Shemot
Summary
The book of Exodus begins some four hundred years after the end of the book o f Genesis, and so we have a short rehearsal of the history - Now these are the names of the sons of Israel, who came into Egypt with Jacob; every man came with his household: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah; Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin; Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher And all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls; and Joseph was in Egypt already. And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation. And the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them.
We are told of a new Pharaoh, one who fears the Jewish presence in Egypt and enslaves them. The birthrate continues to increase, so then Pharaoh decided to kill all Israelite baby boys, but two Hebrew and God fearing midwives, Shifrah and Puah, foil his plan and tell Pharaoh that the Hebrew women give birth rapidly before they can arrive. So Pharaoh told the whole population to throw every son born into the river, but to keep every daughter alive.
The text then focuses on a man from the tribe of Levi who marries a woman from the same tribe and they have a son whom they hide for three months. But then she could no longer hide him, she puts him in a specially waterproofed basket in the River Nile amongst the bulrushes, where his sister can watch to see what happens. Pharaoh’s daughter, coming to bathe in the river, sees the basket and has it fetched and opened, immediately realising that this must be a Hebrew child. The baby’s sister offers to fetch a wet nurse, and Pharaoh’s daughter pays the baby’s mother to take him away and nurture him – bringing him back when he is older. She adopts him and calls him Moshe –“'Because I drew him out of the water.”
When Moses grew up he witnesses an Egyptian taskmaster abusing a Hebrew slave and is so angry he kills the man. Realising his life is in danger because people know what he did, he fled to Midian where he met Yitro a priest of Midian, and marries Yitro’s daughter Tzipporah with whom he has a son he names Gershom “because I was a stranger there”.
After a time, the Pharaoh died, and the cry of the oppressed people was heard by God.
While in the desert caring for Yitro’s sheep Moses comes across a bush that is burning but does not appear to be consumed and there he hears the voice of God commanding him to go to Egypt and fulfil the work of God who will free the Israelite slaves – God will send him to Pharaoh and Moses will bring the Children of Israel out of Egypt. Moses asks of God a pragmatic question – ‘Behold, when I come to the children of Israel, and shall say to them: The God of your ancestors has sent me to you; and they shall say to me: What is the name? What shall I say to them?' And God said to Moses: 'I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE'; and God said: 'Thus shall you say to the children of Israel: I WILL BE has sent me to you.'
Moses then brings out his second objection and protests that the Israelites will doubt his being God’s agent, so God shows him three miracles – changing his staff into a live snake, changing his healthy hand into one covered in skin disease, and finally changing water into blood.
Moses offers a third objection And Moses said to God: 'Adonai, I am not a man of words, neither before nor in the future, not even since You spoke to Your servant; for I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.'
God responds to this anxiety too, telling him that God will be with him teaching him what to say. But Moses still objects – saying “‘Oh God, send, I pray You, by the hand of him whom You will send. And finally God gets angry and reminds Moses that Aaron his brother can speak well and that he is coming to meet Moses and that Moses will teach Aaron God’s words so that Aaron will be the one who speaks to the people while following Moses’ instructions which, of course, are God’s.
Together, Aaron and Moses petition Pharaoh to release the Jews to go and worship God in the wilderness, but Pharaoh’s response is to decree even more harsh requirements, so that the Jews have to produce the same number of bricks but without help in getting the supplies. The people become restive and angry with Moses, but God tells Moses that they will indeed leave Egypt.
D’var Torah
When Moses first encounters God he asks for God’s name so as to be able to prove to the Israelites that he did indeed meet their ancestral deity, and God tells him not a name he will understand, but to say "Ehyeh asher Ehyeh – I will be what I will be - tell them Ehyeh sent you to them".
The word Ehyeh is the first person future of the verb 'to be', and suggests that God is not a fixed and definable figure, knowable nameable and therefore predictable to human beings, but is rather an evolving, mysterious and dynamic power that is always in process of becoming more than what it was or is. The implication is that God grows and changes through contact with us, just as we grow and change in contact with God.
In the earliest books of the Hebrew bible God is very present – God speaks to individuals, walks with them, appears in our world. Encounters with God are recognised as being what they are, the significance is understood. And while much of the language describing the experience is of necessity quite simple and concrete - walking with, appearing, speaking - signs and wonders, outstretched arms, and so on, the writers of the text knew quite clearly that the real encounter was complex and abstract. There is no language even to begin to paint the sense of the evolving, mysterious and dynamic power which is always in process, always becoming rather than merely being. God may have been revealed to individuals, but making a sensible remembrance of that revelation is beyond the skills of human transmission.
Increasingly it seems to me we are losing the ability to communicate real religious experience as we more and more try to define, describe and explain everything around us, and more and more we seek to explain God. Scriptural literalists take refuge in the minutiae of the meaning of the bible as they read it; secularists scoff at what they see as the inability to transmit coherent systems of understanding; people searching for spiritual depth are put off by the archaisms or anthropomorphisms. How do we get across the reality of our encounters with God, the vibrancy of them, the totality of that transient understanding that has nothing to do with language? How do we begin to recognise God, to recognise the significance of our meetings with God when we have no framework to do so?
Every generation has created its own language for its religious encounters - the rabbis of the Talmud say that there are 70 names for God within the Hebrew bible, and they created many more. The mystics created the name EIN SOF – meaning “the entity without end”. The truth is that even after having called God every possible word, we still would not come close to revealing the mystery of the identity of God. But that doesn’t give us the reason not to try to come closer. Every generation is responsible for understanding God in its own way. If God is truly always becoming as well as always being, then what God is in the process of becoming must have something to do with us and our own evolving, our own developing, our own relationship with God.
If we are serious about our Judaism we have to base ourselves on the understanding that our own process is connected to God’s, the imperative for our continual 'becoming' is a reflection of Gods continual 'becoming', God is bound up with us and we with God: as God says at Sinai “You will be my people and I will be your God”. There is within such a statement the almost-heresy – if we no longer choose to be God’s people then God will no longer be our God.
For God to work in our world, we have to do God’s work. That we are partners with God in the world, Co-creators with God, is not a pious statement: it is an imperative we should not take lightly. God always ‘is’ regardless of what we do or don’t do, but what God ‘becomes’ is in our hands.