Pathways to God: Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, and Adonai Avoteichem
Rosh Hashanah 5782
I think I know what the most important piece of Torah is.
I know, it’s a lofty claim. It’s like saying you can identify the single greatest piece of art, the greatest piece of music, the greatest basketball player of all time. Sure we all have opinions, but how can you claim to know what the greatest piece of Torah is?
So fair enough, maybe I don’t *know* the answer to that question any more than I *know* that the answer to the three previous questions are Michaelangelo’s Pieta, Beethoven’s 5th, and Michael Jordan still by a hair over Lebron James. But I will tell you my experience of the best and most important passage in the entire Torah.
There Moses is tending the flock of his father-in-law in Midian, when he comes upon ha’sneh bo’er ba’esh v’ha’sneh e’nei’nu uchal. “An angel of Adonai appeared to Moses in a blazing fire out of a bush. And Moses looked and behold the bush burned with fire and was not consumed.”
Now lest you be concerned that I picked this most obvious of all texts as my most important, don’t worry, it’s actually a few verses later where, I think, it really gets good.
“Moses, Moses,” God says out of the bush. “Hineni,” Moses says. Here I am. “The Cry of my people has reached me,” God says. “I have seen how the Egyptians oppress them. Therefore I will send you to Pharoah,” says God, “and you shall free my people.” A back and forth ensues. “Who am I to do this?” Moses exclaims. “I will be with you,” God reassures him. “But I am slow of speech,” Moses says at one point. “Your brother Aaron will be your spokesperson,” God responds. “But When the Israelites ask what is the name of the one who sent me,” Moses asks, “what should I say?” And here we are. What follows, important passage in the entire Torah:
“Eheyeh asher Ehyeh,” God responds. I will be what I will be.
Eheyeh asher ehyeh, I will be what I will be.
What does that mean? And why do I consider it the most important passage in all of Torah?
To answer that, I think we should look at the runner up, the second most important piece in the entire Torah, the Lebron James of Torah passages.
Flash forward a couple of years later. The Israelites are encamped at Mt. Sinai. They have received the Ten Commandments, and God continues speaking to Moses at ohel moed, at the Tent of Meeting, their portable sanctuary they will carry with them through their wilderness journeys.
“Speak to the whole community of Israel,” God says to Moses, “and say to them: ‘Kedoshim tehyu.’” Be holy. “Ki kadosh ani adoani eloheichem.” Be holy, for I, adonai your God, am holy.
Be holy for I adonai your God am holy.
Why do I consider this the second most important piece of the entire Torah?
Because in a sense, these few words carry within themt the “what” of Judaism. What are we supposed to do as Jews? Kedoshim tehiyu. You shall be holy.
Alright, well what is holiness? How are we supposed to do that?
Fortunately for us, God elaborates in the verses that follow. Over the course of the next chapter, the next 37 verses, God lays out a series of laws that scholars refer to as the laws of holiness, and they cover every walk of life.
“You shall each revere your mother and father and keep my Sabbaths: I am the Lord your God.” God says in the very next verse.
Two commandments in one breath that cover entirely different areas, one about honoring one’s parents, the other about shabbat. One covering relational dynamics, the other covering a question of ritual or ceremony. Both under the rubric, under the topic sentence of “you shall be holy;” each of these commandments geared towards achieving holiness. Revere your parents, keep my holidays. You shall be holy.
God keeps going: “Do not turn to idols or make molten gods for yourselves.” Stay away from false value systems, from prioritizing that which is not sacred. This too under the topic of “You shall be holy.”
“When you reap the harvest of your land do not reap the edges of your field; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.” Provide for those in need. This is how to achieve holiness.
“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your neighbor as yourself.” That famous verse is from this section. Holiness.
And so on, and so on. Verse after verse of, at first glance, disconnected laws. You shall not steal, you shall not eat forbidden foods. You shall not mix threads of different cloths and you shall judge your kinsman fairly. All of this under the umbrella, kedoshim tehiyu, you shall be holy for adonai your God is holy.
One of the most famous stories in the Talmud is the story of the two rival rabbis, Hillel and Shammai. Someone who is not Jewish is approaching each of these rabbis getting ready to potentially convert to Judaism, but the man does so with a rather bizarre request. “I will convert,” the man says, as he approaches Shammai first, “if you teach me the entire Torah while I stand on one foot.” Shammai, aghast at the man’s irreverence, shoves him away with the builder’s cubit that is apparently in his hand. So the man approaches Hillel. “I will convert,” he says, “if you teach me the entire Torah while I stand on one foot.” “That which is hateful to you,” Hillel responds, “do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Tzeh Ulmad,” He concludes. “Now go and learn.”
And the man converted.
That which is hateful to you, do not do to another; a paraphrase of the verse “love your neighbor as yourself,” which as we now know is a mere bullet point under the broader heading, “You shall be holy.”
Holiness. In a sense, that’s the project of being Jewish. Being holy at each and every turn, each and every decision point we encounter in this universe. In each and every corner of our world, we are invited, nay instructed, to be holy. Whether it’s in how we interact with our loved ones, turning towards kindness; how we approach problems of moral consciousness, how we relate to our food, to our planet, how we respond to the stranger, to the refugee, to those in need; how we react to a deadly plague, making sure to prioritize the safety of others as best we can; how we respond when people’s rights governing the most intimate choices of their lives are taken away; how we are when we are alone with our thoughts before we fall asleep at night; or in that sacred moment before we pass from this world. At each and every turn we are invited, dare I say commanded, to Be holy.
So there it is, in my highly scientific ranking system, that is the second most important piece of the entire Torah; the essential “what” of Judaism. You shall be holy. That is the “what” of Judaism.
If that is the “what,” what is the “why?” What is the “why?” of Judaism?
Well, of course, the verse continues: Kedoshim tihiyu, you shall be holy, Ki kadosh ani adonai eloheichem. You shall be holy because I, Adoani your God, am holy.
I, Adonai your God, am holy. There it is: the “why” of Judaism. You shall be holy because I, Adonai your God, am Holy.
OK, so who is this God who is the source of this perhaps most fundamental commandment of Judaism?
Well, this brings us back to, in my mind, the most important text in all of Torah.
“What should I say when the Israelites ask for the name of the one who sent me?” Moses asks God.
God’s response? Ehyeh asher Eheyeh.
Ehyeh asher ehyeh. I will be what I will be.
I will be what I will be, what does this mysterious answer say about the God who is imploring us to be holy? What contribution does this phrase make to our understanding, the Jewish understanding, of God?
Well, as Rabbi Harold Kushner notes, we’ve come to define it as “I will be what I will be,” but in fact, the phrase Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh defies easy translation. The use of a phrase which defies easy translation, he writes, is befitting “of a God who embraces polarities of male and female, young and old, transcendent and near at hand.” This expression of God, ehyeh asher ehyeh, he suggests, recognizes a God who is beyond any binary, not just of gender, but of age, level of intimacy, feeling. God, he is suggesting, encompasses and transcends all spectrums you can possibly imagine.
To the extent we can translate ehyeh, it seems to come from the root which means simply “to be” or “to exist”. So, according to scholar Nahum Sarna, the phrase ehyeh asher ehyeh “expresses the quality of absolute Being”—“the eternal, unchanging, dynamic process of existence.” Ehyeh asher eheyeh.
If that understanding of God isn’t mysterious enough, he points out that the word “Ehyeh” is the sound of wind and breath. Ehyeh. No consonants, no points at which we close our lips. Simply a translucent soundwave escaping the mouth.
In fact, the name we most commonly use for God, Adonai, is not God’s name at all. It is a stand-in, a substitute for another word from the same root “to be,” “to exist,” spelled YHVH, whose actual pronunciation became lost to time. We use the word adonai in part because we no longer know how to pronounce God’s name.
All of this—the difficulties with translation, the name’s breath-like articulation, the lost pronunciation—all of this signals something fundamentally inarticulable about the Jewish understanding of God. Something that can’t be distilled to any simple essence. Something ineffable, as Rabbi Abraham Josuah Heschel would say. No bearded man in the sky, these ancient, sacred, mysterious articulations of God’s name signal to us that a full conception of God and God’s working in the universe lies just beyond the reach of human understanding and of human speech.
In fact, as the renowned medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides believed, even trying to articulate who God is leads us down a path of misunderstanding. By saying “God is great,” for example, “God is wise,” we thereby limit our understanding of God to human conceptions: human conceptions of greatness, human conceptions of wisdom. Saying God is great or God is wise limits our conceptions of God by constraining God to human boxes. God is so much more than “wise,” Maimonides would suggest—wisdom isn’t even the right spectrum to be on. We’ve got to break out of those narrow constraints.
Better to articulate what God isn’t, he believed. God isn’t narrow minded, God isn’t lacking in compassion. At least that would help us get off the anthropomorphic, human-like plane, and invite us to expand our minds, our hearts, our spirits.
The phrase ehyeh asher ehyeh, in this way, invites us to think expansively about who God is.
In fact, as Rabbi Kushner suggests, it invites us to explore the idea that “who God is” isn’t even the right question. As he points out, this name for God, ehyeh asher ehyeh, is not a noun but a verb. The essence of Jewish theology, he suggests, is not who but what. Not who God is but what God does. Or perhaps better yet, “How?” How does God’s presence show up in the universe?
Many theologians offer an answer to this question. How does God’s presence show up in the world? Through us. Through actions.
By tapping into this causative force, ehyeh, this manifestation of the word “to be” or “to exist,” acting in ways we sense are part of God’s essence, bringing love and peace into this world, caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, consoling mourners, burying the dead, by doing all those things we tap into the divine flow, unleashing it into this universe.
We are all part of that flow, this theology suggests. Divine oneness means we are waves on one ever flowing sea of holiness.
Ehyeh asher ehyeh. I will be what I will be. It’s how we respond to that being-ness that reveals whether we are fulfilling the commandment of “kedoshim tehiyu,” You shall be holy. God provides the ever-flowing nature of life, and it’s our job to act in response to that flow, manifesting holiness in our material realm as God does in the Divine.
This is one conception of Jewish theology and one reason I have ehyeh asher ehyeh ranked as my number one most important piece of Torah.
But I don’t think it would quite reach number one were it not for the words that immediately follow. While I love ehyeh asher ehyeh, this idea of God’s inarticulability, of this ephemeral flow pulsing through the universe, this “to be” that, through our actions, we unleash divinity into the universe, to me, there’s also something a little bit missing.
It’s hard to feel loved by “to be,” hard to be heard by mystery, hard to feel like we can cry out to the God that is ehyeh asher ehyeh.
And, as Rabbi Mike Comins notes, this, too, is part of what it means to be Jewish and to be human. A need to cry out.
“Because life,” he writes “with all of its wonder and beauty, can also be devastating. Because there are failures and insecurities, doubts and disappointments. I need to encounter and express my vulnerabilities, my failures, my shortcomings, my worries. I do not want to lead a fake life. I want to live a life of personal integrity, wholly accessing all of my being,” he says.
“With whom can I do this?” He asks. “With whom can I call out, without hesitation or concern of being judged or disregarded? With whom can I express the fragility of my life?
“With my friends? When they ask, ‘How are you doing?’ can I reply, ‘I think I have failed one of my children, my body is showing worrisome signs, my wife and I seem to be missing each other, and I have an overall feeling of dread’? Will my friends ever ask me again?”
“With my wife?” He continues. “I have been married for almost thirty years. My wife is one of the world’s great listeners, nonjudgmental and loving. Yet when and how can I bare my soul without qualification or second-thought? How often? Is she ready to hear me at precisely the moment I need to unburden myself? I have a relationship with God,” he concludes. “A personal relationship.”
Part of the essence of God, according to Jewish theology, stems not only from the ephemeral, the transcendent, the beyond, but from what theologians call the immanent, the intimate, the within. Not just the head, but the heart.
Which brings us back to the most important passage in all of Torah. When Moses asks God what Moses should say when the Israelites ask Moses who sent him, God begins by responding Ehyeh asher ehyeh, I will be what I will be. But God doesn’t stop there. God continues.
וַיֹּ֩אמֶר֩ ע֨וֹד אֱלֹהִ֜ים אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֗ה And God said further to Moses,
This shall be my name for all time, this shall be my remembrance in generation after generation.
Elohei avoteichem, the God of your ancestors. The God of your parents. And their parents, and their parents, and their parents. The God of human beings, flawed human beings Of flesh and blood. Human beings who lived and died, in each generation before you. Some of whom poured out their hearts and souls to a God that they prayed to; some of whom didn’t.
Elohei avoteichem. The God of your ancestors. A God Who was there with us when Abraham heard the calling, leckh leckhah, go forth in search of a better life; Who was there with us when Isaac and Rebecca met and fell in love with one another; when Jacob and Esau fought over their birthright and their father’s blessing; when Moses and Miriam crossed the sea to freedom. A God Whom David cried to, when he composed the psalms, saying: יְהֹוָ֤ה ׀ אוֹרִ֣י וְ֭יִשְׁעִי מִמִּ֣י אִירָ֑א Adoani is my light and my help; whom should I fear?
A God who was with us not only biblical times, but in each and every generation thereafter, helping us find light and inspiration in moments of trial and tribulation: in the wake of the destruction of the temple, helping us find new expressions for our yearnings for connection; Who was present in our darkest moments crying with us as we went from auto de fas to blood libel to pogrom to concentration camp. As the midrash says, Hakadosh Baruch Hu Bocheh, God, too, weeps in the inner chambers of heaven.
Now, conceiving of a God who is with us, a God whom we can personally relate to, does not necessarily entail experiencing a God who intervenes on our behalf, picking winners and losers on this earthly, material plane. I have largely given up that theology. Too much of history proves that’s not how things work, at least as far as we can tell.
But I do believe in, and experience, a God whom I can turn to for spiritual comfort, and guidance, and to whom I can express gratitude, and who hears my cries. Adonai shomeah tefilah, “God hears our prayer,” the liturgy says—even if it’s ultimately up to us to do what we can in this world to confront the challenges with which we are faced.
“God,” Rabbi Art Green writes, “can be understood as the source of inspiration and the ever renewing center of strength for our ongoing struggles. We humans have,” continues, “a partnership with God in a redemption that both require.”
Adoani avoteichem, the God of our ancestors, the God of our parents.
Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, Adonai avoteichem.
What I love about this Torah passage is that in one breath it articulates not only ehyeh asher ehyeh, the theology of a transcendent God, beyond words, manifesting through our actions, but adonai avoteichem, what we call an immanent God, or perhaps more accurately, an intimate God, a familiar and familial God, the God of our parents, our ancestors, whose presence we can feel and experience as we reach out across the universe or whisper to in our own homes.
I know some of us in the modern era have an especially hard time relating to this latter God, one that includes anthropomorphic or, more accurately, anthropopathic characteristics, anthro, human-like, pathic, feelings. But in a way, what does being created in the image of the divine mean, if not for the idea that if it is in us, it is in God too?
If one of the highest forms of our existence is the ability to connect to others, to relate to others, to have love and relationship, why would it be that we couldn’t feel a connection, that we couldn’t experience that love and relationship, with the God who suffuses all of existence with life? Why would we not be able to experience a direct, personal connection with God?
My theology, and why I love this passage, is that it suggests to us that we can. We can experience that sense of connection with God.
I recognize this won’t be for everyone. Perhaps we don’t believe in God altogether or God is not a word we are comfortable with. That is fair. We are B’nei Yisrael, after all. The Children of Israel. And what does “Yisrael” mean but “sar,” wrestling, struggling, with, “El,” God, with the idea of God. Yisrael, wrestling with God. From the moment Jacob wrestled with that angel of God, we’ve wrestled.
The result of my wrestling thus far has been an understanding of God that I can connect directly with, and, as your rabbi, I feel that it’s important for me to share that understanding with you, recognizing that we will approach this questions in different ways, some of us accessing, if at all, the God of ehyeh asher ehyeh, I will be that I will be, some us accessing, adoinai avoteichem, the God of our parents and their parents and their parents.
It’s not easy.
The closing words we say at the end of the High Holidays, the end of Yom Kippur, just like the end of Passover, are L’shanah Ha’bah Beyerushalayim. Next year in Jerusalem.
One of my favorite readings that I’ve encountered lately is a reflection on this verse by Nathaniel Deutsch. He writes:
We live in a broken world… Exile—another name for brokenness—is not just the current condition of the Jewish people; according to the Kabbalah, it is the fundamental condition of the universe and of God. Broken.
But there is one place in this broken world whose very name contains the Hebrew word—shalem—for wholeness, peace, and perfection. That place is Jerusalem. When we sing next year in Jerusalem, we are asking for a new beginning; for a return to wholeness.
And yet there is another Jewish tradition, this time from Hasidism, that teaches us the virtue, even the necessity of “being broken” (tsubrokhenkayt). As a Hasidic saying paradoxically declares: There is nothing more whole than a broken heart. Ayn davar yoter shalem me lev shavur. Here, again, we find the same Hebrew word for ‘whole’—shalem—that lies at the root of Jerusalem.
So what is the wholeness that we seek when we sing “Next year in Jerusalem”? Is it a return from exile or the embrace of a broken heart? Is exile a punishment that distances us from God or an opportunity to get closer to God? Is it more Jewish to be broken than whole? Or is the point of Judaism the attempt to find wholeness in brokenness?
As Rabbi Hillel would say, tzeh ulamd. Go and learn. Shanah Tovah.
