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A Pesach Message from the Chief Rabbi 5770

At the very beginning of the story of the exodus as recorded in the Torah, three words appear that are mistranslated in virtually every Christian Bible. Moses has met God in the burning bush. God summons Moses to lead his people from slavery to freedom. Moses asks, when I go to the Israelites and they ask me who sent me, what shall I say? God replies: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh. Three simple words. What do they mean?
They are usually translated as “I am what I am”, “I am who I am”, “I am that I am” or “I am: that is who I am.” Each of these is a mistranslation. It does not take much knowledge of Hebrew to know that the words mean, “I will be what I will be.” The name of God is written in the future tense.
Why did these words prove so hard to understand? In the ancient world, and still today, people believed that nothing ultimately changes in the human condition. We are born, we grow, we live, we die, and the world stays what it was. Politicians come, politicians go, great powers rise and fall, and still the strong rule the weak, the rich exploit the poor, and might, not right, prevails.
Within such a worldview, what is God? God is eternity. God is beyond time. God does not sully his hands with the messy business of human life. Hence the translation, “I am what I am”. I am pure being as it is in heaven, not earth. That is a fine and noble belief. But it is not Judaism. Had it been true, there would never have been an exodus, or freedom, or Pesach.
Ehyeh asher Ehyeh in fact means, if you seek to know who I am, look to the future, not the past. For I am about to do what has never been done before. I am going to perform signs and wonders the like of which have never been seen before. I am going to lead an entire nation from slavery to freedom. I am going to take a people others despise and make it My own. All this lies in the future. And now I want you to become part of that future.
Those three words changed history, and not for Jews alone. For they meant that the future need not be like the past. There is such a thing as change in the affairs of humankind. History is not a closed loop endlessly replaying itself. Right can win a victory over might among those who have been touched by the hand of God. In that one moment, hope was born.
Pesach is the festival of hope, and Jews are the people of hope. For we are the people who outlived every empire that sought to destroy us, survived adversities that would have defeated any other nation, that emerged from the Holocaust still affirming life, and built the land and state of Israel against unceasing opposition.
The world in the twenty-first century needs hope. The difficulties ahead, environmentally, politically, economically, are formidable. It is all too easy to fall into despair, to say nothing ever really changes, and to think of God as a remote reality in the high and distant heavens. That is not the Jewish way. The Jewish way is to have faith in the future and in the God whose name is Ehyeh asher Ehyeh.
This Pesach, as we celebrate together with family and friends, remember that the seder service that begins with the words, “This is the bread of affliction”, ends with the wine of freedom and with a children’s song in which God defeats the angel of death. No force has lasted as long as, or had greater influence on humanity than, the voice of Jewish hope. It was born when God told Moses, My name is Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, meaning: I am the God you will find if you have faith that the future can be different from the past.
A chag kasher vesameach to you, your family, and the Jewish people, in Israel and throughout the world.

Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks