Why Does God Answer Moses in the Future Tense?

Parashat Shemot (Exodus 1:1–6:1)

These ideas grew out of reading and meditating on Rabbi Sacks's 10 to 15 weekly essays on the parasha, and on his books and worldview.

God reveals Himself to Moses and He tells him, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And later on, Moses asks Him, "But what's Your name?" And He says what is often translated as, "I am what I am." Meaning: I am the God that created the world. I am the God of the cosmos. I am the God who's in charge of everything and is outside of time.

But this is a wrong translation. What it means is not the God of the philosophers, the abstract God that is before time and created the world. It is much deeper than that. It is "I will be what I will be." God is talking about something else completely. He's talking about a relationship. He's saying: I will be what I reveal Myself to be, based on My actions that you will see later on. God is talking in future tense.

And this distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of the Jews is precisely what Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi talks about when he's asked who is your God. He does not reply: my God is a God that created the world. He says something else completely. He says: my God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God of the Exodus, the God who has a relationship with the people, the God who's invested in the world, who acts and frees the oppressed, the foreign, the slaves, and takes them out of Egypt and brings them to a land and gives them a land and protects them.

God is not just a bystander. He's invested in the story of the world. He's invested in our story. This is a remarkable idea. Usually, gods are there to make hierarchies and make it easier to obey for kings and stuff like that. But this is a complete break from the ancient past. Here God is serving us completely. He intervenes for our people. He's invested in the people. He has a care and a relationship with the people that are living in His world. And He has a message, a message of hope, a message of future tense, of trying to build something of the future, yet not reached, of greatness.

And this is exactly a characteristic we see later on of our people of Israel when we're in Egypt. It says, "The more they were oppressed, the more they increased and spread." And this is who we are. This is the characteristic of our nation. We see a difficult situation, we don't give up. We engage with it and make it into a blessing.

This is exactly what our forefather Jacob did when he was wrestling with the angel. He's fighting with him and he tells him, "Wait, don't leave. Please bless me before you leave." Because we create in every difficult situation. We make a blessing out of it. We may be injured but never defeated. This is exactly who we are. We're a people of hope, of finding opportunity in difficult times.

And we see it in every step of Jewish history. In the time of the Crusades, a whole new movement was born: the Hasidei Ashkenaz, a school of piety, a different type of connection to God. And later on, in the time of the expulsion from Spain, there was a mass migration to Israel and a new movement of Kabbalah, Lurianic Kabbalah, and a new wave of poetry and prayer that was rediscovered. And later on, the Eastern European persecution gave rise to the Hasidic movement of the Baal Shem Tov, with a seemingly endless connection to the people, to the song, to music, to stories. And in recent times, the Holocaust, the worst of them all, gave rise to the greatest: to the nation of Israel, to having a land in Israel. And they could inspire the world in their actions, in their Judaism, and in telling the story only they can tell.

This is who we are. We're people of hope. We take opportunities that look difficult and stretch them and make them better. This is evident throughout all the history of Israel. Since the beginning, we had a lack of water. We solved that. We had a bunch of oranges that we grew here. We had all these types of solutions, and we had to irrigate the land. We had drip irrigation, and we exported it to all the world. And later on, in recent times, in the internet, we had very little bandwidth. So we had to innovate with stuff like voice over IP and different technologies of messaging and moving stuff through the internet to make it more efficient. We always find solutions. And to this very day we are the research and development center of the world, more than any other country in the world per capita. We are a people who from a little make a lot. From difficulties, we bring light.

And so God tells Moses, and through him He tells us, that He wants us to have faith in the future and help Him bring that light into the world. See opportunity in every situation, every difficulty. Clean it up and show the beauty that it hides underneath it. That is who we're called to be. We're called to be a blessing to the world, seeing hope and opportunity, and to empower the world and make the world a better place and heal the fractured world.

Shabbat shalom.