In his introduction to his translation of the Book of
Exodus, Robert Alter describes the shift from Genesis to Exodus as the
transition from a zoom lens to a wide-angle lens on a camera:
Instead of the sharply etched individuals who constituted a
family in all its explosive dynamics in Genesis, we now have teeming multitudes
of Israelites. . . . In keeping with this new wide-angle lens through which the
characters and the events are seen, the narrative moves from the domestic,
moral, and psychological realism of the Patriarchal Tales to a more stylized,
sometimes deliberately schematic, mode of storytelling. . . .
According to Alter, as the camera widens its view, the main
players, God and Moses, become more distant. Whereas in Genesis, God walked
around and talked to the patriarchs, here God becomes unseeable, with fiery
barriers to access. Whereas we knew Jacob and Joseph’s inner lives quite
intimately, we only see certain facets of Moses – his qualities as a leader.
The parasha this week opens with God telling Moses that the
patriarchs had not known God by the name YHVH; they knew only the name “El
Shaddai.” As we often see in Torah, this is not really so. The name YHVH has
appeared before, and the patriarchs did know it. But we are still left with the
question here of how God relates to the humans in this book – the book of
Exodus. We are left with the question of whether and why God becomes more
distant in this book.
What is the difference between “El Shaddai,” a name that
connotes fertility, and this name “YHVH,” which the rabbis have interpreted as
representing God’s merciful qualities? God also only uses the word “Elohim,”
connoting God’s quality of judgment, with Moses once in our parasha, and from
this point forward only speaks to Moses as “YHVH.”
A Chasidic commentary that we will study together brings us
an answer to these questions in a way that helps us to reflect on our lives.
(You’ll have to come to Scrollers to see what I mean.)
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