When God approaches Moses at the burning bush, asking him to go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites, Moses rightfully asks, “Who shall I say is sending me? What name should I use?” 

For the first and only time, God says, “Eheyeh Asher Eheyeh, I Will Be What I Will Be.” But almost immediately, God gives him an additional answer to offer: “YHVH, the God of your fathers — the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob — has sent me to you; this shall be My name forever.”

What are we to make of this? What does any of this have to teach us about our purpose as Jews? 

God’s first answer is an acknowledgment that we are called to believe in a God that is constantly becoming — a futuring God. And if we are truly made in the image of God, we too must see ourselves as continually becoming people, a people oriented towards the future.   

To be part of the Jewish story is to believe that our future is made up of stories that have yet to be written. That our future is brighter than our past, and not something that happens to us but rather something we can imagine and co-construct together. It implies that those of us here today must see ourselves as both active participants in building the community we want and as being “good ancestors” for our future descendants.  

Who might those future descendants be? Six years ago, my colleague Amy Asin and I argued in these pages that we need to worry less about what the Jewish community looks like now and focus instead on building for what the Jewish community is becoming. If that was true in 2020, it is only truer today. 

If you don’t think we are living through one of the biggest demographic shifts in American Jewish life, you haven’t visited a Jewish pre-school or a religious school lately. The multiplicity of diverse Jewish identities, from racial and ethnic backgrounds to sexual orientation, gender identities, economic backgrounds and neurodiversity, is astounding and beautiful. It is a future that will be richer for encompassing the lived experiences of a greater number of individuals of diverse backgrounds and unique perspectives. In other words, to believe in a God of becoming means that we must embrace a God that creates the foundation for greater belonging in our communities, ones where everyone is noticed, known, needed and celebrated. 

This isn’t just a theological ideal, but a strategic driver behind the Union for Reform Judaism’s newest endeavor, Jewish Life & Leadership. We are fundamentally restructuring how we support our people because we recognize that separating youth, adults and congregational life no longer serve a community that is experiencing such a profound transformation. We are building an ecosystem designed for the “becoming” people we see in our pews, camps and pre-schools today.

Returning to the text, did God change God’s mind when offering the second answer? No. Rather, by naming the God of your fathers (and, might I add, your mothers), God is signaling to us the importance of grounding what we become in our shared history, past experiences, and life-giving wisdom. In other words, a future that isn’t rooted in something real and eternal will remain empty and shallow. By signaling out each of our forefathers, God is saying, “Don’t lose sight of where you come from. Remember what they have taught you. Learn from the past. Let it serve as a foundation for what you build, anew.”

We need both the God of our ancestors, of our mothers and fathers, as well as the futuring God if we want to build a thriving Jewish community. It’s why, when I was Jewishly homeless many decades ago, I found a home in Reform Judaism. This was a place that embraced the duality of those needs. 

The first mentor I had working in the Reform movement over 25 years ago was the late Leibel Fein, who coined the phrase, “Reform is a verb.” I used to cringe when people would ask, Jew and non-Jew alike, if I was a Reform-ed Jew. No, I’m a still-reforming Jew, I would answer, and I hope I never stop. 

But the Reform movement also invited me to return to our origin story by re-reading Torah through new eyes, embracing the eternal teachings of Shabbat, and examining our multifaceted history as a Jewish people across the centuries and continents.  

Lately, my fear is that the Jewish community, particularly those who lead it with the loudest platforms, has given up on believing in the God who proclaimed, “I will be what I will be. It is a mindset beset with nostalgia and fear and a belief that our golden age is behind us — or worse, that we have no agency over how our futures unfold. 

Luckily, I’ve learned that there are other ways to think about this work. One of the individuals who has modeled for me how we can embrace the ambiguity of our current moment and lean into new ways of thinking is Lisa Kay Solomon, an incredible futurist, designer and Jewish leader. She reminds me that we can ask different questions, like “What does the future need from us?”; and that by creating a more curious posture, we just might be able to shape new futures instead of assuming we are at the mercy of external forces. We need to cultivate more folks who think like the Lisas of the world, especially in Jewish legacy institutions.  

This is part of the work I feel called to do in my new role as vice president of Jewish Life & Leadership at the Union for Reform Judaism. I want us to embrace the teaching of being a “good ancestor.” I want to be like the nameless man who, when asked by Honi the Circle Maker why he was planting the carob tree if he would not live to bear its fruit, replied, “I found a world of carob trees. Just as my ancestors planted for me, so I plant for my children.” 

Let’s go plant.  

Rabbi Esther L. Lederman is the vice president of Jewish Life & Leadership at the Union for Reform Judaism.