Parashat Shemot opens with names. V’eileh shemot b’nei Yisrael, “these are the names of the children of Israel.” Before anything else, the Torah pauses to list each son who went down to Egypt with Jacob. Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, etc., each name recorded, each life counted. This is what a community does: it remembers its people not as numbers but as names. Each member is unique and irreplaceable.
But memory does not hold. Egypt forgets. The generation dies. A new Pharaoh arises who “knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1:8). The names that the Torah preserved with such care become, to Egypt, just a population of migrants to be counted, controlled, and culled if needed. This is what forgetting permits: people become problems to be managed or even disposed of.
The Torah names. Pharaoh forgets. And caught between these two forces, remembering and effacement, stand two women whom the Torah also names: Shifrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives. Pharaoh commands them to kill every male child at birth. They refuse. The text offers only that as an explanation: they “feared God” (Exodus 1:17). That word yirah, usually translated as fear, but carrying the sense of awe, of standing before something greater than oneself. These two women, named when Pharaoh would like all Israel to be nameless, act from that deep instinct: not ideology, not political calculation, simply the recognition that life is not theirs to destroy but to protect.
A new movement can learn from this. The Movement for Progressive Judaism brings together two movements and dozens of communities with distinct histories, different liturgical emphases, varied approaches to practice. We will not always agree on strategy or emphasis. But we share something prior to strategy: a commitment to the tradition we have inherited and the future generations we are called to nurture. That deep, major shared commitment is more foundational than any programme.
Later in the parashah, Moses encounters the burning bush, a fire that illuminates without consuming, a presence that draws near while remaining beyond reach. It burns but is not consumed. The fire of Sinai did not destroy the mountain. The tradition we carry is the same: it burns in us without reducing us to ash, illuminates our lives without incinerating us. Each generation receives this flame and passes it forward to the next, not diminished but kindled anew.
When Moses asks for a name, God responds with that strange phrase: Ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I will be what I will be” (Exodus 3:14). Not a “I am what I am,” static and fixed. The Hebrew uses the imperfect tense (in modern grammars, the future tense), unfinished, pointing forward. It opens countless possibilities, what God will yet reveal, what Israel will yet become, what this encounter will yet unfold. This name is not a label but a promise, an opening, a birthing.
This is the theological heart of Progressive Judaism. We are not “progressive” because we simply move with contemporary culture or dress current values in religious garments. We are progressive because we trust that revelation continues, that the God who spoke to Moses continues to speak to us today, that Torah unfolds its meaning across generations, that our encounter with the Eternal is living and ongoing rather than merely inherited.
What does it mean to be a new progressive movement? Perhaps this: we stand before the fire, shoes removed, on holy ground. We do not yet know all that we will become. But we trust the Voice that calls us forward.
Ehyeh asher ehyeh. We will be what we will be, together as a new movement, with all its promises of a bright future.
- Rabbi Dr René Pfertzel serves Maidenhead Synagogue.