According to Rashi the opening verses of this portion quoted in the previous section are a direct response to Moses’ questioning of God at the conclusion of Shemot. Moses went to Pharaoh in order to save Israel, but instead Pharaoh dramatically increased the workload. “Moses returned to God and said: ‘My Lord, why have you done evil to this people, why have you sent me? From the time I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your Name he did evil to this people, and You did not rescue Your people” (Exodus 5:22-23).
God begins to answer at the end of last portion, “Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh, for with a strong hand he will send them out and with a strong hand he will expel them from his land” (Exodus 6:1). God’s explanation continues in this portion by further clarifying that the process of redemption is a lengthy one, which began back in the days of the patriarchs: “And God (Elokim) spoke to Moses and said to him ‘I am God (Hashem, God’s four-letter name). I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but my name Hashem I did not make known to them” (Exodus 6:2-3).
The Ishbitzer Rebbe notes a subtle anomaly in the first verse – “And God (Elokim) spoke to Moses and said to him ‘I am God (Hashem)'” – between the Hebrew word used for “spoke” (dibber) at the beginning of the verse and the Hebrew word used for “said” (amar) later in the verse. He explains that the former connotes harshness, whereas the latter implies gentleness. At first God reacts harshly to Moses’ questioning Him, but when he sees Moses recoil from the rebuke He softens His approach so as not to overly frighten him. In his explanation, the Ishbitzer Rebbe does not state explicitly why God chose to change his tone with Moses other than stating the obvious that when a person sees a loved one react negatively to reproach he will naturally try to soften the blow. The question that begs an answer is, why is God concerned with not overly discouraging Moses, in this particular case?
The answer to this question may lie in Moses’ role in the future. After the people sinned by worshipping the Golden Calf, God initially said to Moses, “I have seen this people and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. And now leave Me be and My anger will burn against them and I shall consume them and I will make you a great nation” (Exodus 32:9-10). Moses responded by pleading for the people and succeeding in eliciting God’s mercy. As part of his plea, Moses even audaciously tells God that if He will not forgive the people, he should “erase me from Your book that You have written” (Exodus 32:32). Rashi explains that when God commanded Moses to “leave Me be” so that He could destroy the people, He wanted Moses to correctly infer that he should, in fact, not “let God be”; rather, he should pray so that God would not destroy the people.
Had God not softened His rebuke at the beginning of Moses’ career, He would have dissuaded Moses from ever questioning him, and, ultimately, from defending the Jewish people after the sin of the Golden Calf. Furthermore, He recognized that Moses’ questioning Him was actually motivated by the right reason – he sought God’s compassion for His people. Indeed, right from the beginning of his appearance on the biblical stage, Moses manifested this compassion as he killed an Egyptian in order to save a Jew and by doing so sacrificed his life of comfort, privilege, and power. Moses’ compassion for the Jewish people was one of the reasons God chose him to be the redeemer, for this was in God’s eyes an indispensable leadership quality.
The Jewish tradition of challenging, as it were, God’s decrees goes back to Abraham’s plea for the people of Sodom. Significantly, both Abraham and Moses combine tremendous audacity with profound humility. Both confront God directly and speak what is in their hearts, but both demonstrate humility as Abraham adds that he is but “dust and ashes” (Genesis 18:27) and Moses is characterized later in the Torah as “exceedingly humble, more than any person on the face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 12:3).
From Abraham and Moses, we learn an important lesson: God demands our obedience and loyalty, but ultimately He does not want “yes men” who will fail to stand up to Him when the moment demands. This, of course, comes with one caveat: to have the right to stand up to God, one must possess tremendous humility and a deep sense of compassion for others. Abraham and Moses did not question God’s ways so as to refute their belief in Him. Their questioning was, in fact, a tremendous affirmation of their faith in a God who would allow them to respectfully speak their minds.
