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What is Your Name? What is Your Nature? Commentary for Passover 5785
By Hannah Laurie Illions-Rodriguez, Rabbinical Student at Hebrew Seminary
Have you ever had to bear an unwelcome message? When God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, God instructs Moses to go back to Egypt, confront Pharaoh, and tell Pharaoh that God insists that he let the Israelites go (Exodus 3:10). Moses, aghast at this unlikely task, questions God, “And who shall I tell him is asking? What is your name?” (Exodus 3:13).
God’s answer, based on a Hebrew root that means “to be” or “to cause to be,” (Exodus 3:14) has had many interpretations, several of which are described in James L. Kugel’s The Bible As It Was. Kugel quotes such ancient Jewish sources as Philo, Targum Neophyti, and Exodus Rabbah to give a survey of some of the meanings that have been proposed. For instance, maybe the vagueness of God’s name was to communicate that God is unknowable, that no one can capture God’s essence, that all that God is willing to reveal when asked for a name is that God is. Maybe part of the meaning was that God will do whatever God will do, that God‘s actions cannot be quantified or predicted. Others have interpreted it to mean that God is eternal —“God Will Be as God Was and Is”—or that God is identifying themself as Creator because God’s name means that whatever God speaks into being, comes to fruition, or “Will Be” (Kugel, pp. 302–305).
At any rate, armed with a promise of help, a spokesperson, and a sacred name, Moses goes down. The 2nd century C.E. sage, Rabbi Chiyya the son of Abba, described what he envisioned might have taken place when Moses first approached the palace. In his midrash (rabbinic retelling), Moses and Aaron arrive on a day when the ambassadors of other countries are presenting themselves to Pharaoh, many of them bringing him a crown. One of the courtiers tells Pharaoh, “there are two old men outside waiting to speak to you. Shall I let them in?” Pharaoh asks the courtier if these visitors have also brought him a crown. Upon hearing that the “two old men” have arrived empty-handed, Pharaoh orders the courtier to make them wait to be admitted last. Finally, Moses and Aaron are granted entrance and are allowed to greet Pharaoh. When they broach the topic of God commanding Pharaoh to let their people go, Pharaoh is not impressed. He asks, “Who is the Lord that I should hearken to His voice?” When Moses tells him God’s name, Pharaoh says, “I know not the Lord.” According to Rabbi Levi, Pharaoh claims to have searched his address book. He proclaims, ”I have read my entire list of contacts, but the name of your God is not upon it.” Rabbi Levi compares Pharaoh to a servant searching for his master, a priest. In Rabbi Levi’s analogy, the desperate servant finally asks the people in the cemetery if they have seen his master. The people in the cemetery call the servant a fool because his master, as a priest, wouldn’t be found mingling with the dead bodies of a cemetery but would be found among the living. Through this analogy, the rabbis are asserting that, unlike other impotent, non-responsive “gods,” our God is alive and active, powerful, and present (Tanchuma Shemot, Va’era 5:5–6).
But how active is God? The Passover story is full of miracles but we don’t always get such signs and wonders, such deliverance from harm and evil. This month is the 41st yahrzeit for my father. I was very close to him. He was a caring father and a talented, beautiful man. While lighting our candles each year, my sister and I share stories of how he would play games with us and sing songs to us and play his viola for us. We retell some of the stories he used to tell us.
He got cancer when I was 11, and he died when I was 13. Despite my mom being open and honest with us about his prognosis, I did not believe it was possible that he was going to die. I was fasting and praying with all of my heart. I had heard many miracle stories and I trusted in an all-powerful God who I believed knew and loved me like a parent. I knew what a good and loving parent does—they take care of their children in small, loving ways, and certainly protect them from anything unthinkable. When my dad died, I felt betrayed and abandoned by God. For a long time after, I believed that there must be something wrong with me. I felt I must not have been good enough to merit the kind of miracle others were granted, not special enough for God to notice and care about me in my darkest need.
Since then, my faith has matured. I still don’t know why unthinkable things happen. But I do know some reasons that are false. Tragedies are not punishments. When they happen, it is not because we are not special enough for God to care about us. It is not because God hand-picks and sends us “trials” to teach or test us. It is not because God “needs” the loved one more than we do. These cruel explanations are all human constructs, hollow platitudes people try to give in order to grab onto anything that might prevent their own stable world from being tilted by truly encountering the pain of the grieving.
Though I continue to know that I can pray to God for or about anything, and know that in doing so, I may gain increased courage, insight, love, and strength, I also now know that God does not habitually intervene and protect us from life’s tragedies or other people’s cruelty. This experience forced me to rebuild my faith on firmer ground.
Any experience that contradicts our trust or beliefs forces us to reconsider preconceived notions. In his lecture, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” Rabbi Irving Greenberg declares that the Holocaust changed the landscape of belief forever:
The magnitude of suffering and the manifest worthlessness of human life radically contradict the fundamental statements of human value in both [Christianity and Judaism]. … It forces a response … No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children. (Eva Fleischner, ed., Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? Reflections on the Holocaust [1977], pp. 307, 313, 315.)
In light of things like a young father’s cancer, horrific accidents, cruelty and mass suffering and loss such as in the Holocaust, the old answers run dry. Whether it is natural disasters or school shootings, any stories of deliverance because of God’s goodness and favor beg the question of “what about those who were not spared?” In considering the atrocities that happened in Israel on October 7 and the subsequent suffering both in Israel and in Gaza, and other suffering of our neighbors and around the world, we have to ask ourselves, What are we claiming when we retell our origin story of miracles and deliverance? What are we saying when, with our four Passover cups of wine, we recite from Exodus 6:6-7, God’s four promises of delivery?
I will bring you out from under.
I will deliver you.
I will redeem you.
I will take you to be mine.
How do we reconcile these promises with actual experience? Are these promises held in reserve, to be fulfilled only at some future time, perhaps for our descendants? Or are they figurative? Are they promises to our people as a whole but not to us individually? Or are they an expression of humanity’s hope and longing? Truly, the promises alluded to with each cup of Passover wine could mean any of these things.
Maybe when we ask the question—why does God allow suffering?—we are looking in the wrong place; we are not looking far back enough. As part of the Meaningful Life Center video series, in the episode, “The Kabbalah of Loneliness,” Rabbi Simon Jacobson describes a Kabbalistic view that everything began as a “Oneness,” an “infinite sea of seamlessness”:
The only thing that existed was divine higher Consciousness, … a fundamental inherent unity. … And then, the divine consciousness, wanting to fulfill a purpose, which was to create another consciousness, an independent consciousness that would come to connect with … the original consciousness, concealed itself, … withdrawing, in a sense receding, not fundamentally leaving, but creating space. A classic example, given by Rav Shneur Zalman of Liadi [is that] of a teacher creating space for the student. The teacher’s brilliance, if it just flows, would be overwhelming and not allow anyone to receive. Relationship, by definition, requires creating space, boundaries, … allowing a student to emerge, and then connecting.
In other words, God wanted connection, not just with an extension of self, but with other intelligences, and so God created humans. And according to another midrash, God did this despite acknowledging that creating humans would not only introduce goodness and love and relationship into the world, but also evil and harm and pain. Yet, God chose to proceed anyway because to have all of it was better than to have none of it. God could not create one without the other (Bereishit Rabbah 8:4–5).
So it is not a question of why God doesn’t step in and control everything to reward certain people. God created a world where, by definition, God doesn’t micromanage everything. God created humans with choice, a range of potential, and space to act, and be acted upon by others, by ourselves, by nature, by chance, and by the elements so that we can evolve in our sentience and wisdom and connect with God as independent entities.
This is an angle with which to approach the question but, still, like God’s name, it is not a satisfying answer. We can ask. We can be in dialogue. We can even express anger and hurt. But perhaps God’s role isn’t rescuer at all, but companion and loving mentor, partnering with us as we encounter the joys and pains that life itself brings us. Maybe the vagueness of his name does in fact communicate that God is not completely knowable, comprehensible, or controllable. Maybe things will be whatever they will be.
Perhaps God’s answer to the name question also communicates that despite all that cannot be made sense of, God is, God exists, God is there.
And we can try to be there for each other. We can see each other. We can hear each other. We can rejoice with each other. And we can sit together in each other’s pain.
Perhaps the last of the four promises alluded to on Passover, “I will take you to be mine”—God’s promise that we (as humankind) belong to God and that God is our God—is the most important of all.
Like the explanations of Job’s supposed comforters that spout theological rationalizations at him in an attempt to explain his loss to him, any attempted answers are insufficient, meaningless, hurtful. There can be no sufficient answer to fill the hole of gaping loss.
In the face of such suffering, there is only relationship, presence.
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