Howdy y’all. Welcome to another edition of Bible Stories, a series I initially described as a “not-religious but spiritual” dive into ancestral knowledge. You can learn more about this series in the initial post here. My writing covers a wide range of spiritual and mystic topics, such as the Emergence series I named the blog after.
Anyway, thanks for being here y’all. Been an interesting project that I have been enjoying immensely. Spiritual work can be quite ecstatic and fulfilling, which can be a difficult thing to share in our rather self-conscious society. Today’s post is about Exodus Chapter 3 (the burning bush scene), and I’ll kick it off with a poem I wrote in reverie after I initially read it:
Yahweh I am that which I am Our God-self is We are that which we are Your God-self is You are that which you are It is to be that which we are That is how we come to know God Evil is all things That keep us From being That which we are How evil "normal" is How evil desires are How evil expectations are "I wish you were normal" "I wish you were the way I wanted you to be" "I wish I was not the way that I am" We hear evil words And we are severed from ourselves We try to be things that which we are not And we suffer deeply for it For we are that which we are In our awareness of this and And in our acceptance of this We come to know God As long as I am true to myself Then I can feel that God is with me It is this very feeling, this feeling of God That guides me back to myself Like a lighthouse Casting its beam To guide ships Lost at sea Back home
Y’all - I have been deeply enjoying reading the Torah and reconnecting with Jewish mythology. It has re-centered me in many ways and helped me to better understand myself and the world around me. It is the Jewish tradition to read the Torah each-and-every year and I am understanding how powerful this act of repetition has been for building the Jewish spirit. There are great lessons to be discovered, but it may take many trips around the Sun to begin to grok them.
While there is much to consider as I begin Exodus, Chapter 3 of Exodus is truly one of the most beautiful and poetic stories I have ever read. It awoke energy in the deepest parts of me, rarely has text ever made me feel so ecstatic. We are likely all somewhat familiar with the scene - it is when God speaks to Moses through the form of a burning bush, telling him to return to Egypt to bring the Israelites out of slavery.
The passage that moved me so thoroughly was this:
But Moses said to God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
And God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.”
Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you’, and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ What shall I tell them?”
God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.”
A note before I share the next verses, this is the passage where God reveals his name to be “Yahweh”. It is important to know that the name “Yahweh” derives from the Hebrew root for “I am”, which appeared multiple times in the previous verse - though the literal translation of the name itself is a topic of complex consideration.
God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘Yahweh, the God of your fathers - the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob - has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.”
In the Torah, names all hold a special meaning. Often, people’s names symbolize an important aspect of the story told about them. For example, Jacob’s name means something like “he deceives”. I wrote an essay about how much of Jacob’s life was defined by deception. English speakers will not hear Jacob and think “deception”, but in its original language, Jacob’s name brought the awareness that “deception” was a central theme in his story.
So, in the Torah, names carry great weight. This is quite different than how names work in our modern world. For most of us, names don’t really mean anything. Sure, I’m sure we could find a website that explains what “Charles” means in German or something like that, but in our day-to-day experience, “Charles” has no meaning past being a name.
God revealing his true name is a big deal. How to interpret or think about his name is dependent on how literally we wish to read the Torah. I don’t think that the Torah (or any sacred text) is to be taken as literal testimony, but instead as a symbolic story created by people over time. I take, as an assumption that - in the oral tradition that became the Torah - people developed God’s name.
Now, naming God seems like no easy task. If I was coming up with a name for God, I would really want to make sure it was perfect. I’d want to make sure that the name made sense. I’d want to make sure that the name for God captures the very idea of who God is as an entity, as an idea. In fact, I don’t think I’d try and name God unless I was feeling deeply compelled to do so.
I say all this to say that the name people gave to God is worthy of deep consideration. Within this passage is a great depth of wisdom that we should open ourselves up to.
Of course, I might be sounding like I’m suggesting that we haven’t deeply considered God’s name - some of the greatest minds in history have spent Millenia discussing the meaning of God’s name. But, just because great scholars have considered it, does that mean we have for ourselves?
See, wisdom of all kinds is discovered and experienced. It is great if someone else has discovered something, but that does not diminish our own personal need to experience the same profound epiphanies. We must each step into our own wisdom. God’s name, like so many other aspects of the Torah, is a sign post that guides us further down the path of wisdom (Wisdom, 4 miles this way →) .
What is beautiful to me, is that God’s name is not an accidental sign post - no! God’s name was given to us by our ancestors as a sign post to guide us to some deeper truths. See, we are constantly, as a species, discovering wisdom, forgetting it, and then remembering it. Human history is defined by the breath of forgetting and remembering.
The Torah is powerful (like many other sacred texts) because, even in the darker years where people forget certain things about life, the symbols within the Torah remain as sign posts to guide us back into a state of knowing. It was left intentionally for us - so I think we should take it quite seriously. This is also why the Torah (and other sacred texts) have such profound staying power - any work of art that guides us closer to wisdom will inspire new generations to seek it for themselves.
I wish to also say that I don’t think my interpretation or understanding of this passage is “right” or “more right” than any other. In fact, I imagine that as I continue to evolve across time that my ideas of this chapter will evolve as well. That being said, a big reason for this entire project is to, in a sense, display the act of stepping into a personal sense of wisdom in real-time. It is important to look to elder masters for wisdom when the path before us is not clear, but we should feel confident to take our own steps when we see the path for ourselves.
So, to dive in to the passage - “Yahweh” is built upon the previous statement in which God says something along the lines of, “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be”. There are many potentially correct ways to translate the phrase. In a mathematical sense, God is saying that:
God is declaring himself to be that which he is, that which he will be, that which he was. God is saying that he is all things as they are. God is saying that he is the personification of The Truth. God is saying that he is Reality as it is. He is that which is.
When we take the Torah a bit too literally, we come to understand God as a literal omnipotent dude in the sky, big white beard and all. In this understanding, we either “believe” in him or we don’t. Yet, here in Exodus 3, we are given a way to consider who God truly is. And what we receive is an equivocation.
God says “I am who I am” - and you can’t really believe or not believe that statement. That statement is just a reflection of the truth. God is what God is. Charlie is what Charlie is. A horse is what a horse is. God isn’t something we either believe or don’t believe in. Whenever we step closer to the truth, we step closer to God.
God says “I am who I am” - words fall short of capturing what “the divine” is, so we are offered this sign post. We can step closer to God whenever we step closer to the truth. When we see ourselves for who we truly are, we are able to see God within ourselves. When we are able to see others for who they truly are, we are able to see God within them. When we are able to see the world around us for what it truly is, we are able to see God all about us.
One of the first sign posts offered in the Torah is at the beginning of Genesis when we are told that Man was made in God’s image. So, if God is “I am who I am” - then “I am who I am” represents our own mantra-of-sorts, as individuals. There is something fundamentally divine about each of us, by virtue of our very existence. We tap into our own natural divinity by coming to understand our own selves better. When we come to know ourselves better, we come to know all the divine aspects that are inherent to our selves as well.
In simpler terms, the Universe itself is literally unfathomable. Scientists know this too! That is why space exploration is so cool! It is a sort-of non-religious, non-explicitly-spiritual way that many of us are able to engage with the absolute awe-someness of the entire Universe. Though, if you spend a little time with Carl Sagan, you will immediately see how spiritual the scientific pursuit of the Cosmos really can be.
When we come to understand the nature of the Universe, we come to witness its divinity. It cannot be missed! It really is the simple acknowledgement that the Universe is far more complex than we could ever put into words paired with the realization that we can come to understand it in a way that goes deeper than words can allow.
Reality really is beyond our comprehension - much like how we must be incomprehensible to the cells that live inside of us. This can make trying to understand reality or understand God seem like a fruitless endeavor - “if we really can’t understand it, then why even try?”
There is an ancient idea, codified in the phrase “as above, so below”. The basic gist of it is that the laws of the Universe are made manifest everywhere, at every level of the Universe. Physicists are quite interested in these Universal laws, things like gravity, electromagnetism, and what-have-you.
The idea being, by observing one aspect of reality, we are able to learn a truth about all of reality! This is the general principle behind the scientific method. We can run local experiments to learn things about the Universe as a whole. We figured out how gravity works right in front of us and then we are able to comprehend how gravity shapes galaxies, solar systems, and planets.
However, science doesn’t offer a good way to measure things like consciousness, feelings, or a soul. We tend not to think of the laws of physics as pertaining to our internal life, to our spirit, to our soul stuff. Yet, we can intuit that if all things in the Universe are subject to the same laws, then that must be true of the world inside of us.
This holds two implications for us to consider: 1) the more we learn about ourselves, the more we learn about reality (e.g. the world outside of us); and 2) the more we learn about reality, the more we learn about ourselves.
Let me provide a quick example of learning from the world outside of us to help us learn something about the world inside of us. Have you ever seen a tree planted too close to the north-side of a building? Instead of growing straight up like the other trees nearby, this tree grew diagonally away from the building before making its way up - this is called phototropism.
Perhaps you’ve never noticed this before and now you will look for it. Maybe you have seen this but hadn’t considered it much. Perhaps you have thought about this many times before - maybe you even have a favorite tree like this. The tree grows at an angle, because trees need sunlight to thrive. So the tree grew at an angle that would get it out of the shade.
Plants don’t just grow straight up, with no intention whatsoever. Plants grow towards the Sun, because the Sun is what feeds them! It is as if the trees and plants are offering us some pretty great advice - if you want to thrive, you need to grow towards the things that feed you.
If a tree stays in the shade, it won’t thrive and might not even survive for too long. Thus, we must learn to identify the things that keep us “in the shade” from the “sunshine” that feeds us. For me, playing music draws me closer to the things that feed me. Learning to play an instrument is kind of like growing sideways - it takes a bit more work but it’s well worth it if it means “sunshine”. So, when I see a tree growing this way, I feel like I can relate.
And, this brings it all back to “I am who I am”. God said, “I am who I am”. It is easy to brush off the weight of this statement. One can say, “Of course I am who I am… who else would I be?”. See, “I am who I am” is always true, but that does not mean we have come to experience this truth for ourselves.
“I am who I am” is a neat phrase, a mantra we can walk around and chew on. “I am who I am”, we can say… maybe a skeptical voice within us will say, “But, who am I?” and that neat phrase will remind us that “I am who I am”… and maybe we think, “so, then if I want to know ‘who I am’, then I just need to learn more about ‘who I am’… is that what you’re getting at?”
The beautiful thing is, that if reality can teach us about ourselves, and if our own selves can teach us about reality - then every waking moment is an opportunity to better understand the truth of “I am who I am”. We live within reality, within the Truth, and therefore, it is always present about us, available to us, if we are able to bring our attention into the present.
Exodus 3 is the invitation from our ancestors to begin walking the path of self-discovery - much like how Genesis 1 introduced a self-accepting, self-aware God who made us in his likeness. The Torah is telling us that if we want to understand God, we must first understand ourselves. And, if my intuition - “as above, so below” - is correct, it is my sense that these two journeys are one-in-the-same.
Have been enjoying your writings here, would love to know your thoughts on the Coen Brothers movie, "A Serious Man."