[Avodah] “I shall be what I will wish to be.”

[L. E. Levine]

The following is from the new translation of the 
commentary of RSRH to Chumash Shemos:

3: 14 Thereupon God said to 
Moshe:  Ehyeh  ahsher  Ehyeh  [I shall be that 
which I wish to be]! He said: This is what you 
shall say to the Children of Israel: ehyeh has sent me to you.


14 If I am to give an idea of Myself that will effect, in the person who has
understood it and become absorbed by it, decisive change, raising him
above and beyond all the other creatures and bringing him into direct,
intimate relationship to Me, then I will state My Name and say of Myself:
“I shall be what I will wish to be.”

All other beings are what they have to be; their existence is bound
up with the Will of the One Who alone can say “I am” and also “I shall
be what I will wish to be.” This Name expresses the personal, absolute,
and free nature of God. Inasmuch as God does not say here “I am” but
“I shall be,” He stresses that the future is completely dependent on His
Will and is free of any other dependence. This Name gives expression
to the characteristic Jewish conception of God, an entirely new conception,
which is to be made known to mankind through Israel’s deliverance
from Egypt, and which eventually will bring about the redemption
of the whole world.

Non-Jewish thought conceives of God as, at most, the Cause of the
physical existence of the world, ever since it came into existence. Even
when this thought rises above viewing God as part of the world (immanence)
— a view that is tantamount to denial — and recognizes His
existence beyond the world (transcendence), it still limits God’s work
to the past. At one single moment God was in touch with the world,
the moment in which the world was brought from the potential —
God’s Power or Will — into the realm of the actual, i.e., actual existence.
 From that moment — according to this view — God’s work, the world,
was completed. Everything, even the most distant future, is simply the
necessary result of the general order that was imprinted on the world
when it was founded.

According to this worldview, everything follows unchanging, fixed
laws, which, at most, once originated from the immense power of a
higher Source. Hence, only man, with his — apparently — free powers
of action can fashion an — apparently — new future. But how can it
be that God and the world are bound, and man is free?! To save the
honor of unfree, bound God, this view is forced to deny the freedom
of man. This freedom, this definite reality in the consciousness of every
human being, which contradicts the pagan view of the world and of
God, is therefore passed off as a delusion. Man is not free. What he
imagines to be his own free decisions are but the unconscious effects
of influences rooted in and arising from his past. And so, in heaven
and on earth, in the whole expanse of the universe, there is no one
who can say “I shall be!” for no one can say “I will wish to be!”

Ehyeh  ahsher  Ehyeh rises up against this delusion, the denial of the freedom
of God and of man, tears it down, and upholds the truth instead:
God, Who freely determines the future; and with Him, free man, whose
future is in his own hands.

<snip>

These words — Ehyeh  ahsher  Ehyeh— break man’s chains, the chains of
any other power, and set man upright and free in the service of God,
to build the future in partnership with God. Free man, obeying the free
God, rules the world for the sake of a future delineated by the free Will
of God. With every impression of godliness that man impresses on his
own inner world, with every such impression that he stamps on the
external world about him, man helps to build this future.

The guarantee that this future will ultimately be completely realized
lies in the fact that God, in His freedom, created the world for the sake
of this future. Hence, even seemingly antithetical conditions and events
must be leading to this one, sure and exalted goal. We express this
confidence in the recurring Kaddish avowal, which is woven into the
order of our prayers: Yisgadal v'yiskadash sh'mei 
rabbaw B'allmaw dee v'raw chir'usei,
“God’s great Name will be recognized in all its greatness and holiness in the
world which He Himself has created according to His free Will.” 
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