Recently, I had the most wonderful opportunity to spend a quiet, child-free evening with my closest friend. We ordered in dinner, camped out on the couch, and talked. For hours. And hours. This is not a new thing for us. When we were roommates our first year of college, we would stay up until far too late in the night talking about everything. But it had been a good long while since we had been able to reenact our college dorm days so closely.
During our far-ranging conversation, we reflected on our parents’ friendships, how we would see them interacting with their dearest friends and how this would give us a glimpse of pieces of our parents that we didn’t really know. We talked about how we have only gotten to know certain aspects of who our parents are as adults, when both we and they were ready to share those parts of themselves with us. We reflected on how this was also true for our own children. Even though we parent very differently from how we were parented, being far more open with our children than our parents were with us, we realized that our children, too, only know pieces of who we are. We see something similar happening in our Torah reading this week. Parashat Vaera begins with God speaking to Moshe with an act of introduction. “God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am the Lord [YHVH].” (Exodus 6:2) At first read, this passage is perplexing. God and Moshe have already met. The burning bush has already happened. And even though God doesn’t use God’s name the first time Moshe encounters the Divine, God does use this name when telling Moshe what to say to the Israelites. It’s a name that should be familiar to Moshe. There’s no reason to start from scratch here. A number of commentaries and midrashim pick up on this inconsistency, going in different versions of the same direction to explain it. In one way or another, they each say that God was introducing Moshe to an aspect of the Divine self that he hadn’t before known. Moshe is being introduced to God’s promise to reward the faithful, or to God’s merciful nature, or to God’s power to sustain the entire universe, or to God’s eternality, and so on. Each of these attributes of God, previously unknown to Moshe, would be important for their relationship and for liberating the Israelites. Moshe didn’t know these parts of God’s character before, because he wasn’t ready to. Reading this text through the lens of my conversation with my friend highlights for me something about my ever-evolving relationship with God. As children, we thought we knew our parents so well and as adults, after putting ourselves in our children’s shoes, we realized that we didn’t know them very well at all. Only over time and with experience did we come to know more and more facets of our parents as people. Similarly, we often read our sacred texts and find in them prescriptions and descriptions of God. We sometimes come out of that, like children, believing that we know who and what God is, that we know God well. This scene at the beginning of Parashat Vaera is telling us that God is not static. Our relationship with God also need not be static. We can hope to be like Moshe, over time seeing more and more facets of who God is, when both we and God are ready.
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