“And God (Elokim) spoke to Moses and said to him ‘I am God (HaShem, the four letter Name of God). I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai, but my name HaShem I did not make myself known to them” (Exodus 6:2-3).
All the commentators point out that even a superficial reading of Genesis will show that HaShem (the four letter Name of God) did in fact appear and speak many times with all the Patriarchs. Therefore what does it mean that God only spoke to them in the guise of El Shaddai?
Rashi explains that in many places in the Torah the four letter name of God indicates that God fulfills His promises. God explained to Moses that I promised the land of Israel to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but they did not see the fulfillment of this promise, therefore to them I appeared as El Shaddai, but to you I am now revealing my manifest aspect of Hashem, in that now that promise will be fulfilled.
From this we can understand that the name El Shaddai connotes a certain level of constriction and holding back, whereas the four letter name of God represents a more expansive and fulfilling aspect of Divinity. We are told in fact by the Sages that the name Shaddai can be understood as an acronym: She’Amar L’olamo Dai, “that He said to His world – ‘enough’.” This means that when God created the world He at a certain point stopped its continual expansion.
Yet, this explanation seems to be somewhat problematic in light of the measurements of modern science that in fact the universe is not only expanding, but at an awesome rate. Therefore, how do we understand this statement by the Sages?
There are a number of ways we can understand this. First of all, the Sages could mean that God determined that the world, as large as it would be, would still be finite in relation to the infinite reality of God. Science now confirms that the universe consists of tens of billions of galaxies, each one larger than the human mind can really conceive. Nonetheless, in relation to infinity, the world still has its limits.
More fundamentally though, we can answer that this statement by the Sages alludes to gravity and its ability to hold the world in place. Have you ever marveled that while the earth is continually moving by spinning on its axis, while the earth makes its yearly rotation at fantastic speed around the sun, while our solar system is flying through the milky way and our entire galaxy is speeding at astronomical speeds through space, we nevertheless seem to be stationary!!
Similar to how the description of light on the first day of creation and how the Sages explain this mysterious light parallels the creation of electromagnetic energy, so too, we can understand the explanation of the name of Shaddai to allude to the creation of gravity, that force which balances the ever expanding universe (“that He said to His world – ‘enough’”) and allows us to exist. In this way we see that the universe is both expanding and contracting.
This awareness helps us understand the first verse of our portion where Elokim speaks to Moses and says: “I am Hashem.” In essence God revealed to Moses that the name Elokim which represents constriction and judgement, is in reality the same as HaShem, which represents expansion, mercy and giving. The world and the human psyche is in truth a very fine balance of both these energies of constriction and expansion, as represented by both these names of God.
