With You in Suffering
And an angel of god appeared to him in flames of fire within a bush. He looked amazed the bush burned fire but it was not consumed … (Exodus 3:2,13,14) Moses said to God, “When I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The god of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ they will ask me, ‘What is this god’s name?’ What shall I say to them?” And god said to Moses: “I will be what I will be. Tell the people I will be sent me to you.”
The image of the bush. The commentaries go nuts, they love the image. Every generation asks, why this image, why does the god of the heavens humble herself and appear to the prophet from the lowly thorn bush. Bachelard (20th century philosopher of nests, fire, and oneirics) though, wouldn’t have been interested in the commentaries at all. Rather, the daydreams and night dreams of the rabbis in their studies, their personal visions of the bush itself, eyes closed, their own fires and fire sounds. For Bachelard, the inhabitance of the image must precede the words explaining the meaning of fire. So go ahead and get inside the bush. Not Moses looking at the bush, the angel speaking from within it.
What does it mean to inhabit something that is being destroyed and enduring? It was blooming the green and white shoots and flowers of spring, just as the yellow and orange and blue of the fire wrapped and swirled through the branches. The nourishment of warmth and light cohabiting with the destruction of wildfire. Is the acceptance of destruction the fuel source that allows perpetual burning?
The commentaries. Why the lowly thorn bush? It is the most difficult of all trees, no bird can make a nest therein. No bird that enters goes out whole, it’s limbs are torn. The bush is the suffering of the people under oppression. The fire is god with them within them as they suffer. The heart of the fire. Like the limb of the body from which life begins, the heart planted in the center, it is the thing that enables us join with entities outside our body, heart reaching to any other heart, even to the heart of the sky.
The name of god (יהוה) is near to the Hebrew word for existence, being and becoming, a convoluted amalgam of past (היה) present (הווה) and future (יהיה). Coincidentally or not, all the letters of the name are non-consonants, the name is entirely breath letters (YHWH), nearly unutterable. What is the relationship between being, existence, and inhabitance? Are we inhabiting life? Does one inhabit death?
God’s name is a koan -- I will be what I will be. Struggling to make sense of the non-name name, Rashi (13th century), uses a method of fill in the palimpsest, that he has developed exquisitely. He reimagines the conversation between God and Moses at the bush. “When the people ask your name what say I?” “Tell them -- I will be with them in this suffering as I will be with them in the sufferings to come.” Moses says, you nuts? They can barely manage the current suffering and you want to foretell more suffering? God says to Moses, ok, you’re right. Leave out the suffering, go with, I will be as I will be.
This divine name, both before Moses’ edit and after it, scores well in theological wholeness. God the compassionate, god of forgiveness, these names are only part of the picture. Sometimes they are untrue. This name is whole, its truthfulness unrelenting. Moses’ instinct to change god’s name reveals our natural distaste for the inhabitance of suffering. We prefer to inhabit beds of feathers, before bushes of thorn. But in the name change, in the refusal to inhabit suffering, god is broken, diminished, and so are we.
The original name -- I will be with you in your suffering. When I read Rashi’s commentary, my ears went after the prepositions. With, in. With them in suffering (עמם בצרה). To be within, dwelling, residing, inhabiting, is stripped to the root. To inhabit is to be with and in. Even when we inhabit alone, a dwelling, a loneliness, a depression, a suffering, god is with us in that suffering. Here god is code for the compassion of friends, parents, children, sisters and brothers born from mothers of kin and mothers of love.
Now I understand the relationship between the bush and the name. They are the same. The name is eternal just like the bush. I will be discovering ourselves permuting in time like the movement of fire. The suffering and joy of existence, the dual mark of being, becoming, suffering and joy unceasing, but never alone. With, in. God says to Moses. Whenever you are with me, I will be with you.