[Avodah] All the paths of Jewish history have led up to this moment.

[Prof. Levine]

The following is from RSRH's commentary on Shemos 6

3 [And was so] even when I appeared to Avraham, Yitzchak and Ya'akov 
as the All-sufficing God but had not become known to
them as that which My Name Hashem signifies.

This new revelation of God had been prepared from the very beginning
of Jewish history. All the paths of Jewish history have led up to this
moment. God says:

"I was already Hashem when I appeared to Avraham, Yitzchak and Ya'akov
only as Kale Shaki and did not allow My intended sovereignty as HaShem to
become manifest to them in their own lives.

"You are wondering why things have only become worse, and why
even your mission has served only to push your misery to the utmost
limit. Do you not see that your entire history up to this point has been
a downhill road? Avraham was a Nasi Elokim among the nations, whereas
Ya'akov was an unfortunate, hard-working servant 'who had to toil in
order to get himself a wife and then was forced to perform additional
labor in order to keep her' (see Hoshea 12:13).

"I could have led you on an upward path. Instead of giving Avraham
a son in his hundredth year, I could have established for him a family
by the time he was seventy, and I could have allowed his progeny to
flourish and become a people in happy, favorable circumstances on its
own native soil. But then this people would not have become God's
people, Am HaShem, the people through which God will be revealed as 
HaShem. Then
this people, like all the other peoples, would have been rooted solely in
the world of things that can be seen and touched. Like all the other
peoples, this people would have had only physical foundations, and
would have sought only material power and material greatness, aspiring
to the spiritual and to the moral only to the extent that these were
compatible with, and beneficial to, its material ambitions.

"But this people is not to be like the other nations. Unlike the others,
this people is to be founded solely upon God and upon the fulfillment
of His Will in moral freedom, and is to have an earthly hold and an
earthly standing only from and for this God and this fulfillment."
The idea of a free almighty God and of mankind made free by that
God has vanished from the earth. People and nations have sunk into
materialism in both theory and practice (cf. Commentary above, 3:14).
The emergence of the people of Avraham is to reawaken consciousness
of freedom and to release mankind from the bonds of materialism.


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