A few months ago my football team, the soccer club Liverpool,
hired a new manager, Jurgen Klopp. He got the job primarily, I think, because
of his track record as a successful coach in Germany. I don't know
exactly what happened at the interview that he had with the club, but in his
first media interview after being announced as the Liverpool manager he was
engaging, he was funny, he was charismatic, and he laid out a plan for
Liverpool that all of the fans and supporters could buy into and get behind. By the end of that hour long meeting with the
press, all of the supporters were on board with the Jurgen Klopp project.
In this week's Torah portion we have the beginning of God's
interaction with the people as a whole. God speaks to Moses and says to him: ‘I am
Adonai. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did
not make Myself known to them by My name Adonai’
(Ex. 6:2-3).
In this way God lays out God's credentials. God had a
relationship, and entered into a covenant, with our ancestors; Abraham Isaac
and Jacob. The challenge is that those people lived a long time ago, and as
we all read at the end of the Book of Exodus it was four hundred thirty years
that the Israelites were in Egypt; they had no firsthand knowledge of the
people that God was referring to.
God instructed Moses: ‘Say, therefore, to the
Israelite people: I am the Lord. I will free you from the labors of the
Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an
outstretched arm’ (Ex. 6:6). In this way the offer on the table
was probably very attractive to a people who had suffered through all of these
years of slavery. And the promise to bring them into the land that was
sworn to be given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would have also been something
that they look forward to.
But we read when Moses told this to the Israelites ‘they
would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage’ (Ex. 6:9). They had no reason to believe Moses about this
Adonai, and they were therefore skeptical.
Perhaps, as we read about the Ten Plagues that follow, and all of
the miracles, the ways that God brought the people out of Egypt, these were in
many ways God's interview. God's credentials were undeniable to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; but after four hundred
thirty years of slavery the people had forgotten. The people had lost their
connection to God, and there was a need for a reengagement and a recreating of God’s
relationship with the people.
And so over the next chapters of Torah we read of “God's interview,”
as God demonstrates the power, the might, and the miracles that God could
perform. This meant that when the people
got to Sinai they were ready to accept Adonai as their God. Not just the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; but the God of the people, the one that they each,
individually and communally, accepted.
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