The parasha of Vá'era begins with some fateful words.

It wouldn't be too much to say that they changed the course of history

because they changed the way people thought about history.

In fact, they gave birth to the very idea of history.

Listen to the words.

God said to Moses, I am Hashem. I appeared to Avram to Yitzchak and to Yaakov as

Kail Shaddai, but by my name Hashem, I did not make myself fully known to them. What exactly

does this mean? As Rashi points out, it doesn't mean that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah,

Rivka, Rochel and Leia didn't know God by the name of Hashem.

To the contrary, God's first words to Abraham, leave your land, your birthplace and your father's

house, were said using the name Hashem.

It even says just a few verses later, Vyera Hashem el Avram. Hashem appeared to Abram and said,

To your descendants, I will give this land. So God had appeared to Avram as Hashem. And in the very

next verse, it says that Avram built an altar and called on the name of Hashem. So Avram himself knew the name and had used it.

Yet it's clear from what God says to Moses that something new is about to happen,

a divine revelation of a kind that had never happened before, something that no one,

not even the people closest to God, had yet seen. What was it? The answer is that through

Bureshid, God is the God of creation, the God of nature, the aspect of God we call, with different

nuances, but roughly the same sense, Eloquim, or Kel Shadai, or even Konesha Maimba Arez, creator of heaven and earth.

Now, in a sense, that aspect of God was known to everyone in the ancient world.

It's just that they didn't see nature as the work of one God, but of many.

The God of the sun, the God of the rain, the goddesses of the sea and the earth, the vast

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