I Am

ESSAY: I Am
G-d identifies Himself after decades of seeming anonymity

INSIGHTS
The Brick Factory
We were forged as a nation at the brick kilns of Egypt, and the manufacture of bricks remains the essence of our mission in life
Life in the River
Thirty-four hundred years after Pharaoh’s decree, Jewish babies are still being thrown into the Nile

A TELLING STORY: An Eye and a Sigh
The laws of gravity may be universal, but different things carry different weight in different places

I Am with you in your present distress, and I shall be with you in future exiles and persecutions
Rashi on verse[1]

When G-d appeared to Moses in the burning bush and charged him with the mission to take the people of Israel out of Egypt, Moses said to the Almighty:

“Behold, I will come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The G-d of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they will say, ‘What is his name?’ What shall I say to them?”[2]

G-d replied to Moses: “I Am who I Am... Tell the children of Israel, ‘I Am (Eh‑he‑yeh) has sent me to you.’ ”[3]

To name something is to describe and define it. So G-d, who is infinite and undefinable, cannot be named. Indeed, G-d has no name, only names—descriptions of the various behavior patterns that can be ascribed to His influence on our lives. In the words of the Midrash, “G-d said to Moses: ‘You want to know My name? I am called by My deeds. I might be called E‑l Sha‑dai, or Tzevakot, or Elokim, or Ha‑Va‑Ya‑H. When I judge My creatures, I am called Elokim. When I wage war on the wicked, I am called Tzevakot. When I tolerate the sins of man, I am called E‑l Sha‑dai. When I have compassion on My world, I am called Ha‑Va‑Ya‑H...’ ”[4]

Therein lies the deeper significance of the question that Moses anticipated from the children of Israel. “What is His name?” they were sure to ask. “What type of behavior are we seeing on the part of G-d in these times? You say that G-d has ‘seen the suffering of His people in Egypt,’ has ‘heard their cries,’ and ‘knows their pain,’ and has therefore sent you to redeem us.[5] Where was He until now? Where was He for the eighty-six years that we are languishing under the slave-driver’s whip, that babies are being torn from their mothers’ arms and cast into the Nile, that Pharaoh is bathing in the blood of Jewish children? What name is He now assuming, after eighty-six years in which He has apparently been ‘nameless’ and aloof from our lives?”

As explained above, each of the divine “names” describes another of the attributes by which G-d has chosen to relate to His creation: Elokim describes G-d’s assumption of the attribute of Justice, Ha‑Va‑Ya‑H His assumption of Compassion, and so on. “Eh‑he‑yeh” (“I am”), the name by which G-d here identifies Himself to Moses, connotes G-d’s assumption of Being and Existence.

This is why there is some question as to whether the name “Eh‑he‑yeh” should be counted among the “seven holy names of G-d.” Torah law forbids erasing or defacing G-d’s name, the very ink and paper (or other medium) having assumed a holiness by virtue of its representation of something that relates to the divine.[6] While there are many “names” and “adjectives” that describe G-d’s myriadly-faceted involvement with His creation, there are seven primary divine names to which the strictest provisions of this law apply. Yet despite the fact that Eh‑he‑yeh is considered the loftiest of divine names,[7] it is not included in certain versions of the seven-name list as it appears in the Talmud and the halachic authorities; indeed, the final halachic conclusion is that it is not one of the seven holy names.[8]

The reason for this paradox is best understood by understanding the meaning of the term “holiness.” What makes something “holy”? Holy (kadosh in the Hebrew) means “transcendent” and “apart.” G-d is holy, for He transcends our earthly reality; Shabbat is a holy day, for it is a day of withdrawal from the mundanity of the everyday; a Torah scroll or a pair of tefillin are holy because these are objects that have visibly transcended their material state to serve a G-dly end.

The same applies to the seven holy divine names: each describes a divine activity that goes beyond the mundane norm, a divine intervention in reality—G-d as ruler, G-d as judge, G-d as provider, G-d as savior, etc. Eh-he-yeh, on the other hand, is G-d as being—G-d as the essence of reality.[9]So Eh-he-yeh is beyond “holiness”: if holiness is a feature of G-d’s transcendence, the beingness of G-d transcends holiness itself, describing a dimension of divine reality that pervades every existence even as it transcends it, and thus relates equally to them all, “holy” and “mundane” alike.

 [Nevertheless, Eh‑he‑yeh is a name—that is, an assumed “behavior pattern”—of G-d’s. The very phenomenon of “existence” is part and parcel of G-d’s creation, and G-d certainly cannot defined by something He created. Utimately, the G-d can be described as a “being” or “existence” only in the sense that we speak of Him as a “provider” or “ruler”: these are mere “names,” describing not His essence but a certain perception He allows us to have of Him by affecting our reality in a certain manner.]

This was G-d’s answer to the people’s outcry, “What is His name?!”

Tell the children of Israel, said G-d to Moses, that My name is Eh‑he‑yeh. Where was I all these years? With you. I am being, I am existence, I am reality. I am in the groan of a beaten slave, in the wail of a bereaved mother, in the spilled blood of a murdered child. Certain things must be, no matter how painful and incomprehensible to your human selves, in order that great things, infinitely great and blissful things, should be. But I do not orchestrate these things from some distant heaven, “holy” and removed from your existential pain. I am there with you, suffering with you, praying for redemption together with you.[10]

If you cannot see Me it is not for My ethereality, it is because I am so real.

Based on the Rebbe’s talks, Shabbat Shemot and Shabbat Vayeira, 5743 (January 8 and 15, 1983)[11]

Before they could become a people, chosen by G-d as His “light unto the nations,”[12] the children of Israel had to first undergo the “smelting pit of Egypt.”[13] For 210 years they were “strangers in a land that is not theirs,” the last eighty-six of which they were inducted into forced labor by the Egyptians, primarily in the manufacture of bricks.[14]

Why bricks? Nothing is incidental in G-d’s world, particularly in the history of His people. If we were forged as a nation at the brick kilns of Egypt, then the brick is significant to our mission in life.

Man is a builder. Some build physical structures: homes, cities, roads, hi- or low-tech machines, and a host of other useful (or useless) objects. Others engage in more metaphysical construction, structuring words, hues or sounds so that they house ideas or feelings. But all build a life, forging materials from their environment, their society and their own psyche into an edifice that serves a certain function and aim. Man being endowed by his Creator with free choice, he might make this a material or spiritual aim, a selfish or altruistic one, a positive or negative one; or he can make it the ultimate aim of “building a dwelling for G-d”[15] by devoting his life to the fulfillment of G-d’s will as revealed in the Torah.

The materials we use fall under two general categories: G-d-given and man-made. Much of what we build our lives with was already here when we arrived on the scene, ready for use, or with its potential implicit in it, awaiting discovery and realization. But G-d empowered us to do more than simply develop His world. Desiring that we be His “partners in creation,”[16]He imparted to us the ability to create potential where no such potential exists.

Therein lies the deeper significance of the bricks we molded and fired as we matured as a people. In the eleventh chapter of Genesis, the Torah describes the invention of the brick: Originally, the survivors of the Flood inhabited mountainous regions, and quarried stone as a building material; but then they settled in the valley of Shinar (later Babylon), where they desired to build “a city and a tower whose head reached to the heavens.” Where would they find a material strong enough for such a massive structure? Someone had an idea: “They said one to the other ‘Let us mold bricks, and bake them with fire.’ And the brick served them as stone, and clay served them as mortar.”[17]

The “stone” represents those materials with which G-d provides us to build our lives. Not that man needn’t toil—the stone must be cut from the mountain, transported, hewn into shape, and fitted with many others for a structure to be raised. But the stone is there, solid and fit for the task, awaiting development. In our personal lives, these are the elements that are naturally qualified to serve as part of a home for G-d and readily lend themselves to this end: our positive character traits, the sacred times and places in creation (e.g. the twenty-four hours of Shabbat, the Holy Land), objects and forces designated for the performance of a mitzvah (e.g. a Torah scroll, a pair of tefillin).

Then there are those elements that are as qualified a building material as raw clay: our selfish and animalistic instincts, and a material world that obscures the truth of its Creator. Elements that, by nature, are unconducive, or even contrary, to anything good and G-dly. To include these elements in the “dwelling for G-d” we make of our lives, we must forge bricks: knead and mold them into a shape they have never known, fire them in the kiln of self-sacrifice and love of G-d, until they become as solid and supportive as the sacred “stones” in our edifice.

Based on an address by the Rebbe, Shabbat Shemot, 5726 (January 15, 1966) and on other occasions[18]

And Pharaoh commanded his entire nation: Every son that is born you shall throw into the river, and every daughter you shall make live

Exodus 1:22

Pharaoh did not say to let the Jewish girls live; he commanded to make them live (techayun, in the Hebrew).

Pharaoh’s decree of annihilation against the Jewish people consisted of two parts: to throw every Jewish newborn male into the Nile, and to “make live” every female. The boys were to be physically murdered. The girls were to be murdered spiritually by making them live the Egyptian life, by indoctrinating them into the perverse lifestyle of Egypt.

The boys were to be drowned in the Nile. The girls, too, were to be drowned in the Nile—conceptually, if not actually. The Nile, which irrigated the fields of rain-parched Egypt, was the mainstay of its economy and its most venerated god. The girls were to be raised in this cult of the river, their souls drowned in a life that deifies the earthly vehicle of material sustenance.

Today, thirty-four centuries after Pharaoh’s decree, the practice of drowning children in the Nile is still with us: there are still parents whose highest consideration in choosing a school for their children is how it will further their child’s economic prospects when the time will come for him to enter the job market. The people of Israel survived the Egyptian galut (exile) because there were Jewish mothers who refused to comply with Pharaoh’s decree to submerge their children in his river. If we are to survive the present galut, we, too, must resist the dictates of the current “Pharaohs.” We must set the spiritual and moral development of our children—rather than their future “earning power” and “careers”—as the aim of their education.

Based on the Rebbe’s talks, Passover 5712 (1952) and 5714 (1954)[19]

An Eye and a Sigh

Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov once said to his disciples:

There once lived two neighbors, a Torah scholar and an impoverished laborer. The scholar would wake before dawn, rush to the study hall and study for several hours. He would then pray at length and with great devotion, hurry home for a quick bite of breakfast, and return to the study hall for more hours of study. After the noon meal he would go to market and engage in some minimal dealing--just enough to earn him his basic needs--then back to the study hall. After evening prayers and the evening meal, he would again sit over the sacred books till late into the night.

His neighbor would also wake early, but his situation did not allow for much Torah study: no matter how hard he struggled to earn a living, he barely succeeded in putting bread on the table. He would pray quickly with the first minyan at daybreak, and then his labor would consume his entire day and the greater part of his night. On Shabbat, when he finally had the opportunity to take a book in his hands, he would soon drop off from exhaustion.

When the two neighbors would pass each other in the yard, the scholar would throw the crass materialist a look of contempt and hurry on to his holy pursuits. The poor laborer would sigh and think to himself: how unfortunate is my lot, and how fortunate is his. We're both hurrying---but he's rushing to the study hall, while I'm off to my mundane burdens.

Then, it came to pass that the two men concluded their sojourn on earth and their souls stood before the heavenly court, where the life of every man is weighed upon the balance scales of divine judgement. An advocate-angel placed the scholar's many virtues in the right cup of the balance scales: his many hours of Torah study, his meditative prayers, his frugality and honesty. But then came the prosecuting angel, and placed a single object on the other side of the scales---the look of contempt that the scholar would occasionally send his neighbor's way. Slowly, the left side of the scales began to dip, until it equaled, and then exceeded, the formidable load on the right.

When the poor laborer came before the heavenly court, the prosecutor loaded his miserable, spiritually void life on the left scales. The advocating angel had but one weight to offer---the sorrowful sigh the laborer would emit when he encountered his learned neighbor. But when placed on the right side of the scales, the sigh counterweighted everything on the negative side, lifting and validating every moment of hardship and misery in the laborer's life.

Adapted from the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe by Yanki Tauber