively between either Moses alone, or Moses and Aaron, with Pharaoh. (Indeed, through much of the Torah, the people as such only speak in the contexts of complaining and murmuring against Moses, or actively rebelling against his leadership -- from the incidents of the manna, the quail, the splitting of the Red Sea, through the story of the Golden Calf and the series of incidents in Bamidbar, the Book of Numbers).

The Mystery of the Holy Name

The title verse of this week’s portion—“I appeared to the fathers as El Shadday/Almighty God; but by my name HVYH [a circumlocution for the name YHWH] I did not make myself known to them“ (Exod 6:3)—is one of the most difficult in the entire Bible (see my discussion in HY I: Vaera), seeming to fly in the face of the obvious fact that the name HVYH appears throughout the Book of Genesis, including conversations with and revelations to all three patriarchs. Rashi resolves this dilemma by explaining that this verse is not referring to simple knowledge of the Name, but to a manifestation of the implicit significance of the Name, its realization in history, in a way that had not occurred during the lifetime of the patriarchs. Hence, the use of the causative verb form noda’ti rather than hoda’ti: “I made promises to them, and in all of them I said: I am El Shadday; but I was not made known to them in my attribute of truthfulness [or: verification, confirmation] for which I am called HVYH, faithful to fulfill his word; for I made them promises, but did not [yet] fulfill them.”

Several other classical commentators—Ramban, Ibn Ezra, Sforno, Rasag, etc.—seem to be in substantive agreement with this view; their differences with Rashi revolve more around the grammatical and linguistic difficulties of the verse, or with their more philosophical-conceptual definitions of the meanings of the Divine Names, as opposed to the more midrashic (and later Kabbalistic) terminology of Middat ha-Din and Middat ha-Rahamim underlying Rashi’s comment. Thus Ramban (in part elaborating upon an idea first articulated by Ibn Ezra):

The matter of this verse is that He appeared to the patriarchs with this Name, through which He conducts the systems of the heavens, doing with them great miracles in which the way of the world is not negated. In famine He redeemed them from death, and in war from the sword, and He gave them wealth and honor and ever good thing…. But with my name of HVYH, by which all Being was [created], I did not make Myself known, to create new things, in changing the outcomes… Therefore, tell the Israelites that I am HVYH, and tell them once again the Great Name by which I do miracles.

We thus have here a new, dramatic and hitherto unknown manifestation of what Ramban calls “God’s Great Name.” The moment is pregnant with a deep sense of history being made, of the relationship between God and His people being raised to a new, significantly different level. No longer is this only the intimate experience of God by a few select individuals, such as the patriarchs, however deep their quiet conviction of God’s presence in their lives may have been. From now on, there is a sense of God’s redemptive power, His involvement in history, His covenant with an entire people, being made real.

To understand this properly, we need to elaborate the idea of the Divine names more fully. The two Divine Names here are taken by the classical Rabbinic Sages to signify Middat ha-Din as against Middat ha-Rahamim, the Divine attribute of Stern Judgment vs. that of Mercy or Compassion. El Shadday, translated here “Almighty God” (or for that matter the generic Elohim, “God”), signifies the God of nature, of rules and limits and boundaries—a God who is distant and impersonal, not intimately concerned with human beings. Elsewhere, Rashi quotes a midrash explaining the name El Shadday as mi she-amar la’olam dai, “He who said to the world: ‘Enough!’”—He who pushed back the waters of pre-Creation chaos or, more generally, who established the rules and limits in the world. He is the God of thunder and earthquakes, of terrifying upheavals of nature, of explosions of super-nova; and He is the Author of natural law, whether the laws of physics or uncovered by the other sciences, or of the natural law, the natural ethics incumbent upon all humankind. This aspect of God is not stern in the sense of being harsh, cruel, or vindictive; rather, it refers to an objective God, removed from the world of human needs and emotions, steadfast and implacable, who sets down rigid and immovable laws.

Middat Harahamim, by contrast, signifies that God is compassionate, empathetic, involved in history, performing redemptive acts. He is an almost palpable presence in everyday life; and, most important, He enters into a covenant with Israel. Yet to the sceptical, rationally-minded modern observer observing empirical reality, this aspect of God seems far less self-evident than the cold and distant, almost “watchmaker” God of Middat ha-Din—who is, if you will, akin to the God of 18th century Deism.

Given this, we may understand Rashi’s comment on this verse. The name not fully experienced by the patriarchs, HVYH, is connected with the dynamic combination of promises and their fulfillment. The patriarchs heard the divine promises that their descendants would inherit the land, but did not live to see it fulfilled; thus, in the deepest sense, the Divine name HVYH signifies, even more so than it does “mercy” as against “justice,” the principle of Divine involvement, of covenantal relatingness, or simply “Being With.” This is the point of Rashi’s comment on 3:14: more than cosmic, metaphysical “Being,” as has been suggested by some, God is perceived as relating intimately to his people, as a loving father who is with them in all their troubles. If you like, HVYH signifies “Presence” more than it does “Being.”

Several modern thinkers have described these same basic categories using somewhat different terminology. Rav Soloveitchik, ztz”l, in his major essay Uvikashta misham (“And You Shall Seek From There”), draws a typology of two types of religious experience: the “natural experience” and the “revelatory experience,” which largely parallel these two types, albeit in terms of their human, experiential counterpoints. Sociologist Peter Berger, in The Heretical Imperative, speaks of “inductive” vs. “deductive” modes of religious knowledge. Berger tries to provide an alternative avenue of faith for modern, secularized people who cannot accept traditional religions based upon revelation and sacred texts (i.e., where faith is derived in a “deductive” way from first principles—i.e., inherited axioms, dogmas, or literatures), in which religious truths are “induced” from our own experience of the world. In both cases, we find have a more general, universal, “natural” type of religious experience contrasted to one that is more specific; one in which God is experienced as personality, as Will, as Providential involvement in the affairs of men; hence: open to dialogue, covenant, realization. Again: Elohim and HVYH.

But there is another problem here. A series of midrashim on this passage draw a rather invidious comparison between Moses, who, in the encounter at the burning bush, repeatedly demands from God all sorts of signs and answers before he is willing to undertake the mission for which he has been chosen, and the patriarchs, who trusted in God unquestioningly, notwithstanding the numerous difficulties they encountered in their lives, and. Thus, in Exod. Rab. 6.4, God waxes nostalgic for the patriarchs:

Said the Holy One blessed be He to Moses: Woe for those who are gone and no longer with us! Many times I revealed myself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with the name El Shaddai, and I did not make My name HYVH known to them as I have made it known to you, and [nevertheless] they did not question My attributes (lo hirharu ahar midotai). I promised Abraham , “Go and walk in the land, to its length and breadth, for I give it to you” [Gen 13:17], yet when he wished to bury Sarah, he could not find a grave until he bought it with good money, yet he did not question My attributes. I promised Isaac, ”you shall live in this land…” [Gen 26:3], and when he wished to drink water “the shepherds of Gerar quarreled with the shepherds of Isaac…” [ibid., v. 20], yet he did not question My attributes. Jacob… [when he returned from Padan Aram] sought a place to pitch his tent, and could not find it until he bought it for one hundtred qesita, yet he did not question My attributes…

And you, at the very beginning of My mission, asked: What is My Name? And in the end you said: “and since I have come to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, You have done evil with this people” [Exod 5:23]…. “And I have also heard the cry of the children of Israel” [6:5], for they have not questioned My attributes. And even though Israel in that generation were not behaving as they should, I have heard their cry because of the covenant I have made with their fathers.…

Between the lines, we seem to be told that the fathers did not need to know me in the fullest sense through my more “powerful” name of HVYH, the “God of relation“ or of covenant, because they trusted in Me anyway. Moses, because of his doubting nature, required a more concrete kind of knowledge and greater assurances. They accepted God without questioning His attributes; without allowing their world to be upset by the contradiction between promise and delayed fulfillment. They did not demand proofs; they continued to love God and serve Him, whereas Moses, already in the opening chapters of his mission to the Jewish people, ran to God with complaints. In other midrashim as well (e.g., Exod Rab 6.1; 3), Moses is described as what would be called today an “über-hokham” or “too clever by half.”

The question that occurred to me is this: why does the Midrash criticize Moses vis a vis the patriarchs specifically within the nexus of the two Divine names? Is the “making known” to Moses of the seemingly holier, “great” name of God a sign of a higher, more profound knowledge of the Divine, or is it perhaps the opposite? Might it be that he was shown this name at this time because his faith was somehow not strong enough, not profound enough, to carry out his mission, to know God fully, through His other name? The Fathers, even though they did not “know” God as HVYH, knew him in depth in Elohim—and that was enough. Moses’ knowledge of HVYH through promises, through covenantal fulfillment, provides a solution to a certain kind of dilemma, but is also a kind of let-down. It is almost as though his being given “everything,” the fulness of the Divine Name and its realization, with all that symbolizes, somehow leads to a grosser, more tangible, and thus less profound type of faith.

It is interesting that the figure of Abraham is shown as one who came to know God specifically through his own reflection and thought, through years of pondering and puzzling over the mystery of the world, until he came to the conclusion that: “It is inconceivable that the palace [i.e., the world] does not have a master!” A natural, inductive experience of Elohim par excellence!

After composing the above line of argument, I read an essay on this portion by Aviad Stolman, published in the newsletter Shabbat Shalom, in which he reaches a similar conclusion. He suggests an interesting typology of types of faith: 1) Biblical faith, based (largely) on supernatural miracles; 2) the post-biblical (i.e. medieval) period, in which such philosophers as Rambam, Crescas, Albo, Bahya ibn Paquda, and others attempted to base faith on logical proof, which they also described by the term “mofet,” also used to refer to miracles; 3) the modern or post-modern age, in which proofs of God are no longer seen as valid, because people came to realize that “reasoning from the finite world cannot be applied to the infinite, nor from the temporal to the eternal.” Modern man can thus return full circle to a very primal, Abrahamic kind of faith in God.

More on the Divine Names (with some repetition)

“I appeared to the fathers as El Shadday / as Almighty God; but by my name YHWH I did not make myself known to them“

Why did the ancient Sages who divided the Torah into its weekly portions choose to make a breaking point at this particular verse? The late Lubavitcher Rebbe always attached special significance to the title verse of each parshah, seeing it as emblematic of the portion as a whole. In this case, this verse and those that follow convey an at once festive and solemn, upbeat note: God revealing himself, and stating in fuller terms the imminent realization of the ancient promise. Thus, the theme of God making himself seen—meaning, his power and kingdom being made manifest and known to man—is a leit-motif that runs throughout the ten plagues, the first seven of which appear in this portion. “And Egypt shall know that I am the Lord” (7:5); “that they may know that there is none like the Lord our God” (8:6); “… that I am the Lord in the midst of the land” (8:18); “to show my power and to tell of my name throughout the land” (9:16); etc., etc.

But the verse as such is one of most difficult ones in the entire Bible. It seems to flagrantly contradict the obvious fact that the name HVYH (a transposition, often used especially in Hassidic sources, for the Ineffable Name represented by the letters YHVH), appears constantly throughout the Book of Genesis, including conversations and revelations to all three patriarchs. Even if, as Rashi seems to suggest, this verse refers specifically to those occasions on which God made promises to the patriarchs, it is not consistently true. Whereas God does introduce himself with the name El Shadday to Abraham in the covenant of circumcision (Gen 17:1), and to Jacob when he returns to the Land of Israel (35:11), there are other verses in which God presents himself as HVYH. Thus, in the seminal covenant Between the Pieces: “I am HVYH who took you out of Ur of the Chaldees” (15:7)—and so on in many other places.

What then does this verse signify?

Rashi comments here that: “I made promises to them, and in all of them I said: I am El Shadday; but I was not made known to them in my attribute of truthfulness [or: verification, confirmation] for which I am called HVYH, faithful to fulfill his word; for I made them promises, but did not [yet] fulfill them.” We thus have here, not a new name for God, but a realization or manifestation of that which was already potential, but not yet realized, in the well-known name of HVYH.

Modern Biblical criticism has of course a very simple answer. Since, according to the documentary hypothesis, the Bible is compassed of several, originally separate literary strands that were woven together by a later redactor, this is in fact the first appearance of the name YHVH in the “P” or “Priestly” document, and hence is introduced here with great solemnity. In similar fashion, the elaborate presentation in Exodus 3 of this name, first as Ehyeh and then as YHVH (both of which come from the same semantic field), is the first appearance of that name in the E or Elohist strand, and it occupies a similar position.

Much ink has been spilled in Orthodox polemics with the school of Biblical criticism, and it is not my intent here to add to them. This approach raises profound ideological and theological issues, deserving serious consideration; I hope to discuss this problem in the near future in another forum. What is rarely noted, in the heat of religious polemic, is that at least for our present purposes—i.e., understanding peshat of this passage—it is of little consequence whether it is viewed from a traditional or a critical perspective. In either case, what we have here is a dramatic manifestation, either of a new name of God, or of a new manifestation of an existing name. In either case, it is clear that the moment is pregnant with a deep sense of history being made, of the relationship between God and His people being raised to a new, significantly different level. No longer is there merely the intimate, inner experience of God of a select few individuals, such as the patriarchs, however deep their quiet conviction of God’s presence in their lives may have been. From now on, there is a sense of God’s redemptive power, his involvement in history, his covenant with an entire people, being made real. As recently expressed by Bible scholar, Prof. Israel Knohl: the transition from the book of Bereshit to Shemot, from Genesis to Exodus, is one from “beloved is man, who was created in the divine image” to “my first born son is Israel.”

What then is the meaning of these names? In biblical thought, a name is not merely an arbitrary convention for identifying someone or something (a “handle,” in the lingo of the American Southwest); nor is it fully identified with the inner essence of that something, which can never be fully captured. Rather, it is an in-depth reflection of how a given thing or being is understood, perceived, experienced by others.

The two Divine Names are already taken by the classical Rabbinic Sages to signify Middat ha-Din as against Middat ha-Rahamim, the Divine attributes of sternness or judgment vs. that of mercy and compassion. El Shadday, translated here “Almighty God” (or for that matter the generic Elohim, “God”), signifies the God of nature, of rules and limits and boundaries—a God who is distant and impersonal, not concerned with human beings. Rashi quotes a midrash explaining the name El Shadday as she-amar laolam dai, “who said to the world: Enough!”—who pushed back the waters of pre-Creation chaos; more generally, who established the rules and limits in the world.

He too is the God of earthquakes, of upheavals of nature, of the terrifying phenomenon of life; and of natural law, be these the laws of physics and the other natural sciences, or of “natural law” (to utilize the term of medieval Christian theologians and which, without using the term, underlies the Jewish concept of a Noachide code of law), to refer to a presumed natural ethics incumbent upon all humankind. This aspect of God is not stern in the sense of being harsh, cruel, or vindictive; rather, it refers to an objective God, removed from the world of human needs and emotions, steadfast and implacable, who sets down rigid and immovable laws. Middat Harahamim, by contrast, signifies that God is compassionate, empathetic, involved in history, performing redemptive acts. He is an almost palpable presence in everyday life; and, most important, He enters into a covenant with Israel. But of course, this aspect of God, is far less self-evident to the sceptical, rationally trained, modern observer looking at empirical reality, than the cold and distant, almost “watchmaker” God of Middat ha-Din—who is really, if you will, almost the God of 18th century, post-Christian Deism.

Given this, we may understand Rashi’s comment on this verse. “I was not made known to them in my attribute of truthfulness… for I made promises, but did not yet fulfill them.” The name not fully experienced by the patriarchs is connected with the dynamic or combination of promises and their fulfillment. The patriarchs heard the divine promises that their descendants would inherit the land, but did not live to see it fulfilled; thus, in the deepest sense, the Divine name HVYH signifies, even more than it does “mercy” as against “justice,” the principle of Divine involvement, of covenantal relatingness, or simply “Being With.” This is the point of Rashi’s comment on 3:14: more than cosmic, metaphysical “Being,” as has been suggested by some, God is perceived as relating intimately to his people, as a loving father who is with them in all their troubles. If you like, HVYH signifies “Presence” more than it does “Being.”

All this is no compliment to Moses. To the contrary: the Midrash (Exod. Rab. 6.4; and cf. 6.1) makes a rather invidious comparison between the patriarchs, who trusted in God unquestioningly, notwithstanding the numerous difficulties they encountered in their lives, and Moses who, in the scene at the burning bush, repeatedly demands from God signs and all sorts of answers before he is willing to undertake the mission for which he has been chosen. Between the lines, we same to be told that: the fathers did not need to know me in the fullest sense through my more “powerful” name of YHVH, the “God of relation“ or of covenant, because they trusted in Me anyway. Moses, because of his doubting nature, required a more concrete kind of knowledge and greater assurances.

Vaera (Haftarah)

“Pharaoh - the mighty reptile in his Nile”

The haftarot for both Va’era and Bo are, suitably enough, prophecies decreed against Pharaoh and the nation of Egypt; they are taken from the blocs of prophecies against the nations found, respectively, in Ezekiel and Jeremiah. (Interestingly, the corresponding “burden of Egypt” in Isaiah 19, with its rather interesting conclusion in which Israel, along with side Egypt and Assyria, forms a “threesome of blessing… in the midst of the earth” is chosen to complement these other two only by the Yemenites, who read it as the haftarah for Shemot.)

While the association to the Pharaoh of the slavery is clear, it is important to remember that these prophecies were written in a very different historical context: that of the closing decades of the First Temple, when Israel found itself caught in the middle between the two resurgent powers of the ancient Near East: Babylonia and Egypt. Pharaoh here is not the pharaoh of the affliction, Rameses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty, but Pharaoh Necho, of the Twenty-Sixth dynasty, who tried to rebuild Egypt after the fall of Assyria to Babylonia, who served as a major contender for power in the ancient world. Unlike Pharaoh of old, he did not attempt to enslave Israel, but attempted to bring them within Egypt’s sphere of influence as a kind of junior ally, offering them protection from Babylonia in return for economic tribute and other subservience to his interests. Several of the later kings of Judah debated whether to take up this offer: during an early stage of the Babylonian incursions into Eretz Yisrael, King Zedekiah even fled to Egypt, and there was a steady stream of Israelite expatriates to Egypt, which formed the core of the later Diaspora community there.

But, as observed by several of the prophets, Egypt was to prove a “weak reed” upon which to lean. In general, one of the themes often repeated by many of the prophets is the folly of relying upon foreign alliances. Time and again, they call upon the leadership and the people generally to place their trust in God, rather than upon the passing considerations of one or another realpolitik argument for a particular alliance. The dominant line of the prophets (with some exceptions) was to trust in God, whose love and covenant with Israel would eventually be vindicated. The haftarah for Va’era is taken from Ezekiel 28:25-29:21. It opens with two brief verses promising that Israel will be ingathered and dwell securely in their own land, while God “is sanctified in the eyes of the nations” and will ”do judgement against all those that afflict them around about.” The bulk of the haftarah is a prophecy directed against Pharaoh, shown as a megalomaniac figure who declares, “Mine is the Nile, and I made it.” He is portrayed as a huge, looming sea monster, whose “fish”—presumably, the ordinary Egyptian subjects—are attached to his scales. God will spear him through his jaws, pick him up and fling him into the desert—together with the “fish” attached to his scales—where he will left to dry out, “and not even be collected or gathered in” (29:5); indeed, all of Egypt will become a dry, desolate land (v. 10), particularly inhospitable to “Super-Reptile” Pharaoh.

Vaera (Midrash)

What are Frogs Good For?

Philosophically oriented commentators on this week’s parsha tend to focus on the theological problem implied in the revelation to Moses of God’s Name “by which I did not make myself known to the patriarchs,” on the related announcement of the imminent redemption, and on the quandaries of freewill and determinism involved in God’s hardening Pharaoh’s heart. Yet the midrashic authors drew some interesting lessons from the specific details of the individual plagues. Thus, for example, in Exodus Rabbah 10.1:

“And God said to Moses, go to Pharaoh… For if you refuse to send [my people] I will strike…” [Exodus 7:26-29] It is written there, “The profit of the land is in all of them” [Eccles 5:8]… [Here the midrash gives an internal cross reference to Leviticus Rabbah 22.2, where the midrash on this verse is presented at greater length] Even those things that seem to you to be superfluous in the world, such as flies and fleas and gnats, were included in the creation of the world, as is written: “And God saw all that He had made, and it was very good” [Gen 1:31].

This passage, which does not originally relate specifically to the plague chapter, invokes the vast diversity of God’s Creation. We often forget the ubiquity and sheer number of the insect kingdom; the overall number of species of insects, not to mention their individual members, far outnumber all other forms of life on this planet; the generic “bug” with which many of us are wont to dismiss this realm of life in fact includes many millions of highly diverse and unique species; even the humble “beetle” and “cockroach” encompass a dazzling variety of kinds. (Pessimists have been known to remark that insects are likely to be the hardiest and most adaptable survivors of a nuclear holocaust.)

R. Ahha b. R. Haninna said: Even those things that you see as superfluous in the world, such as serpents and scorpions, were included in the Creation of the world. The Holy One blessed be He said to his prophets: Do you think that if you do not go on My mission, that I have no other messengers? “The profit of the land is in all of them.” I can perform my mission even by means of a serpent, even by means of a scorpion, even by means of a frog. Know that this is so, for were it not for the hornets, how would the Holy One blessed be He take recompense against the Amorites? And were it not for the frog, how would He take recompense against the Egyptians? Of this it is written: “Behold, I shall strike you in all your borders with frogs” [ibid.]

Here the midrash turns to the historical function of these lowly creatures. I don’t know if the midrashic Sages were aware of the essential role played by all of the many diverse creatures in maintaining the delicate balance of the world as an ecosystem, as a modern reader might; their orientation was more towards the sometimes dramatic role played in history by the “dumb” animals, such as the hornets (whom, according to Deut 7:20, will chase out of the Land those of the Canaanite peoples who “remain and are hidden from you”), or the frogs of the second plague, who play a prominent role in this week’s reading. Also important here, of course, is the ethical message directed against human arrogance; would-be prophets should not think that God is totally dependent upon their cooperation to accomplish His ends; if need be, “the Omnipresent has many emissaries.”

Breaking the Boundaries of Heaven and Earth

Another midrash, taking off from the verses surrounding the plague of hail, comments on the ambivalent and oft-times broken nature of the division between heaven and earth: Exodus Rabbah 12.3:

“And the Lord said to Moses, stretch your hand to the heavens…” [Ex 9:22]. Of this is it written: “Whatever the Lord wishes, He does” [Ps 135:6]. David said: Even though the Holy One blessed be He decreed that “the heavens are the heavens of the Lord, and the earth He gave to the sons of man” [Ps 115:16]. To what may this be compared? To a king who made an edict and said: The Romans shall not descend to Syria, and the Syrians shall not ascend to Rome. Thus ,when the Holy One blessed be He created the word He issued a decree and said: “the heavens are the heavens of the Lord, and the earth He gave to the sons of man” [ibid.].

The opening section of this midrash describes the paradox, through means of two contrasting verses in Psalms. On the one hand, God’s Will is boundless and not subject to any limitations (presumably, not even the natural law which He Himself sets up); on the other hand, there is a clear set of divisions in the universe, in which humankind was given dominion over the earth (what the medieval philosophers, with their concentric spherical model of the universe, called the “sub-lunar sphere”).

But when He gave the Torah he nullified this decree for the first time, and said: The lower ones shall ascend and the upper ones shall go down to meet the lower ones. And I shall begin, as is said: “And the Lord descended upon Mount Sinai” [Exod 19:20], and it is written: “and to Moses he said, ascend to the Lord” [Exod 24:1]. This is: “Whatever the Lord wishes, He does.”

Revelation, by its very nature, is a breaking through of the seemingly immutable boundary between heaven and earth: a meeting between the transcendent, cosmic God and the earthbound human being. That is perhaps why, in terms of symbolism, its locale must be a mountain—a place somehow between heaven and earth, to which man ascends and God lowers Himself. (This, notwithstanding the other midrashim about the relative lowness and humility of Sinai.)

Similarly, when He wished He said: “Let the waters gather together” [Gen 1:9] and when He wished, He made the dry land into sea and depths, as is said, “He who calls to the waters of the sea and spills them upon the face of the earth” [Amos 5:8; 9:6]. And it says: “On that day there burst forth all the founts of the great deep” [Gen 7:11].

The separation of water and dry land is a similar eternal cosmic division, analogous to that of heaven and earth; hence, the Flood in the days of Noah is an equally dramatic breaking through of boundaries, in which water—specifically, the cosmic, heavenly reservoir of water—trespasses upon the realm of the dry land. And when He wished, He made the sea and the depths into dry land, as is said: “and the children of Israel walked on dry land through the sea” [Exod 14:29]. And it says, “and he led them through the depths as in a desert” [Ps 106:9]. The splitting of the Red Sea was a manifestation of the same breaking down of boundaries, but in the opposite direction.

So too in Egypt, Moses, who was in the earth, was given permission to control the acts of heaven, as is said: “And the Lord said to Moses, stretch your hand to the heavens…”

This final case returns us to the particular context of our weekly Torah portion. Unlike the previous examples, here a single individual (albeit a prophet, acting as God’s messenger) breaks through ordinary human limitations, and is given dominion over cosmic forces of nature—in this case, bringing down hail.

Thus, the central conclusion of this midrash is the malleability of boundaries and the concept of God as Sovereign Will: hence, the flexibility of natural law and the constant possibility of changes. (We have discussed elsewhere the problems this poses for some rationalistic Jewish philosophers, as for modern, scientifically educated people, regarding the tension between God as author of the immutable laws of nature vs. God as maker of miracles, in which those same laws are broken. Thus, Maimonides, in his Treatise on Resurrection, is forced to countenance at least the possibility of seemingly far-fetched miracles in order to allow for belief in the Creation. And see David Hartman’s discussion of this problem in his edition of the epistles, Crisis and Leadership.)

Vaera (Hasidism)

A Hasidic Doctrine of Exegesis

Degel Mahaneh Efraim on this week’s parsha presents an interesting discussion of methods of exegesis:

“And I appeared to Abraham to Isaac and to Jacob…” And Rashi explained; “to the fathers.” But Rashi’s words here do not add any clarification of this. What did Rashi wish to say by this? And one may say, in my humble opinion according to which the Lord has graced me, with His compassion and great mercy: that it is certain and true, that the Torah was given without vocalization. And the reason for this is that there are seventy faces to the Torah. And the Torah may be expounded according to the vocalization that pertains to the matter of the homily, one of its various faces. And one may vocalize the Torah with whatever vowel signs that one wish that work out properly with the derush. And there is an allusion to this in the Tikkunei Zohar, in the passage Petah Eliyahu: “Malkhut refers to the mouth, with is called the Oral Torah.” And it is known that Malkhut refers to HVYH, [the Divine name] which has no vocalization [because the Ineffable Name is not pronounced], and that is, that Malkhut is the secret of Oral Torah, which cannot be with vocalization. For there are seventy faces to the Torah, and one may expound it one time with this vocalization and another time with that other vocalization, according to the matter of the homily.

To put it crudely: the Torah, in the eyes of this Hasidic teacher, is almost infinitely flexible! R. Efraim of Sudylkow as much as says: “You can say whatever you want, and vocalize the words in whatever way necessary to make your homily work out properly after the fact.” Is this intellectual chicanery? Sacerdotal sleight of hand? No! In a strange, and seemingly paradoxical way, these rabbis (like many other Jewish exegetes [or is the better word “eisegetes”?] before and since) believed that any idea they found in the Torah, however artificially presented, was on some level an authentic word of God. Gershom Scholem, in his essay, “Reflections on the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time” made the fascinating observation that:

Each and every word and letter… is an aspect of the revelation of the Divine Presence; and it is this specific revelation of holiness that is meant by Torah from heaven. It is only for this reason that they were able to find infinite illuminating lights in every word and letter, in the sense of seventy faces to the Torah—of the infinite interpretation and endless understandings of each sentence.… Once a person has accepted the strictures of this faith and this quality of faith… he enjoys an extraordinary measure of freedom…. He is able to uncover level upon level, layer upon layer, in the understanding that the gates of exegesis are never closed… The awesome faith in the power hidden within the divine word… allows wide latitude for religious individualism, without leaving the fixed framework of the Torah, which reserves to itself the possibility of unique inspiration, which is only granted to a particular individual whose soul is hewn from the same source or from its sparks.

To return to our text: after explaining his theory of exegesis, the Degel presents a Kabbalistic interpretation of the title verse of this portion. Having laid the groundwork above, this is based upon an alternative reading (vocalization) of a key word:

It is known that Abraham was the attribute of Hesed, which is [the Divine name] El; and Jacob also had the attribute of El, as is written [Gen 33:20]: “And they called it [lo; also: “him”], El, the God of Israel. And Rashi comments there, “The God of Israel called Jacob, ‘El.’” And one may say that this is alluded to by the words va’era el, “ and I appeared to…” The word va’era, is the same numerical value as Yitzhak [208]. “El” [to], if vocalized with a tzeirei, is [the Divine name] ”El,” which is Hesed, and these are the patriarchs: Abraham and Jacob are the attribute of “El,” and Yitzhak, who was not the attribute El [since he was the attribute of Stern Judgment - JC], is alluded to in the word Va’era, which alludes to Isaac by his number. We thus find that the words Va’era el include [all] the fathers, and this is what Rashi alluded to, “to the fathers”: that in these words are incorporated the patriarchs. And understand.

Over and beyond the word and number play, what is the underlying idea of this passage? That the patriarchs are at some level tantamount to God? Or perhaps, more modestly, that they were the human beings who must closely emulated the Divine qualities—and that they, in turn, may serve us as models of imitatio Dei.

The Secret of Greatness and Smallness

A bit further on, Degel Mahaneh Efraim addresses the more substantive question, which we discussed at length above: what is the significance of the “play” between the two Divine Names on our opening verse? His answer, as we shall soon see, is rather different than that of the classical and modern commentaries invoked above:

Or one may say: “And I appeared to Abraham to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shadday, and I did not make known my name HVYH to them.”… Let us introduce this it by what is stated in the Talmud [Yoma 28b], “Abraham, our father fulfilled the entire Torah before it was given”—and one needs to understand this. From whence did he know and apprehend to fulfill all the details of the commandments of the Torah?

And one may say, that in my humble opinion, according to what he heard from “the great terebinth” : that Abraham took upon himself the sign of the covenant, and this commandment encompasses within itself all 613 commandments. I also heard that the word Brit equals 613 with the kollel [i.e., its gematria is 612: 2 + 200 + 10 = 400, plus adding one, the “kollel” for the word itself]. And one may say that this is the intent: that there are embodied incorporated within it a 613 mitzvot.

And one may say that from this commandment Abraham looked upon the details of all 613 mitzvot of the entire Torah, and fulfilled each and every one of the mitzvot. For this mitzvah, which is the holy covenant, includes all the mitzvot, and therefore Abraham, was able to convert proselytes; and understand this…

For then, at the time of Abraham, the entire Torah, which corresponds to a person’s limbs and sinews, was yet in the secret of smallness, for it was contracted within the one small organ, which is the sign of the covenant. And the Torah, and the Holy One blessed be He, and the souls of Israel, were all one, and the light of his soul and his attribute were all in the secret of smallness, like the Torah. and therefore he converted proselytes…

And this is the meaning of the verse, “and I appeared to fathers in El Shadday:”: that at that time the name of HVYH, which is the secret of the entire Torah… was then contracted into El Shadday, which is the secret of the holy covenant, as stated above. And from there thy would look gaze at the name HVYH to fulfill all details of the commandments of the Torah, which is the name of God, and the light of man’s soul.

For the Torah and the Holy One blessed be He and the souls of Israel are all one. And therefore the name of the Holy One blessed be He was also in contraction in the name Shadday, as were the Torah and the souls of Israel. Until afterwards when Moses our teacher came, and Jacob had already propagated twelve tribes. And the name HVYH had also ready spread to its twelve permutations combinations, and afterwards there came out of them the sixty myriads of Israel who were in Egypt. and there the names of HVYH, which is the secret of the entire Torah, spread further in all its sides, and it became the six hundred thousand letters of the Torah, that each one in Israel has a hold upon one letter of the Torah, as is known. The name Israel, is the initials of the phase: “There are sixty myriad letters in the Torah” (yesh shishsim ribo otiyot latoarah). And this is the aspect of greatness…

And contemplate he fact that the entire Torah is the name of the Holy One blessed be He, and all this is by way of Da’at [Knowledge], that spread forth as is known. For Da’at lifts up all small aspects to the aspect of greatness. Therefore when Moses found sixty myriad Israelites, and he was the root of them all, for they were all included within him. Then he took them out of Egypt, which the aspect of smallness, to the aspect of greatness, which is the giving of the Torah, with the spreading forth of the 248 positive mitzvot and 365 negative mitzvot, that are explicated in the sixty myriad letters of the Torah….

I will suffice this time with a few very brief comments. First: he defines the two names as representing the states of katnut and gadlut, “smallness” and “greatness,” in the sense of limited as against expanded consciousness—central Hasidic themes, which we have discussed previously. In what way? Perhaps Elohim, the cosmic, “generic” God, known through a kind of simple argument from existence or design, represents a “small,” non-comprehensive faith. HVYH, by contrast, is further-reaching, richer in potential for mystical knowledge and apprehension. (I don’t understand the relationship between Abraham’s proselytizing activity and “smallness”; vetzarikh iyyun).

Second: the description of the “expansion” of the Torah, of the people of Israel, and of God’s name, all expanding parallel to one another, is fascinating. Beginning with the Zoharic (?) saying that, “Torah, God and Israel are all one,” he works out an across-the-board equivalence among their different stages of development. Torah expands from the single commandment of circumcision, to the 613 commandments and 600,000 letters of the Torah; the Jewish people begins with a single patriarch, and expands to the twelve sons, until it becomes the [again] 600,000 who went out of Egypt; while God’s Name “expands” from El Shadday, to HVYH, to the letters of the Torah, which are again seen mystically as the Name of God.

Third: the idea of brit milah. Why are all mitzvot encapsulated in this one mitzvah? Perhaps it is a concept of pre-Sinaitic Torah; more likely, because it is a sign of the covenant, it contains within itself the essential relationship to God. But perhaps also: because circumcision is performed upon the organ of generation, through which occurs the regeneration of life and the passing on of the genetic heritage of a new human being, it thereby somehow encapsulates the “souls” of Israel, and contains more than a hint of the “expansion” that is the theme of this piece.

Vaera (Rambam)

Is Free Will Possible?

In this week’s parsha, the drama of Israel in Egypt continues to the beginning of the liberation from enslavement, and especially to the first seven of the ten plagues. A leitmotiv here is the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart: each time, after the demonstration of God’s might and the havoc this causes to his country, he agrees to let the Israelites go, but each time, after Moses calls off the plague and the immediate threat ceases, he turns stubborn and refuses to give them leave to go.

This passage raises a theological problem: How can we speak of man having free will if God could deliberately harden Pharaoh’s heart, thereby preventing him from doing the good? Are there limitations to human free will? More generally, this raises the entire issue of free will in Jewish thought, and together with that the classic dilemma known as behirah ve-yedi’ah, the apparent conflict between free will and Divine omniscience. If God is all-knowing and all-seeing, and “tells from the beginning what will be at the end,” (Isa 46:10), in what sense is it meaningful to speak of human freedom? Indeed, as we saw last year in our studies of Hasidic thought, such thinkers as R. Mordecai of Iszhbitz, author of the Mei Shiloah, hold to a radically deterministic position, in which human freedom is seen as ultimately illusory.

Maimonides devotes two entire chapters of Hilkhot Teshuvah, “The Laws of Repentance,” to free will and its implications—the reason for its being discussed there being that the very concept of repentance presupposes human autonomy and moral freedom. After all, if one’s acts are predetermined, it makes no sense to speak of repentance, of changing one’s mind or, indeed, of responsibility in any meaningful sense.

In the present setting I cannot present these two chapters in full; perhaps at some future date I will fill in the lacunae. For the present, we shall suffice with only a few halakhot, beginning with Teshuvah 5.1:

1. Every person is given free will: if he wishes to turn towards the good path and to be righteous, he is free to do so; and if he wishes to turn towards the evil path and to be wicked, he is free to do so. Concerning this it is written in the Torah, “Behold, man has become like one of us, to know good and evil” [Gen 3:22]. That is, this human species is unique in the world, for there is no other species similar to it in this respect, that by himself, in his own mind and thought, he knows good and evil and may do whatever he wishes, and there is nothing that can prevent him from doing good or evil. This being so, “lest he thrust out his hand… ” [ibid.]

It is interesting, first of all, that Rambam interprets the Garden of Eden story, and the consequences of eating of the Tree of Knowledge, in terms of humankind thereby acquiring the power of moral choice. In essence, this act, which is described as a “sin” (Christians even identify it as the “Original Sin”), marks the beginning of the moral history of mankind, and hence of the human condition, as we know it. The late psychologist-philosopher Erich Fromm devoted an entire book, You Shall Be as Gods, to the elaboration of this theme, and to the idea that moral choice is the essence of the Hebrew ethic (albeit he takes it in a more secularist, humanist direction).

This is counterpoised by Rambam (by implication) to the instinctual nature of animals, who are driven by biological drives. It is significant that a major trend in contemporary discourse advocates a biologist approach to mankind as well, seeing human beings as acting out of a kind of biological determinism. In this view, man is no more than an extraordinarily sophisticated, complex animal, whose crowning glory—his mind and thoughts and the culture it produces—are no more than a product of evolutionary adaptation. This approach is, to my mind, one of the most serious challenges to religion: both to the plausibility of religious faith, and to specific items of traditional morality (for example, one sometimes reads in the popular press a kind of justification for successful middle-aged men who abandon their long-time companions for “trophy wives” twenty years younger than themselves, as acting out of deeply-rooted biological impulse). I believe that there is a crying need for a religiously-rooted philosophy of science that will respond to this and other points of contemporary thought, and that will not simply refute these approaches dogmatically, but give cogent answers to the issues raised within the language of contemporary discourse—on this and other issues as well (e.g., such issues of bio-medical ethics as the implications of new forms of human reproduction.)

The Judaic belief in free will runs counter to other major trends in human thought as well. Thus, ancient Greek drama was dominated by the sense of fate (moira), that man is inevitably destined to do certain things (this is the real point, e.g., of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex). Such motifs are present in much of later European literature and thought as well.

Determinism is also present in certain tendencies within religious thought, both non-Jewish and Jewish, such as Calvinism, Gnosticism, the thought of the Dead Sea sect, and even certain steams within Kabbalah and Hasidut, such as the above-mentioned Ishbitz. Thus, Rambam is doubtless polemicizing here with others. Indeed, in §2 he lambasts “the fools of the nation of the world and the majority of dolts among the children of Israel” (I never said he didn’t write like a snob!) who believe that a person is predestined to be righteous or evil, and reemphasizes that man is free to determine the moral course of his life.

We now turn to the lengthy passage, in which Maimonides addresses the problem of free will vs. Divine omniscience. Teshuvah 5.5:

5. Lest you say: Does not the Holy One blessed be He know all that shall be, and even before it happens knows that this one shall be righteous or evil, or does He not know? And if He does know that this person will be righteous, it is impossible for him not to be righteous; but if you say that He knows that he will be righteous but that he may also be wicked, then He does not know the thing thoroughly. Know, that the answer to this dilemma is as wide as the land and broad as the sea, and great principles and high mountains depend upon it. But you need to know and to comprehend what I am about to say concerning this thing.

We have here the classic formulation of the problem of yedi’ah and behirah. It is logically impossible to maintain Divine foreknowledge and human freedom simultaneously; one or the other must go, as he explains above. Incidentally, I wonder here whether part of the attraction of the doctrine of determinism, perhaps for some of Rambam’s neo-Aristotelian cohorts, is that it is seen as philosophically necessary so as not to diminish God’s perfection, including the perfection of His knowledge? Rambam is thus called upon to defend human free-will, which is no less important for any sort of morally serious universe.

We have already explained in the second chapter of the Laws of the Foundations of Torah that the Holy One blessed be He does not know by means of knowledge that is external to Himself, as human beings do, in which they and their knowledge are two [distinct] entities; rather, He and His knowledge are one. But the human mind is incapable of comprehending this matter thoroughly. And just as man is incapable of apprehending and discovering the truth of the Creator, as is said, “No man shall see me and live” [Exod 33:20], [similarly] it is not within human power to comprehend and discover the Creator’s mind, as the prophet said, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are My ways your ways” [Isa 55:8]. This being so, we have not the power to know how the Holy One blessed be He knows all His creatures and all things, but we know beyond all doubt that man’s actions are in his hands, and that the Holy One blessed be He does not draw him nor decree that he must act thus.

And we know this, not only through religious tradition, but through clear [philosophical] demonstrations. And for this reason it is said in the words of the prophets that a person is judged by his actions, be they good or evil, and this is a great principle upon which all the words of the prophets are dependent.

Essentially, Rambam says here that the solution to this contradiction—which is that both axioms are true—is beyond human comprehension, and that ultimately needs to be accepted on faith (like the “mysteries of faith” in Christian doctrine, such as the simultaneous unitary and triune nature of God?; i.e., an irresolvable logical conundrum). Nevertheless, Rambam as philosopher is reluctant to openly declare that this is what he is doing—i.e., accepting something inconsistent with reason “on faith.” (The Rabad of Posquières, whose glosses on the Yad are an important part of this literature, here asks with biting sarcasm why Rambam raised this question if he didn’t have a coherent answer to offer. He would have done better, he says, to leave it “to the innocence of the innocent.” He also suggests that Rambam is unnecessarily confusing God’s “edict” with His “knowledge.”)

To buttress this position, Maimonides offers a novel interpretation of the verse, “man cannot see Me and live.” This verse is ordinarily understood as referring to the overwhelming, awesome nature of direct experience of the Godhead, the encounter with the “mysterium tremendum” which may literally frighten a person to death. Here, he reads this as referring to the impossibility, beyond a certain level, of human conceptual understanding of God (“seeing” used as a metaphor for ”knowing”). Moreover, he adds, this applies not only to knowledge of God’s essence, but to understanding of His “knowledge”—and that, as applied both to His own self and to the world.

Nevertheless, he does offer a philosophical explanation for this. Referring back to an earlier discussion, in Yesodei ha-Torah 2.10, he explains that God’s knowledge is not like our knowledge, because “it is not external to Himself.” Rather, as he puts it there: “He is the one knower, He is the known, and He is the knowledge: all is one.” In other words, there is no subject-object distinction such as exists in human knowledge. God Himself is both the one engaged in knowing, the object of knowledge, and the knowledge itself.

What does all this mean? Notwithstanding Rambam’s warning that a human being cannot comprehend this, I would like to suggest two possible directions of interpretation. One is based upon a panentheistic conception of God: that is, His own being includes the entire universe and all that is within it, but is not exhausted by it. Unlike the pantheists, who hold that God and Nature are the same, God encompasses all of Nature, plus more beyond that. As the Midrash puts it succinctly, “He is the place of the world, but the world is not His place” (see the discussion of this in HY III: Vayetze). If the universe is all part of God, then God’s knowledge of the world is equivalent to His own self-knowledge, and the subject-object distinction familiar to us from our own experience does not exist for God.

A second possible explanation—and I stress, this is my own speculation, which may or not conform to Rambam’s view—is that the “arrow of time” does not apply to God. He transcends, not only the physical world, with its three dimensions, but also the flow of time itself. “He was, He is and He will be.” God’s eternity does not “only” mean that He “lives” for ever, but that His life is somehow outside of time itself, and that He looks at the entire universe, from past through present to future, in one glance, from without. Such a concept of course boggles the human mind; one can write the words, but one cannot begin to imagine the reality they attempt to describe. In that sense, Maimonides’ comment that all this is beyond human comprehension makes sense. (Nevertheless, such concepts are perhaps a little bit easier for us to accept and to consider plausible in the post-Einsteinian world in which we live, knowing that time itself is relative and is distorted by rapid motion through the cosmos. Maimonides, as we shall note again next week, lived in a pre-Galilean, pre-Copernican, pre-Newtonian universe.)

In any event, if we say that God lives outside of the flow of time, it follows that He can have knowledge of everything without thereby effecting or harming human free-will. (I won’t go into Heisenberg and the interrelation of observer and observed, interesting as it might be to speculate thereon.) This also has some bearing on our previous discussion of messianism, where we touched upon the issue of the nature of time, God’s foreknowledge of the date of the Redemption, and by extension the entire issue of determinism, and whether or not the course of human affairs is fixed in advance by God.

The question is, of course, whether Rambam himself held such an idea. At first blush, Maimonides’ concept of the Divine unity seems to be that God is entirely transcendent, outside of the universe, the First Cause, the unmoved mover. The dialectic play between transcendence and immanence, so familiar to us from Hasidic and Kabbalistic thought, seems alien to the type of pristine perfection that Maimonides ascribes to God. Or perhaps not?

As for Pharaoh, whom we seem to have been forgotten by the wayside: it seems noteworthy that after each of the first five plagues, and in the seventh, the Torah text tells us that “Pharaoh‘s heart was hardened” or “became heavy” (vayehezak / vayakhbed lev Par’oh); Exod 7:22; 8:11,15, 28; 9:7, 35), whereas in the sixth, eighth and ninth, as well as in the introductory section in which God tells Moses what is to happen generally, we read “And the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart” (thus, in Exod 7:3; 9:12; 10:20, 27; cf. 10:1). Rambam states, in Teshuvah 6.3, that God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart was a form of punishment, meted to him by God for his earlier sins. That is, after a certain point, once he had become hardened in his stubbornness on his own, God deprived him of free-will and of the power to do teshuvah, which is ordinarily available to every person. A kind of exception that proves the rule—and something that, in addition to the theological dimension, is certainly true psychologically. The more a person is hardened in a negative path, the more difficult it is for him to change.

Melancholy Postscript: As we read this week about the beginnings of Moses’ public career, we recall with longing the leadership of a man who never took so much as a shoelace from his people. Are what we have today the best leaders that the holy Jewish nation deserves?

Psalm 78: A Longer Short History of Israel

These two Torah portions tell the story of Israel’s redemption from Egypt, which is the central event in the Book of Exodus, or Shemot. Bereshit, with its narratives of the patriarchs and their lives and times, is a kind of prehistory of Israel: the annals of the family that became the nation. Parshat Shemot is a kind of prelude to redemption, describing the events that led to the Exodus—the life of Moses, the beginnings of the enslavement in Egypt, etc. Vaera, by contrast, opens with the dramatic announcement of the imminent fulfillment of the Divine promise (“I am the Lord”—Rashi: “faithful to fulfill my promise…”) and continues, into Bo, with the events that set the liberation from Egypt in motion—Moses’ confrontations with Pharaoh interspersed with the ten plagues, the death of the Egyptian first-born, the eating of the paschal lamb by the Israelites, and the actual departure from Egypt.

Hence, this is an appropriate occasion to introduce yet another genre of psalm: the historical psalm, that retells in poetic form the central events in the life of the people Israel. The relating of the sacred history of Israel—especially of the Exodus, the epiphany at Sinai, the wandering in the desert, and the entry into the Land of Israel—is a central imperative of the Torah—similar in value, if different in kind, from the law or halakhah of the Torah. ”Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders and they will tell you” (Deut 32:7). After all, if history is one of the central realms of God’s self-manifestation in the world, then the retelling of that history and, more important, its teaching and interpretation for lessons to be learned for the present, are central religious acts. One could well say that the commandments, incumbent upon parents, to teach Torah to their children, has two major components: knowledge of the mitzvot, of the practical commandments that the children will need to execute in everyday life; and knowledge of, and identification with, the past of the Jewish people.

Historical memory plays a central role in Jewish existence: the Passover Seder is the example par excellence of the centrality of transmission of the past from one generation to the next. But this is true, not only of events in hoary antiquity, but also of more recent history: in medieval times, chronicles of the Crusades and the acts of Kiddush Hashem that took place therein, were important; or, in contemporary Jewish life, the traumatic and triumphant events of recent times—i.e., the Holocaust, on the one hand, and the creation of the State of Israel, on the other—are central defining events. (See Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory [Seattle, 1982], for an interesting essay on the meanings of historical memory in Jewry.)

Throughout the Bible, the retelling of history—specifically, the retelling of the great formative event of the Exodus—is a major theme, and it is always interesting to note exactly how things are retold. To take a few examples from the earlier books of the Bible: a major portion of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses’ farewell address to the people of Israel before his death and their crossing over the Jordan into the Land, consists of a recounting of the history of the forty years they have undergone together (Chapters 1-3, 8:2-10:11, and elsewhere throughout 4-11). Similarly, Joshua’s farewell exhortation to the nation in Josh 24:1-13 and the speech of the “angel of the Lord” in Judges 2 both begin with a recap of Israel’s history till then. When Samuel is asked by the people to appoint a king, he begins his response by recounting Israel’s history to that point (1 Sam 12:6-12), implying that the people managed well without a king for many years, and it is really superfluous to appoint a monarch at this point. Many more examples could be mentioned, such as Nehemiah 9:6-37 (the first few verses of which are familiar to many from the daily prayerbook).

Three of the longest psalms are devoted to retelling the sacred history of Israel: 78, 105, and 106. Psalm 78 is the longest of them all, and is in fact the second longest psalm of all (second only to 119, the eight-fold acrostic in praise of Torah). It opens with an invocation, describing the purpose of retelling history:

Give ear, my people, to my teaching, turn your ear to the words of my mouth! I will open my mouth in a parable, I will utter sayings of old. Things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us. We will not withhold them from their children, telling the next generation: the glorious deeds of the Lord and His might, and the wonders which he has wrought.

Both the tone and several of the phrases used here are reminiscent of the Song of Moses, quoted earlier.

The psalm continues, swinging back and forth between descriptions of the people’s faithlessness to God, and God’s acts of kindness toward them:

1. The Desert Period (vv. 11-41). God’s kindnesses are revealed, first and foremost, in sustaining them in the desert in the most basic sense of providing nourishment: giving them water, bread (i.e., the manna, called “grain from heaven”—a favorite phrase of the Sefat Emet— and “bread of nobles”), and “meat”—i.e., the quail they were given when they complained about the boredom of their manna diet (a request that boomeranged). And yet they were not satisfied, did not appreciate God’s kindnesses, and in the end tried to “seduce” God with insincere words. Nevertheless, “He is compassionate, forgiving sin… and long suffering” (v. 38; a familiar phrase from the Evening Prayer) and, more importantly, “remembers that they are merely mortals, and will die, not to return” (v. 39)—a fact that somehow mitigates their wickedness, and elicits His compassion (compare our discussion of Ps 90, HY VI: Shemot).

2. The Exodus itself (vv. 42-51), presented in a kind of “flashback” in terms of the time sequence. The plagues are mentioned in the following passage:

The day … when He displayed His signs in Egypt, His wonders in the field of Zoan. He turned their rivers to blood, so that they could not drink of its stream, He inflicted them with swarms of insects to devour them, and frogs to destroy them. He gave their crops to grubs, and the fruit of their labor to the locusts. He destroyed their vines with hail, and their sycamores with frost. He gave their cattle over to the hail, their flocks to lightning bolts…. He smote every firstborn in Egypt, the first issue of their vigor in the tents of Ham. (vv 43-48, 51)

Interestingly, the description of the plagues in Psalm 105 (which will be discussed, with God’s help, come Pesah) is very similar: there, too (vv. 27-35), emphasis is placed, on the one hand, on the plagues of blood and frogs, which were particularly striking and dramatic in their physical appearance and, on the other, on the later plagues of hail and locusts, which decimated the Egyptians’ crops. Or, as Amos Hakham notes, the psalmist omits the last one in each trio of plagues (as is well known, the first nine plagues came in three groups of three, which follow identical patterns)—that of which Pharaoh was not warned in advance, but which Moses and Aaron precipitated on their own. (albeit, Psalm 105 also mentions the plague of darkness).

The concluding verse of the section about the plagues, “He let loose against them his burning anger, wrath, indignation, trouble, a band of deadly angels” (v. 49), appears in a midrash in the traditional Passover Haggadah. At almost every Seder I’ve ever attended, or conducted in my own home, people are puzzled by the group of three midrashim immediately preceding the hymn Dayyenu, in which the ten plagues, through what appears to the modern reader as exegetical sleight-of-hand, are miraculously increased to 50, 200, and 250 plagues that befell the Egyptians at the Sea. The proof text for the latter two such passages, given in the names of R. Eliezer and R. Akiva, are both based upon this verse, the various synonyms for the Divine anger — haron apo, evrah, za’am, tzarah, mishlahat malakhei ra’im—being used to multiply the original number of plagues by either four or five.

Emanuel Levinas, in his philosophical discourses on the Talmud (some of which have been translated into both English and Hebrew under the title Nine Talmudic Readings) notes that, “The excellent master who taught me the Talmud taught that it is proper to trust Talmudic references if one is very cautious… that, beyond this or that verse, closely or remotely supporting what a Talmud scholar is saying, it is by its spirit, that is, its context, that the verse conveys the proper tonality to the idea that it is supposed to establish” (p. 103). That is, that even the most seemingly far-fetched prooftext makes sense, if read carefully in terms of the overall context. This is reinforced if we consider the fact that Jews in ages past, certainly in Rabbinic times, were well-versed in the Bible. Thus, as soon as one verse or even phrase was quoted from Scripture, many listeners would immediately have in their mind’s eye the entire chapter from which it was quoted. The above-cited verse was not simply plucked at random, but appears immediately after the passage that retells the tale of the plagues that befell Egypt, and even functions as a kind of summary thereof. Hence, its exegetical use in the Haggadah may be seen, at very least, at one lesser degree of implausibility than most modern Pesah celebrants have thought—even if it still does strain modern sensibilities.

3. Leading them into the Land (vv. 51-72). The final section describes how God led them “like a flock” in the desert, providing for them securely, bringing them into the land, chasing away their enemies—and once again they rebelled, building high places and idols. And God was again angered, abandoning the tabernacle at Shiloh, allowing his priests and young men to be killed in war—until finally He chose the tribe of Judah as His chosen tribe, Mount Zion in Jerusalem as the holy mountain on which to build the Temple, and David, whom he took “from behind the flock” to lead His people, as king. The kingship of David is thus seen as the culmination, the climax, of the entire psalm.

Why were Joseph, Ephraim, and Shiloh so roundly condemned and rejected by God already then and in such strong language (“He was disgusted with the tent of Joseph…”; v. 67)? Was it for their building ”high places”? The sins of Eli’s sons? In anticipation of Jeroboam’s syncretism? We are not told.

Vaera - Bo (Psalms)

Psalm 78: A Longer Short History of Israel

These two Torah portions tell the story of Israel’s redemption from Egypt, which is the central event in the Book of Exodus, or Shemot. Bereshit, with its narratives of the patriarchs and their lives and times, is a kind of prehistory of Israel: the annals of the family that became the nation. Parshat Shemot is a kind of prelude to redemption, describing the events that led to the Exodus—the life of Moses, the beginnings of the enslavement in Egypt, etc. Vaera, by contrast, opens with the dramatic announcement of the imminent fulfillment of the Divine promise (“I am the Lord”—Rashi: “faithful to fulfill my promise…”) and continues, into Bo, with the events that set the liberation from Egypt in motion—Moses’ confrontations with Pharaoh interspersed with the ten plagues, the death of the Egyptian first-born, the eating of the paschal lamb by the Israelites, and the actual departure from Egypt.

Hence, this is an appropriate occasion to introduce yet another genre of psalm: the historical psalm, that retells in poetic form the central events in the life of the people Israel. The relating of the sacred history of Israel—especially of the Exodus, the epiphany at Sinai, the wandering in the desert, and the entry into the Land of Israel—is a central imperative of the Torah—similar in value, if different in kind, from the law or halakhah of the Torah. ”Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders and they will tell you” (Deut 32:7). After all, if history is one of the central realms of God’s self-manifestation in the world, then the retelling of that history and, more important, its teaching and interpretation for lessons to be learned for the present, are central religious acts. One could well say that the commandments, incumbent upon parents, to teach Torah to their children, has two major components: knowledge of the mitzvot, of the practical commandments that the children will need to execute in everyday life; and knowledge of, and identification with, the past of the Jewish people.

Historical memory plays a central role in Jewish existence: the Passover Seder is the example par excellence of the centrality of transmission of the past from one generation to the next. But this is true, not only of events in hoary antiquity, but also of more recent history: in medieval times, chronicles of the Crusades and the acts of Kiddush Hashem that took place therein, were important; or, in contemporary Jewish life, the traumatic and triumphant events of recent times—i.e., the Holocaust, on the one hand, and the creation of the State of Israel, on the other—are central defining events. (See Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory [Seattle, 1982], for an interesting essay on the meanings of historical memory in Jewry.)

Throughout the Bible, the retelling of history—specifically, the retelling of the great formative event of the Exodus—is a major theme, and it is always interesting to note exactly how things are retold. To take a few examples from the earlier books of the Bible: a major portion of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses’ farewell address to the people of Israel before his death and their crossing over the Jordan into the Land, consists of a recounting of the history of the forty years they have undergone together (Chapters 1-3, 8:2-10:11, and elsewhere throughout 4-11). Similarly, Joshua’s farewell exhortation to the nation in Josh 24:1-13 and the speech of the “angel of the Lord” in Judges 2 both begin with a recap of Israel’s history till then. When Samuel is asked by the people to appoint a king, he begins his response by recounting Israel’s history to that point (1 Sam 12:6-12), implying that the people managed well without a king for many years, and it is really superfluous to appoint a monarch at this point. Many more examples could be mentioned, such as Nehemiah 9:6-37 (the first few verses of which are familiar to many from the daily prayerbook).

Three of the longest psalms are devoted to retelling the sacred history of Israel: 78, 105, and 106. Psalm 78 is the longest of them all, and is in fact the second longest psalm of all (second only to 119, the eight-fold acrostic in praise of Torah). It opens with an invocation, describing the purpose of retelling history:

Give ear, my people, to my teaching, turn your ear to the words of my mouth! I will open my mouth in a parable, I will utter sayings of old. Things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us. We will not withhold them from their children, telling the next generation: the glorious deeds of the Lord and His might, and the wonders which he has wrought.

Both the tone and several of the phrases used here are reminiscent of the Song of Moses, quoted earlier.

The psalm continues, swinging back and forth between descriptions of the people’s faithlessness to God, and God’s acts of kindness toward them:

1. The Desert Period (vv. 11-41). God’s kindnesses are revealed, first and foremost, in sustaining them in the desert in the most basic sense of providing nourishment: giving them water, bread (i.e., the manna, called “grain from heaven”—a favorite phrase of the Sefat Emet— and “bread of nobles”), and “meat”—i.e., the quail they were given when they complained about the boredom of their manna diet (a request that boomeranged). And yet they were not satisfied, did not appreciate God’s kindnesses, and in the end tried to “seduce” God with insincere words. Nevertheless, “He is compassionate, forgiving sin… and long suffering” (v. 38; a familiar phrase from the Evening Prayer) and, more importantly, “remembers that they are merely mortals, and will die, not to return” (v. 39)—a fact that somehow mitigates their wickedness, and elicits His compassion (compare our discussion of Ps 90, HY VI: Shemot).

2. The Exodus itself (vv. 42-51), presented in a kind of “flashback” in terms of the time sequence. The plagues are mentioned in the following passage:

The day … when He displayed His signs in Egypt, His wonders in the field of Zoan. He turned their rivers to blood, so that they could not drink of its stream, He inflicted them with swarms of insects to devour them, and frogs to destroy them. He gave their crops to grubs, and the fruit of their labor to the locusts. He destroyed their vines with hail, and their sycamores with frost. He gave their cattle over to the hail, their flocks to lightning bolts…. He smote every firstborn in Egypt, the first issue of their vigor in the tents of Ham. (vv 43-48, 51)

Interestingly, the description of the plagues in Psalm 105 (which will be discussed, with God’s help, come Pesah) is very similar: there, too (vv. 27-35), emphasis is placed, on the one hand, on the plagues of blood and frogs, which were particularly striking and dramatic in their physical appearance and, on the other, on the later plagues of hail and locusts, which decimated the Egyptians’ crops. Or, as Amos Hakham notes, the psalmist omits the last one in each trio of plagues (as is well known, the first nine plagues came in three groups of three, which follow identical patterns)—that of which Pharaoh was not warned in advance, but which Moses and Aaron precipitated on their own. (albeit, Psalm 105 also mentions the plague of darkness).

The concluding verse of the section about the plagues, “He let loose against them his burning anger, wrath, indignation, trouble, a band of deadly angels” (v. 49), appears in a midrash in the traditional Passover Haggadah. At almost every Seder I’ve ever attended, or conducted in my own home, people are puzzled by the group of three midrashim immediately preceding the hymn Dayyenu, in which the ten plagues, through what appears to the modern reader as exegetical sleight-of-hand, are miraculously increased to 50, 200, and 250 plagues that befell the Egyptians at the Sea. The proof text for the latter two such passages, given in the names of R. Eliezer and R. Akiva, are both based upon this verse, the various synonyms for the Divine anger — haron apo, evrah, za’am, tzarah, mishlahat malakhei ra’im—being used to multiply the original number of plagues by either four or five.

Emanuel Levinas, in his philosophical discourses on the Talmud (some of which have been translated into both English and Hebrew under the title Nine Talmudic Readings) notes that, “The excellent master who taught me the Talmud taught that it is proper to trust Talmudic references if one is very cautious… that, beyond this or that verse, closely or remotely supporting what a Talmud scholar is saying, it is by its spirit, that is, its context, that the verse conveys the proper tonality to the idea that it is supposed to establish” (p. 103). That is, that even the most seemingly far-fetched prooftext makes sense, if read carefully in terms of the overall context. This is reinforced if we consider the fact that Jews in ages past, certainly in Rabbinic times, were well-versed in the Bible. Thus, as soon as one verse or even phrase was quoted from Scripture, many listeners would immediately have in their mind’s eye the entire chapter from which it was quoted. The above-cited verse was not simply plucked at random, but appears immediately after the passage that retells the tale of the plagues that befell Egypt, and even functions as a kind of summary thereof. Hence, its exegetical use in the Haggadah may be seen, at very least, at one lesser degree of implausibility than most modern Pesah celebrants have thought—even if it still does strain modern sensibilities.

3. Leading them into the Land (vv. 51-72). The final section describes how God led them “like a flock” in the desert, providing for them securely, bringing them into the land, chasing away their enemies—and once again they rebelled, building high places and idols. And God was again angered, abandoning the tabernacle at Shiloh, allowing his priests and young men to be killed in war—until finally He chose the tribe of Judah as His chosen tribe, Mount Zion in Jerusalem as the holy mountain on which to build the Temple, and David, whom he took “from behind the flock” to lead His people, as king. The kingship of David is thus seen as the culmination, the climax, of the entire psalm.

Why were Joseph, Ephraim, and Shiloh so roundly condemned and rejected by God already then and in such strong language (“He was disgusted with the tent of Joseph…”; v. 67)? Was it for their building ”high places”? The sins of Eli’s sons? In anticipation of Jeroboam’s syncretism? We are not told.

Shemot (Torah)

Moses the Man

This Shabbat’s opening portion of the Book of Exodus begins on two parallel tracks: the Jewish people in Egypt and the story of their enslavement, and the biography of Moses. Generally speaking, the personality of Moses as such is not emphasized in the Torah. We know far less about his “personal” life than we do about the patriarchs, about whom there is a whole family saga. Throughout most of the Torah, he is seen almost exclusively in relation to the people—as their leader in the showdown with Pharaoh and in the subsequent Exodus; confronting them in the incidents of the Golden Calf and during their numerous back-slidings in the Book of Bamidbar (Numbers); interceding on their behalf with God—or in relation to God and his Torah.

Here, we have as it were the “pre-history” of Moses: the events in his personal biography that led to his emerging as who he was. Moses of course played a double, or even triple role: as leader, as prophet, and as teacher. Maimonides (Hilkhot Yesodei Hatorah, Ch. 7) explains that prophecy is neither purely a matter of the Divine Spirit resting upon a person, nor of the natural development of (extraordinary) human capabilities, but a combination of both. Rambam explains there how, after a person has attained a high level of development in the intellectual, moral and spiritual realms, he may merit to prophecy. Here, in Chapters 2 and 3, we see what made Moses who he was—at least in terms of the natural, human factors in his biography.

The account begins with his birth under the sign of persecution (which the midrash elaborates with various miraculous features), and his adoption by Pharaoh’s daughters. There, growing up in the royal palace, he enjoyed protection, security, comfort, and an education—benefits that most of his brethren did not have. But what must have been most important to his psychological development is that, perhaps thanks to the irony of his own real mother nursing him (unbeknownst to Pharaoh), he discovered his true identity. His awareness of this anomaly, of the tremendous gap between the ruling class within which he was raised and the enslaved people who were his true brethren, must have caused him great anguish, and no doubt goes a long way toward explaining the innate sense of justice he later displayed.

“And Moses grew up and went out to his brothers“ (2:11). Rashi explains that the word “and he grew” (vayigdal) here refers to maturity (political, within Pharaoh’s court; but also emotional and moral?), rather than mere physical growth, as it did in the previous verse. The two incidents related there—his smiting of the Egyptian taskmaster who beat a Hebrew slave, and his chastising two Hebrews for fighting with one another—illustrate his emerging sense of the need to act, including the use of violent means if necessary.

These youthful, formative experiences were followed by a long period in the wilderness, as shepherd for his father-in-law Jethro, the Midianite priest. We often find periods of exile and even of imprisonment playing an important role in the biographies of political and revolutionary leaders. It provides time to think, to grow, to reflect, as well as to read, study and write. Long periods of time spent alone, particularly in the bosom of nature, are also important in the development of mystics and religious visionaries: the silent, rocky, desert wilderness of Sinai must have been an ideal site for turning his mind away from the immediate, transient concerns of human society towards the eternal and the transcendent. Moreover, the task of shepherd, as elaborated by the midrash ad loc., is ideal for cultivating the qualities of caring, compassion, and responsibility for others so needed of a leader.

The Burning Bush —Ehyeh asher ehyeh

All this led up to the crucial encounter with God at Mount Horeb, at the “burning bush that was not consumed.” Theologically, this may be seen as a central symbol for the Jewish conception of God. He is mysterious, ineffable, never seen directly but only through his manifestations. The rejection by Judaism of visual imagery for God, the preference for “the voice” over the ”the image,” has been commented upon too often (most notably and at greatest length by the Rav ha-Nazir, Rav David Cohen) to make any elaboration necessary here. The bush itself has at times been taken as a sign of the Jewish people (constantly subject to harm and attack, but never destroyed), or may be taken as a symbol of God Himself: a constantly burning fire (“For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God”: Deut 4:24, where it is a symbol for God’s passion).

Arthur Green, in his personal theological essay, refers to the Divine name as flowing, ever-changing, both all-embracing cosmic and like breath. He speaks of the four-letter name of God as “an impossible construction of the verb “to be”… a grammatically impossible conflation. Y-H-W-H is a verb that has been artificially arrested in motion and made to function as a noun…. This elusiveness is underscored by the fact that all the letters that make up this name served in ancient Hebrew interchangeably as consonants and as vowels…. The name of that which is most eternal and unchanging in the universe is also that which is wiped away as readily as a passing breath… To express it differently, God is both being and becoming, noun and verb, stasis and process.” (Seek My Face, Speak My Name, pp. 18-19) This elusive, dynamic image of God, as captured in the “dancing” four letters of the Divine Name, may be seen as well in the image of the fire within the bush.

Indeed, the encounter at the bush culminates in the statement of the Divine name as “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh” — “I shall be as I shall be.” Theologians and philosophers have made much of the ontological implications of this name: God as the apotheosis of Being. Yet, quite interestingly, Rashi on this verse explains matters very differently. “[God says:] I will be with them in this trouble, and I will be with them in their subjugations in other exiles’ [Berakhot 9]. [Moses] said: … ‘Am I to mention to them their other [future] troubles? Is not this trouble enough for them!” Here, ehyeh is not indicative of some profound ontological philosophy about God as Being, but a simple statement of Divine presence with man: what Heschel calls, if I remember rightly, Divine empathy. God’s most salient and significant characteristic is his presence with human beings in their troubles and suffering: “I am with him in trouble”; “In all their troubles he is troubled”; “He who heals the broken-hearted, and soothes their wounds”; etc. But there is no real contradiction here. The essence of God may be perceived on many different levels. For the mystic (or philosopher), who transcends his own existential human condition, and is able, at least for brief moment of lucidity and heightened insight, to in some limited sense see the world from God’s vantage point, so-to-speak, God is Being, the All, the summum bonum of all that was, is and will be. But for the ordinary person, God is seen in relation to our existential needs and difficulties. From this perspective, God’s simple presence, His compassion and empathy and redemptive acts, are the most significant sign of his nature. Some New Age thinkers may speak of mankind in coming generations gradually transcending the existential and entering into cosmic-mystical consciousness. So be it; only time will tell—probably more time than the life-span of anyone reading these words. The rest of us are not only bound to our existential situation, but by-and-large have not even the strength to think beyond our present troubles (hence Moses’ “Is not this trouble enough for them!”).

Shemot (Haftarah)

“In time to come Jacob shall take root”

There are two widely-known customs for the opening Shabbat of the Book of Exodus: the Ashkenazim read Isaiah 27:6-28:13; 29:22-23, while the Sephardim read Jeremiah 1:1-2:3. This latter reading is read by the Ashkenazim during the summer time as the first of the three haftarot of “catastrophe” that precede Tisha b’Av; we shall discuss it then. Here I shall merely note that, alongside stern passages of rebuke, this reading also alludes in passing to the period in the desert, following the Exodus, as a model for Divine-human love—hence its appropriateness to this Shabbat.

The haftarah read by the Ashkenazim, while also predominantly one of rebuke, contains promises of redemption, analogous to the Exodus. It promises that those who smote them will be smitten even more so and that, in the end, the nations who had beaten Israel shall be “threshed out like grain… from the Euphrates to the Brook of Egypt.” This section ends with the great promise to ingather in the holy mountain of Jerusalem “all those who were lost in the land of Assyria and driven to the land of Egypt” (Isa 27:13). In brief, a prophecy of return to the land and of the ultimate vindication of Israel.

But the second half of the haftarah, 28:1-13, turns to a biting, sarcastic criticism of “the drunkards of Ephraim”— the priests and prophets of the northern kingdom, who “reel” and “stagger“ with wine, spending their days in endless feasting and drinking, enjoying an illusory sense of well-being and material wealth, oblivious to the approaching destruction. In their arrogance, they have made themselves deaf to the words of the Torah and to the rebuke of the prophets; for them, the word of the Lord is fragmented, meaningless, like a series of broken, trite sentences: “precept upon precept, line upon line, a little here, a little there” (tzav latzav, kav lakav, ze’eir sham, ze’eir sham). The picture here is interesting: of people who have become unable to respond meaningfully to the word of God, not through a process of outright rejection or ignoring it, such as that which might be found in paganism or atheism, but by seeing it as trivial, irrelevant, unimportant. This image could easily be applied to the contemporary situation: there are those who ostensibly believe in God’s word, but domesticate it, making it into something “nice,” “safe,” “tame”: a pleasant leisure time, cultural activity, but without the radical edge of the demands—ethical, intellectual, and spiritual—that it makes it upon a person. (To avoid any misapprehension: this blunting of the edge of the living word of God is felt among both the observant and non-observant public.)

Shemot (Midrash)

“I Am that I Am”

This week’s portion, which opens the Book of Shemot (Exodus), recounts the early years of Moses’ life, and at their center his crucial encounter with God at the Burning Bush, deep in the Sinai desert. Here God informed him that He will take the Israelites out of Egypt, and tells Moses to present Him with the enigmatic name, Ehyeh asher Eyyeh, variously rendered as “I Am that I Am” or “I Will Be what I Will Be.” The midrash offers a variety of explanations of this name in Exodus Rabbah 3.6: “And God said to Moses… [‘I am that I am’]” [Exod 3:14].

[1] Said R. Abba b. Memel: The Holy One blessed be He said to Moses: Do you wish to know my name? It is according to my actions that I am called: sometimes I am called “Almighty God” (El Shadday); “Hosts” (Tzeva’ot); “God” (Elohim), or “He who Is” (YHVH). When I judge my creatures I am called Elohim; when I wage war against evildoers I am called Tzevaot. When I suspend the sins of a person [from punishing him] I am called El Shadday; and when I have compassion upon my world, I am called YHVH, for that Name is none other than the Attribute of Mercy, as is said, “The Lord, the Lord, merciful and compassionate…” [Exod 34:6]. This is: “I am that I am”—I am called according to My acts.

The essential point, both here and in [6], is the ineffable nature of God: anything we can say about Him is in a sense talking around the subject, as He is beyond human definition, understanding, etc. Even His names do not reflect His essence, but are merely nounal forms of what Maimonides calls “attributes of action”—the varying ways in which He acts in the universe—and as such are changing, dynamic, flowing, even evanescent and fleeting. Even the name revealed to Moses at the bush, Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, is not so much a name as an evasion of the question, an explanation that He does not really have a name at all, but Is whatever He is, can only be spoken of in terms of what He does! (Is this perhaps related to the tradition that angels, as Divine beings, have no names, only more so? See Gen 32:29; Judges 13:6, 17-18.)

[2] R. Yitzhak said: The Holy One blessed be He said to Moses: Tell them: I am He who was, and I am He now, and I shall be in the future to come. Therefore it is written “I am,” three times.

R. Yitzhak gives a more conventional theological interpretation: He is the Eternal, He who spans and exists through all of Time: past, present, future. Some Sephardic Siddurim have the words “Hayah Hoveh ve-Yihyeh” (“He was, is and will be”) at the top of each page, to remind the worshipper of the unchanging, eternal nature of God. This is close to the classical Aristotelian-Maimonidean position, in which God’s static, unchanging nature is the surest sign of His divinity, that He is totally different from human beings, or from any created thing. God is the unmoved mover, the First Cause, the Active Intellect, the eternal font of Wisdom. This position is almost diametrically opposed to articulated in [1], where God is ever-changing, fluid, impossible to pin down by any definition: like the four vowel letters of his Holy Name, the life breath of the universe, constantly changing, moving, dancing. Does the placing of that passage at the beginning of this midrash, relegating the more stable, delineated definition to #2 position, reflect a decision or preference on the part of the midrashic compiler?

[3] Another thing. “I am who I am.” R. Yaakov b. Avina said in the name of R. Huna of Zipporin: Said the Holy One blessed be He to Moses: Tell them: I shall be with them in this subjugation, and I shall be with them in the subjugation to which they are going. He replied to Him: Is this what I shall tell?! It is enough for them to have [each] trouble in its time! He said to him: No! “Thus shall you say to the children of Israel, I who Am has send me to you” [ibid.]. I make it known to you, but I shall not make it known to them.

Here, as befitting a passage preceding a great historical act of redemption, the name Ehyeh is not seen as a name of God, but as a promise: “I will be with you.” This reading is pregnant with irony: the message that the long-awaited freedom from Egyptian bondage will not mark the end of their troubles and sufferings, but is only the first in a long series of troubles—but not to worry, God will be with them, and eventually deliver them from each and every one of them. Needless to say, this is hardly the message that a rag-tag collection of slaves needed to hear at that moment; as God makes clear to Moses, this is a message for the leader[ship], not for the masses.

[4] Another thing. “I am.” R. Yitzhak in the name of R. Ami said: In mortar and bricks they stand, and to mortar and bricks they are going. And so too in Daniel: “And I Daniel was overcome and was sick” [Dan 8:27]. He replied to Him: Is this what I shall tell them?! He said to him: No! Rather, “I who Am has sent me to you.”

How does this passage differ from the one that precedes it? That the people’s future destiny will include hard, back-breaking labor, even if not actual slavery? The use of the verse from Daniel is somewhat arcane: does this mean to say that the human condition generally is tough and filled with suffering? And, if not political subjugation and hard work, then being subject to mortality and illness?

[5] R. Yohanan said: “I shall be as I shall be” to individuals, but to the many, against their will, and not to their benefit, with broken teeth, shall I rule over them, as is said: “By my life, saith the Lord, if not with a strong hand and an outstretched arm and with outpoured wrath shall I reign over them” [Ezek 20:33].

A fascinating distinction is drawn here between the [potential?] religious experience of the individual and that of the community. As I read it, the individual can attain the subtle, sophisticated religious insight symbolized by the name Ehyeh: the knowledge that God is present in all of Being, the ineffable nature of this being, possibly even mystical awakening, the flash of insight into the omnipresence and immediacy of the Divine within all of Being that cannot be embodied in words or conveyed to anyone else. On the other hand, there is such a thing as Divine rulership, of God imposing Himself upon the human polity, “reigning over them,” whether they like it or not. The God spoken of here is Lawgiver, Commander, King, who makes concrete normative demands. Without Divine rule society faces anarchy; hence, the individualistic approach to religion, which celebrates the subjective experience, the “this is my God,” is inadequate. There is also need for law, halakha, institutions, the social power and authority of organized religion to overcome the chaos and Evil Impulse—the tendency to ego and childish gratification, if not to demonic evil and destruction—that lie within the human soul..

[6] Another thing. R. Annanel b. R. Sasson said: The Holy One blessed be He said: When I wish it, one of the angels, who is a third of the world, stretches forth his hand from the heavens and touches the earth, as is said, “And He sent forth the shape of a hand and took me by the lock of my hair” [Ezek 8:3]. And when I wish: I made three of them to sit under a tree, as is said, “and they reclined beneath the tree” [Gen 18:4]. When I wish, His Glory fills the entire earth, as is said, “For do I not fill the heavens and the earth, saith the Lord” [Jer 23:24]; and when I wished, I spoke with Job from the whirlwind, as is said: “and the Lord answered Job from the whirlwind” [Job 38:1]. And when I wish—from within the bush.

This is a variation of [1], with an important difference: whereas R. Abba b. Memel spoke of the attributes of God’s activity, His differing ways of moral involvement in the world, R. Annanel b. R. Sasson focuses here on the concrete, “physical” manifestations of God’s Presence (Glory). Interestingly, this discussion includes His angels: they may be enormously large, like the angel in Ezekiel 8 who fills one third of the world, or appear as ordinary people, who sit under a tree passing the time of day. God’s Glory may be infinite, filling heavens and earth, or He may contract Himself to a humble bush —and here our midrash ends, having come full circle to the scene in Exodus 3 with which our portion began.