Vaera: God is Becoming, We Are Becoming

Have you ever wanted to stop time—to freeze a moment before it slips away? That impulse feels deeply human. We crave certainty in an uncertain world, stability in the midst of constant change. But time doesn’t pause. Even what appears solid and still is, according to physics, always in motion. Time moves forward, relentlessly.

We’ve entered a new year, we’ve entered the book of Shemot, the Book of Names. In this week’s parashah, God reminds Moses that our ancestors knew God as El Shaddai, but not by the name Yud–Hey–Vav–Hey.  The gematria, the numerological value of this holiest name of God, is 26- Yod is 10, Hey is 5, Vav is 6, Hey is 5.  Twenty Six.  So 2026 may yet be the holiest of years!

It’s no accident that when we try to name ultimate reality, we reach for images of solidity and permanence—HaMakom (The Place), Tzur (The Rock), Magen (The Shield). We imagine God as stable, fixed, unchanging.

That may say more about our longing for stability and protection than it says about God.

We want life to hold still long enough for us to understand it, to frame the picture just right. Elizabeth Berg captures this feeling beautifully: “I feel like I’m walking around carrying a really full—overly full—bowl of water. When I don’t look at it, nothing spills.” And then the realization: “I felt like I’d just realized the world was made of glass.”  No wonder we imagine God as the source of stability.

Judaism offers many names for God, each reflecting a human attempt to grasp the Divine from a particular angle. But, in this week’s parsha, when Moses asks directly at the burning bush, “What is Your name?” God answers with something radically different: Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh—“I will be what I will be,” or, “I am becoming what I am becoming.” It is a refusal to be fixed, labeled, or contained. God is not a noun, but a verb.

Erich Fromm, in You Shall Be As Gods, explains this paradox: “Only a thing, that which has reached its final form, can have a name… Only idols have names, because they are things. The ‘living’ God cannot have a name.”

Freedom, the Israelites are about to learn, is unsettling. It means uncertainty. It means discovery without guarantees. And the deeper lesson—for them and for us—is this: if God is in a process of becoming, then so are we, created in the Divine image. Each of us brings God into the world in a way no one else can.

That’s both exhilarating and frustrating. We want answers. We want clarity. Instead, God says: you will never fully know Me—and life itself offers no final certainty. One question leads to another. Every answer opens a new door.

Our story begins with a call to leave home—to wander, to question, to seek. We are still Yisrael, the people who wrestle with God. Our spiritual inheritance is not certainty, but argument, curiosity, and the insistence that there is always another perspective. As Rabbi Irwin Kula puts it, we cannot “institutionalize the infinite.” And because we are made in God’s image, we too are always becoming. No wonder the Hebrew word for life, chayim, is plural—it means “lives.”

Rabbi Kula urges us to embrace what he calls the “sacred messiness of life.” He suggests that acting with 51% certainty—rather than waiting for 100%—can make us more compassionate, more flexible, and more forgiving of ourselves and others. Outcomes are never permanent, and control is always partial.

George Eliot captures this truth poignantly: “So our lives glide on: the river ends we don’t know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.” At some point, without fully realizing how, we find ourselves carried forward by the current of our lives. Like the Holy One, we are becoming who we are becoming.

I’m deeply moved by Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. It feels too profound to be manufactured—a declaration that uncertainty is not a flaw in the universe, but its foundation. We want answers, even difficult ones. But life offers movement instead.

That fragility becomes clear in moments of sudden loss—when we’re reminded how much we take for granted. We live as though tomorrow is promised, because otherwise it would be impossible to function. Yet every day is, in truth, a journey without guarantees.

Every time we leave our homes—whether for a day or a lifetime—we step into uncertainty. We entrust ourselves to roads, vehicles, systems, and people we do not know. We hope to return unchanged, yet we rarely do. Each journey, large or small, asks the same question: what gives us the courage to go forward when there are no guarantees? Our lives move through fragile bodies and limited time, and every day carries discovery, joy, fear, wisdom, and sometimes loss. Simply setting out is itself an act of faith, and the journey—imperfect, uncertain, and unfinished—is the blessing. That is what this name of God teaches us. There is no certainty. The only constant is change.

Rabbi Kula offers a striking midrash on Humpty Dumpty. What if Humpty didn’t fall—but jumped? What if the “great fall” was not a shattering, but an awakening? What if he didn’t want to be put back together again the way the king imagined, but instead hatched—choosing life, earth, and possibility over perfection?

“Life,” write Byron Sherwin and Seymour Cohen, “is a gift in the form of an enigma.” That is why God answers the question “What is Your name?” with mystery itself. Long before modern physics, Torah insists that uncertainty is woven into the fabric of reality.

We can resist it. Or we can build a spiritual life rooted in awe, gratitude, and courage—learning to live fully in the becoming.