This week’s Torah portion opens with God appearing to Moses. The moment is quiet in tone but seismic in consequence. Moses is not being offered comfort or insight. He is being given a command that will alter the fate of an entire people and confront the most powerful empire of its time. With these opening words, the Torah signals a shift. Divine command is no longer shaping only a life. It is about to reshape history.
This is not the first time God has appeared in the Torah. But it is the first time that appearance carries unavoidable historical weight. Until now, God’s demands have been personal, relational, and contained. Here, they become public, political, and irreversible. The question that follows is not whether God is present. That is assumed. The question is how divine command moves from the private realm into the public world.
To understand what makes this moment possible, we have to look backward. Long before God confronts Pharaoh, He confronts Abraham. Long before a nation is commanded to move, one man is told to go.
The portion of Vaera (Exodus 6:2-9:35) records God’s appearance to Abraham, not as a ruler issuing decrees, but as a presence shaping character. Abraham’s life unfolds through a series of demands that test loyalty, restraint, hospitality, and moral judgment. The culmination of that relationship is the binding of Isaac. The Akeida is not a national drama. No one is watching. There are no political consequences and no immediate outcomes that reshape the world. Abraham is asked to act without explanation and without assurance that the future he was promised will survive the act itself.
That moment defines the kind of human being God intends to place at the root of history. Covenant does not begin with mass movements. It begins with obedience, discipline, and the willingness to act without guarantees. Before God will challenge an empire, He forms a person capable of responding to command.
Only after that groundwork is laid does the Torah return, generations later, to another appearance. This time, God speaks to Moses with a declaration that reframes reality itself: “God spoke to Moses and said to him: I am Hashem. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by My name Hashem I was not known to them” Exodus chapter 6 verses 2–3.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks noted that this does not mean the patriarchs were unfamiliar with God’s name. They invoked it often. What they did not yet experience was what that name represents in action. In Vaera, God reveals Himself not only as Creator of the natural world, but as the force that directs history. Slavery is no longer inevitable. Power is no longer self justifying. Time itself is no longer static. History acquires direction.
The plagues that follow are not demonstrations of raw power. They are judgments. Each one confronts a system that treats human beings as expendable and exposes the moral bankruptcy of empire. God does not intervene as a force of nature. He intervenes as a moral authority, reshaping the destiny of a people and placing them onto the stage of history with responsibility, law, and memory.
The movement from Abraham to Moses reveals a deliberate sequence. God does not begin by overthrowing regimes. He begins by demanding faithfulness from individuals. Only when conscience has been formed does history become meaningful. The Torah insists that public redemption rests on private obedience.
That structure explains something about our own experience of the world. One of the defining features of modern life is the sense that history is always unfolding in front of us. Wars, revolutions, collapses, and realignments arrive in real time, unfiltered and relentless. It raises a quiet but serious question. Has history always been this intense, or are we simply more exposed to it now?
The Torah’s answer is steady and unsentimental. History has always been fragile. What Vaera introduces is not chaos, but meaning. God does not promise predictability. He promises presence. When God tells Moses “I am Hashem,” He is not offering reassurance about outcomes. He is declaring that history is not abandoned, even when its direction is unclear.
That distinction matters. Faith after Vaera is not confidence in how events will turn out. It is confidence that events matter. Human action is not swallowed by inevitability, and suffering is not the final word. God is present not only in moments of clarity, but in moments of command, when movement is required before certainty is granted.
The Torah’s message is demanding and durable. God shapes history by first shaping people. He calls individuals before He calls nations. He asks for trust before He delivers redemption. That sequence has not changed. It is the grammar of history itself.
God appeared to Abraham, and the world learned what faith looks like in private. God appeared to Moses, and the world learned that history can be challenged. We live after both moments. That means we are never without responsibility, and never without God.
