"I am what I am..." goes the anthem that closes Act I of La Cage aux Folles. A song of empowerment, sung by the character Albin, a drag queen in crisis. "I am what I am," she sings, encouraging us to claim all the parts of us that others might not see as worthy, or might not see at all.
It's a tricky thing, this "I am what I am" phrase. It can be celebration; it can be defiance. It can also be apology. Like when Popeye sings, "I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam." In other words, don't expect more from me, and don't expect me to change. "I am what I am" as an announcement of limits and a shrug of the shoulders.
Those are the references and questions in my head every year when we get to this week's Torah portion, the first one of Exodus, when Moshe, not yet the leader of our people, sees a bush aflame and oddly smokeless. He decides to leave his path and go closer to investigate. At the bush, an angelic voice calls out, Moshe, Moshe! And he responds, hineini. Here I am.
The voice tells him to remove his shoes, that this is holy ground. And then God lays out a plan, that the Children of Israel should be redeemed from slavery and Moshe would be in charge of the operation. Moshe asks, "But who am I to do this?" God replies, "I will be with you." Moshe asks the next logical question which is, more or less, "And who are you?" God replies, ehyeh asher ehyeh – "I am what I am." (Exodus 3:15).
This is one of the most fascinating moments in Torah. Either God is being unconscionably cagey – or wholly truthful. God is above all words and beyond all imagination, the response suggests. There is no name that can capture the essence of the Divine without reducing it to something finite and ultimately problematic.
Which is what has happened with just about every way we refer to God, including the word God itself. Ah, the ways the word "God" has been used send shivers up my spine. Everything we could possible object to in organized religion we can find in the resonances of the English word "God." Half of you probably don't like it when I say "God" and I don't so much like it so much either, unless we all understand that we're saying "God" in quotes, and meaning something bigger, different, and not quite so fossilized.
And it's not like Hebrew avoids that problem. First off, every word in Hebrew has a grammatical gender, and that means we inevitably talk about God as "he" in Hebrew. Except for some aspects of God, such as the Shekhinah – God's close and palpable presence – which is grammatically feminine and which therefore becomes the desperate repository of the feminine aspects of God for which we're starving. When in actuality, the Divine encompasses and transcends all genders, all identities, all physicalities. We just can't easily get our minds or our language around that.
And then there is all the hierarchical terminology. We learn God's name as YHWH, a four-letter name that is a third-person version of Ehyeh. It means something like "Being" or simply "Is." But our taboo against pronouncing God's name led us to say Adonai when we see YHWH in print. And that word, Adonai, means "Lord". So YHWH becomes "Lord" in King James and just about every other translation of Torah, and suddenly the intimacy of being on a first-name basis with God, the intimacy Moshe had, and which fills Torah, is taken away from us, as we position the Divine as Lord and King. Rabbi Arthur Waskow says that those hierarchical God-words are the source of lots of problems; that our feeling of ownership over Earth – instead of membership in it – comes right from all of this king and lord business.
I, for one, am working to bring into my practice more alternatives for traditional God-language. I already mostly use Ruach – Great Spirit – instead of melekh – "king" – in most blessings. And instead of Adonai, I want to try more assiduously to use Yah – a short form of YHWH, or Havayah – an anagram of YHWH which has the advantage of also meaning "Existence". And there's no right answer. Sometimes you just need to ask the Divine what it wants to be called today.
It is inevitable that we will struggle to figure out how to express something of the Divine. We do not have the capacity to speak of the Divine in its fullness. We might have a non-verbal sense of it in moments of transcendence or joy or grief, but there's no way to express it without diminishing it.
And, being created in God's image, the same can be said of us. There is no way to know each other, grok each other. Everything we think about each other is an inevitable diminishment. All we can really know is that there is so much more to know.
Ehyeh asher ehyeh. I am what I am. I am what I am and I barely know what I am. Let alone what you are. Maybe ehyeh asher ehyeh is an invitation for us to see the greatness, the expansiveness, the Divine in each other. To see everything in us – no matter how we judge ourselves – as a gift.
My neighbor Rick has a favorite joke. Two Jewish ladies in the 1960s go to see the New York Philharmonic. They leave, kvelling about Leonard Bernstein and all his talents. One says to the other, "And I hear he's a homosexual." The other responds, "Is there nothing that man can't do?"
What if every aspect of us were a surprise and a delight, even the challenging parts. All of it. The parts that are easy to love and the parts that are harder to love. How might a statement of ehyeh asher ehyeh work for us not as defiance but as appreciation. Noticing the worth of all of it – the normative and the non-normative, the luminous and the shmutz. I am what I am.
One last thought. Biblical Hebrew does not have what we think of as a present or future tense. It has moods, and this phrase is in the imperfect mood. Meaning it's something in process, unfolding, incomplete. And that is one of the beautiful things about Ehyeh. I am as I am. I will be what I will be. Or maybe: I am becoming what I am. More and more, over time, I become what I am.
Indeed we are all imperfect, living in the imperfect. We are all in formation. And this unfinishedness is perfect in its own way. I am becoming what I am. I don't know the parameters of that yet, but I know I am becoming what I am, more all the time.
Ehyeh asher ehyeh.
Gratitude to Rabbi Arthur Waskow, to Rick Kantor, and to the 2020 graduation class of the Aleph Spiritual Direction Program for all their insights.