How do you imagine the first moment God breaks centuries of silence and speaks to Moshe?
We have certain expectations of the Divine. We expect majesty. We expect power. If we were choosing the location, we might pick a cedar of Lebanon, towering and ancient. We might choose a jagged mountain peak, or a storm like the one that will eventually descend on Sinai. We expect the setting to match the status of the occupant.
Yet when the time comes to break the silence of centuries and speak to Moshe, God defies every expectation. The setting is a sneh—a lowly, prickly thorn-bush. A shrub that offers no shade, produces no fruit, possesses no beauty. The humblest plant in the desert.[1]
A Midrash notices exactly what we notice. Shemot Rabbah asks: why a thorn-bush? And it answers: to teach that there is no place devoid of the Divine presence, the Shechinah, not even a thorn-bush, not even the lowest, most painful places.[2]
That is already profound comfort. God is not found only in the beautiful, the successful, the photogenic. God is found in the thorns. God is found where we would rather not look.
But the thorn-bush does more than teach us where God can be found. It hints at how God behaves.
A God who chooses the thorn-bush is not a distant monarch. Not the Greek ideal of the "Unmoved Mover"—perfection understood as being untouched, unchangeable, unbothered.[3] The God of the thorn-bush goes to where the pain is. God is present not above the world, but within it. A God who is moved. Abraham Joshua Heschel called this divine pathos: the claim that God is not indifferent, that God cares, that the world matters to God.[4]
Which is why Moshe's question, in the very next breath, feels so human.
Moshe asks: "When they ask me, 'What is God’s name?', what shall I say?"[5] On the surface, it sounds practical. But Moshe is not really asking for information. If he were, saying “the God of Avraham, of Yitzchak and of Yaakov” would’ve been enough. He is asking for trust. How can I trust a God I cannot define?
We human beings love nouns. We love names. If we can name something, we can grasp it. If we can grasp it, we can control it. That impulse lives very close to the heart of idolatry—not only bowing to statues, but turning the infinite into something finite. Trading the God who calls for a god we can manage.
And we live, perhaps more than most generations, in a time of radical uncertainty. Some of it is personal: health, family, relationships, ageing. Some of it is communal: identity, cohesion, conflict. Some of it is global: violence, climate, technology, the constant sense that the ground can shift under our feet.
In such a world, the temptation is to ask religion to become a theological security blanket. We want God to be the answer that makes uncertainty go away. We want God to be a noun: solid, dependable, unchanging. A cosmic controller who has everything decided.
Then the Torah does something extraordinary. God refuses to give Moshe a noun. Instead, God gives him a verb:
Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.[6]
Some of us might’ve grown up hearing it translated as "I Am That I Am." It sounds majestic, philosophical, static. Pure Being. A God who is complete, finished, beyond all motion.
But the Hebrew refuses to sit still. Ehyeh is in the imperfect tense. It leans forward. It opens out. "I Will Be What I Will Be." Not a frozen definition, but an unfolding presence. Not only "being," but "becoming."
Here we need to name an influence that many of us carry without noticing. Greek philosophy gave Western religious imagination a powerful picture of God as perfection-through-unchangeability. That picture influenced Christian theology, and it also influenced medieval Jewish philosophy. Maimonides develops a model of God as absolute, necessary existence, beyond change and beyond any human attribute.[7] There is grandeur in that vision. But it can become spiritually dangerous when it quietly turns God into a cosmic controller, a being of absolute certainty, too perfect to be affected.
That is not the God speaking from a thorn-bush.
Because in the Torah itself, God does not merely announce existence. God speaks relationship.
"I have surely seen the affliction of My people."
"I have heard their cry."
"I know their suffering."
"And I have come down to deliver them."[8]
This is not a God untouched by the world. This is a God who is affected by what human beings do to one another. Rashi sensed this dynamism immediately. He interprets Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh not as a metaphysical definition, but as a promise of presence: "I will be with them in this sorrow, just as I will be with them in future troubles."[9]
Do you hear the difference? The Greek God says, "I exist." The Jewish God says, "I will be with you." The first offers certainty; the second offers relationship.
And this is where Jewish Process Theology becomes not just an intellectual exercise, but a lifeline. Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson challenges the picture of God as a coercive monarch who has already decided everything. He offers instead a God of relationship, a God who does not override human freedom but works through it, inviting, luring, calling creation towards healing and wholeness. Not the "Unmoved Mover," but the "Most Moved Mover."[10]
If God says "I will be," then the future is not predetermined. It is open. Who God becomes in history depends, in part, on what we do. We are not passive recipients of a fixed plan. We are partners in redemption.
That is thrilling, and it is frightening.
It is thrilling because it means the world's brokenness is not the last chapter. It means change is genuinely possible. It means our actions matter, not as footnotes to a script, but as real contributions to what the future becomes.
But it is frightening because it means we cannot cling to the idol of certainty. We cannot know how the story ends. We cannot outsource responsibility to the heavens.
The Talmud offers a remarkable scene that captures this theology in narrative form. In Tractate Brachot, God initially wants Moshe to tell Israel, "I will be with you in this suffering, and I will be with you in future sufferings." Moshe protests: do not mention future sufferings now, it is enough that they bear the suffering of the present. And God agrees, and tells him to say simply: "Ehyeh has sent me to you."[11]
Read as theology, it is startling. God not only speaks, God listens. God not only commands, God responds. God enters a dialogue about what people can bear. It is a portrait of divine relationship, not divine distance.
Now, if this is the God in parashat Sh'mot, what changes for us?
First, it changes how we pray. If we pray to a God who has already decided everything, prayer becomes either performance or persuasion. But if we pray to Ehyeh, the God of becoming, prayer becomes relationship. Prayer becomes alignment, but not passive alignment. It becomes turning ourselves towards the divine call, answering it, arguing with it, consenting to it, and then returning to it again.[12]
Second, it changes what "faith" means. Faith is not certainty. Faith is not knowing the ending. Faith is the willingness to live without the idol of control, whilst staying in relationship with a God who cannot be pinned down.
And third, it changes how we live with suffering. A static, all-controlling God can make suffering unbearable, because if God is the cosmic controller, then every tragedy becomes either willed or permitted with full power to prevent it. That is the theology that breaks people's hearts.
The thorn-bush suggests something else. God is present in suffering, not as its author, but as its companion, and as the power that calls us towards response. God is the fire that burns, yet does not consume. Not the destroyer, but the resilience. Not the one who guarantees we will never be in the thorns, but the one who meets us there and calls us towards a different future.
And perhaps this is why the bush burns but is not consumed. Not because redemption is a single moment that fixes everything. But because becoming is ongoing. The fire keeps burning, and still we are not consumed.
So here is the invitation for this Shabbat.
Let us be honest about our uncertainty. Let us stop demanding from theology what theology was never meant to provide: total control.
Instead, let us listen for the voice that calls from the thorn-bush, not from the places where we feel powerful and composed, but from the places where life scratches, where the world hurts, where we are tempted to look away.
And when that voice says, "I will be," let us hear it as promise and responsibility.
Promise: the present is not the final word.
Responsibility: the future is being written, and our choices are part of the ink.
We do not worship a thing. We worship in relationship. We do not follow a map with every turn marked out. We are in dialogue with a voice that says: I will be with you, as I will be with you.
And in a world that is uncertain, and sometimes frightening, and often unfinished, that is enough.
Shabbat Shalom.
[1] Exodus 3:1–2.
[2] Shemot Rabbah 2:5.
[3] Aristotle, Metaphysics
[4] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets.
[5] Exodus 3:13.
[6] Exodus 3:14.
[7] Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed I:63.
[8] Exodus 3:7–8.
[9] Rashi on Exodus 3:14.
[10] Bradley Shavit Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology (Jewish Lights, 2013).
[11] Babylonian Talmud, Brachot 9b.
[12] Toba Spitzer, "Why We Need Process Theology," CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly (Winter 2012).
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário