Shabbat Shemot: Who is God?
Throughout the Torah, God has been referred to anthropomorphically.
God in human terms. God has a finger and a hand and gets disappointed and angry. All these are metaphors because humans can only think in human terms. When we’re faced with something that is not human, we find it easier to use such human terms even if they are not accurate. Our language is limited. We know what butter tastes like but cannot convey the taste through words or what love feels like.
This week Moses, in Exodus Chapter 3, when God wants him to go down to Egypt to free the people, Moses asks what am I going to say to them? How am I going to describe God to them when they are in a state of slavery and feel abandoned? God replies, “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh ( I will be what I will be) that is what you should tell them.” These Hebrew words can be translated in several ways; I am what I am, I am who I am, I am that I am, and I will be what I will be. What do those words mean? Are they just a polite brush-off?
The Hebrew letters of God in Hebrew Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey, (Ehyeh) are the same letters as those of the Hebrew for past, present, and future. God is above and beyond time. Everything material changes and deteriorates. We are not today what we were yesterday and will not be the same in the future. God is unchangeable, simply not material, above and beyond physical time.
Philosophically this might make a lot of sense. But was that how people understood those words in those days? They were not all philosophers but ordinary human beings who struggled as we do with the questions of life, of why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people, and why we suffer. They wanted a simple answer. Which was that God would get them out of this mess right away. They could depend on it. But they expected it to happen immediately and were disappointed when it didn’t. But eventually, it did.
What I believe they understood from what Moses told them was that belief in God is a belief in hope, a future, and a way of coping with intense pain and suffering. One might say this has always been the Biblical message. There is no guarantee that as individuals we will do well or flourish. We cannot expect God to act the way humans act. One ought to take God on trust which involves suspending one’s critical rational faculty. The fact is that historically we have survived despite every attempt from the outside to destroy us from the inside to reject our tradition after losing Kingdom after Kingdom temple after temple after being persecuted universally, we’re still around agreed in very small numbers, and part of our tradition is to believe in our survival.
What God was saying was the one thing I can tell you is you will survive, and I am there to help you by giving you the tools whether you choose to accept them or not. When Moses is told by God to go to the children of Israel and tell them “I am who I am” it’s another way of saying I promise you that ultimately things will work out.
This still doesn’t tell us what God is. This is something that we have to grapple with ourselves and that too is part of the message. God requires that we should take responsibility for our lives as best we can, make the best choices, and focus on survival without expecting magic solutions or Divine intervention every time things go wrong.
Exodus 1-6.
