As you know I live in Chicago but, thanks to the Internet, I sometimes listen to the radio in New York. Over the past two weeks, I have been listening to an “oral history call-in” that Brian Lehrer hosted for fifteen minutes each day on his New York public radio show. He invited listeners to share the most pivotal public event that they remember and that had the greatest impact on the course of their lives. I found it so moving to listen to people call in and explain how their values and careers and worldview had been shaped by formative memories of events that occurred 30 or 50 or even 80 years ago.
I was particularly interested in the ways that history itself had molded the lives of those who called in to the show. It was riveting to listen to them reflect on the priorities and values with which they had constructed their lives and connected it back to memories of Pearl Harbor, VE Day, the March on Washington, or the AIDS epidemic.
History shapes our lives and we then go on to live lives that shape history. Events can occur which place their mark on a generation who will thereafter live in a world that for them has been transformed by that collective experience. And, of course, each of our lives have private, personal moments of discovery that leave an imprint on our very souls and mark the close of one chapter of our lives and the opening of another. Some of you remember where you were and what you were doing on November 22nd 1963 and some of you remember where you were and what you were doing on September 11, 2001.
But we also remember the first time we fell in love or the first time we experienced jealousy or the first time we mourned the death of a parent or of a friend. As Jews our spiritual autobiographies are marked by other memories: the first time visiting Israel, or the first time learning Gemara, or the first time saying mourner’s Kaddish. Do you remember when and where you selected the name for your first child? Do you remember learning about the person for whom you were named? The events of personal history shape our lives no less than national events of historic importance.
Parashat Vaera opens with an announcement from God that a generational paradigm shift is about to occur in the history of humanity’s relationship with God. Last week’s parasha ended with Moshe discouraged that his initial confrontation with Pharaoh had ended in failure. Since the start of Moshe’s mission nothing has gotten better and, in fact, things have gotten worse. When the curtain rises on Parashat Vaera God has a message of encouragement:
וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר אֱ-לֹהִ֖ים אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֑ה וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֵלָ֖יו אֲנִ֥י ה׃
And God spoke to Moshe saying: I am Hashem – using God’s four-letter name.
וָאֵרָ֗א אֶל־אַבְרָהָ֛ם אֶל־יִצְחָ֥ק וְאֶֽל־יַעֲקֹ֖ב בְּאֵ֣-ל שַׁדָּ֑י וּשְׁמִ֣י ה לֹ֥א נוֹדַ֖עְתִּי לָהֶֽם׃
And I appeared to Avraham and to Yitzhak and to Yaakov with the name El Shadi, but my four-letter name – וּשְׁמִ֣י ה was not made known to them.
Taken at face value, God is introducing an entirely new name which was entirely unknown to our ancestors in Sefer Bereishit, in Genesis. But that is not true! God’s four-letter name does appear in Sefer Bereishit and so there must be a more profound and less obvious significance to this name and its reintroduction now.
Rashi explains that the four-letter name of God signifies the way that God is:
נֶאֱמָן לְשַׁלֵּם שָׂכָר טוֹב לַמִּתְהַלְּכִים לְפָנַי, וְלֹא לְחִנָּם שְׁלַחְתִּיךָ כִּי אִם לְקַיֵּם דְּבָרִי שֶׁדִּבַּרְתִּי לָאָבוֹת הָרִאשׁוֹנִים
That God is faithful to those who walk before God. And therefore, Moshe should have encouragement.
Our ancestors in Sefer Bereishit knew about our exile and redemption as something that God had promised would occur in the distant future. Moshe was told in Parashat Vaera that he and his generation would be the generation that would know God as the one who fulfills what God promises.
In Rashi’s view, the encouraging new paradigm inaugurated by God’s reintroduction represents a positive development in history. The new generation will experience something better than what had been known by their ancestors.
The Sefas Emes, the great 19th century Hasidic rabbi and scholar, evades the hierarchy that is implicit in Rashi. According to Sefas Emes, it is a category error to rank the forms of faith displayed by each generation because each paradigm was necessary and each paradigm was associated with its own form of religious commitment and religious devotion. The patriarchs and the matriarchs accomplished the task of serving God and cultivating faith without supernatural miracles. They competed with jealous siblings. They negotiated with challenging neighbors. They suffered from famine and from infertility. Their accomplishment was, in many ways, greater than what Moshe could achieve.
אף כי כ’ שמדרגת מרע”ה הי’ למעלה יותר. אעפ”כ הוטב בעיני השי”ת עבודת האבות לפרסום כבוד שמו ית’ כמו שהוא נסתר בעולם הזה
“Moshe’s spiritual stature and vision was more exalted than any other person, but the patriarchs revealed God’s presence as it was hidden in this ostensibly mundane world. The miracles of the exodus and the revelation of Moshe could only transpire because the patriarchs and matriarchs had first served God without miracles and without revelation.”
But the story is bigger. The change in paradigm introduced at Parashat Vaera was not the last shift in the ways that God became known in Jewish history. The Mechilta, one of the ancient collections of midrashim, praises the Jewish people for the sensitive way in which our ancestors perceived God in different ways at different stages of our history. God appeared like a warrior when we crossed the Sea. God appeared like a merciful elder when God spoke to us at Sinai.
This process continues to our own times. The spiritual imagination of our grandparents’ generation was forged by the Great Depression and the Holocaust. The generation of the Six Day War came to understand its own unique truths about God’s hand in human affairs. Their younger siblings learned something altogether different during the Yom Kippur War. We cannot even imagine what events in the distant future will define the spiritual horizons of the youngest people here in the room today.
וּשְׁמִ֣י ה לֹ֥א נוֹדַ֖עְתִּי לָהֶֽם׃
God has not yet made known to us by which Name God will be known. The pathways to an encounter with the Divine that will open in the coming years will be made known to us, but they will necessarily be different from the pathways that our grandparents and parents walked, just as each generation before us has paved its own path to an encounter with an eternal God.
And, of course, what is true for our collective journey through history is also true for our own individual lives as our understanding of God matures and is shaped by the events that we experience. When I was a child I believed that in appreciation for the mitzvot that I performed God would protect the people whom I loved. When my father died I learned that was not true.
וּשְׁמִ֣י ה לֹ֥א נוֹדַ֖עְתִּי לָהֶֽם׃
The classic commentators all notice that the word נוֹדַ֖עְתִּי is written in the passive voice. The verse doesn’t say “I did not make known to them my name Hashem” but through the passive voice the verse is saying that God did not manifest in the world in such a way as to be known by the name Hashem. This means that our subjective encounter with the Divine and the names of God that we can identify become the mechanism for this unfolding process. The contemporary philosopher Dr. Tamar Ross has called this “expanding the palace of Torah” as contemporary women and men read our experiences and perspectives into the Torah itself as new meanings are uncovered in God’s infinite Torah.
Jewish institutions, like shuls, need to strive to be relevant to the ways that people of this era of Jewish history connect to Torah and mitzvot and to God. And we also need Jewish institutions, like shuls to be responsive and relevant to our evolving needs at different stages of our lives.
Weekday Shacharit is a joy for those who love to pray with a congregation, a sense of pressure for those who feel it to be a burdensome obligation, completely irrelevant to most members of most Modern Orthodox shuls, and absolutely crucial to someone saying Kaddish. I’ve seen people rearrange their daily schedules in order to say Kaddish for 11 months who had never shown any interest in shul prior to 10:45 AM on Shabbos morning.
My wife Sara grew up in Teaneck and knew, in an abstract and impersonal way, that her family’s shul had a Chessed Committee. And then when her father died she understood that every Jewish community absolutely needs a Chessed Committee, or some other mechanism, to make sure that every family feels the warm embrace of their community in the aftermath of tragedy. (And because it was Teaneck they were actually members of three of the closest shuls who each had their own highly competent Chessed Committee.)
Do you remember how after the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting American Jews were encouraged to go to their shul as an act of protest and defiance against antisemitism? That was a new and novel significance for something that many of us had done for years without ever thinking it could take on that meaning.
Parashat Vaera introduces a new paradigm for God’s involvement in the world. Each generation ushers in a new opportunity to create a paradigm within which we live and build communities faithful to the covenant of Sinai. And in our own lives, we might each have moments where God’s love and protection can be felt, as well as moments in which we feel alone or even abandoned. Those moments are all invitations to hear a call from God, perhaps with a name that had not been known before to you, but which offers a connection to eternal call that reverberates from Sinai.
God can be all things to all people because God is infinite. We are not infinite and our institutions are not infinite. But a holy community can strive to mirror the Divine and emulate the Divine by striving to provide numerous access points for as many people as we possibly can at each and every stage of their lives.
You were each called to this community and you answered that call because there was some access point to the Divine, some special way that Torah and Mitzvot are instantiated here, that spoke to you. The challenge you face, which is the common challenge of every Jewish community, is to celebrate the diverse and unique ways that you, as individuals, encounter God and know God’s name, while learning and praying and growing as one united community.
Can you remember what it was that first brought you here? Can you now serve as the access point to someone else who is just like you were then, and who has not yet felt called to become close to the Jewish community? What mitzvah, what access to the Torah, is now calling you? What would it look like to answer that call?
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 