I want the world to know what dignity looks like when cruelty fails. This week’s Torah as Mirror is called Here I Am. Blessing doesn’t always arrive as comfort. Sometimes it arrives as clarity that can’t be undone. May the telling itself become repair. For those who came before me, who could not get through the door. And for Amelia, who deserves better.
Carrying Fire (oil pastel)
Torah as Mirror — Week 12
Here I Am
Parashat Shemot
The book of Exodus does not begin with freedom.
It begins with fear.
Names are spoken, and then they are forgotten.
A people grows, and their presence is read as threat.
Fear hardens into strategy. Strategy becomes policy. Policy becomes cruelty that no longer needs to call itself cruelty.
This is how Torah teaches us to recognize a world shaped by fear.
And it is into this world—not a healed one—that Moses is called.
The Call
When Moses encounters the burning bush, he is not looking for purpose.
He is not asking to be chosen.
He is attending to what is directly in front of him, far from power, far from home, carrying a life shaped by rupture and unfinished belonging.
The call does not come as affirmation.
It comes as interruption.
Moses, Moses.
God does not call Moses’ readiness.
God does not praise his strength.
God calls his name.
And when Moses answers—Here I am—it is not confidence speaking.
It is availability.
I have learned that transformation does not begin when we feel prepared.
It begins when we are still willing to answer.
“They Will Not Listen to Me”
Moses’ first response is not eagerness.
It is fear.
What if they do not listen to me?
This is not insecurity.
It is recognition.
Voice forms in relationship. Identity forms where voice meets response. When someone speaks—again and again—and is not met, something happens inside. You do not just feel disappointed. You adapt.
You soften needs.
You lower expectations.
You learn which truths are too costly to name out loud.
This is especially true in sacred space—family, community, institutions meant to hold care. When a person is not listened to there, the injury is often quiet. It teaches the body where it is expected to remain, and how much room it is allowed to take.
This is not weakness.
It is formation under pressure.
Torah does not deny this formation.
It names it.
Fear, Made Structural
God responds with words that have always unsettled me:
Who makes a mouth? Who makes one mute or deaf, seeing or blind?
This is not an explanation of suffering.
It is a refusal of a lie.
The lie is that credibility belongs only to those who are easy to hear.
The lie is that worth depends on seamless access.
The lie is that being believed is the condition for being called.
I have learned—both personally and professionally—that fear does not stay internal. It becomes structural. It builds gates. It invokes safety. It delays and deflects and proceeds without those left waiting.
It does this quietly.
Often politely.
Often while believing itself to be reasonable.
Torah has shown us this pattern before—in families, in communities, in nations.
Exodus is where it is finally named.
Repair Is Not the Same as Presence
There is a moment in this story that we often rush past.
God does not say to Moses, It will all be fixed.
God does not promise timelines or eventual improvement.
God stays.
That matters.
Because in human systems—especially sacred ones—repair is often offered in place of relationship.
We’re working on it now.
It’s being addressed.
Things will be different going forward.
But harm is not shaped only by what happens.
It is shaped by what follows.
Attachment is not determined by the absence of rupture.
It is determined by whether someone remains present in the rupture.
A door being repaired does not undo the experience of waiting outside.
A future fix does not reach backward and become care.
Process does not replace response.
I am not interested in blame.
I am interested in time—
in what it means when care arrives late or not at all,
and who is asked to carry the cost of that delay.
Torah understands time morally.
Exodus does not erase slavery once liberation begins.
Freedom does not require forgetting.
Repair does not demand silence.
What shapes identity is not only that something was blocked,
but that the burden of noticing, naming, reminding, and waiting remained with the one who needed access.
That is how fear becomes structural.
And that is why God does not rush Moses past his hesitation.
God does not say, It will work out.
God says, in effect: I am here with you in this.
The Staff
God asks Moses what he is already holding.
A staff.
Not a weapon.
Not a credential.
A support—something shaped by the ground he moves through.
Power does not come from transcending limitation.
It comes from claiming what has sustained you.
Torah is not asking Moses to become unmarked.
It is asking him to bring his body, his voice, the way he already moves through the world—openly—into service.
And then there is the burning bush.
The bush burns and is not consumed.
This is not spectacle.
It is instruction.
Service that consumes the self is not sacred.
A call that requires disappearance is not divine.
The Fire That Is Carried
At first, the fire is external.
It appears in a bush, outside Moses, arresting his attention.
But Moses does not spend the rest of his life returning to the bush to ask what to do.
He carries something forward.
The authority Moses grows into is not obedience to a voice outside himself.
It is not submission.
It is not being ruled by fear or approval.
Moses internalizes the fire.
The fire does not consume him.
It does not override his judgment or erase his discernment.
It becomes orientation.
This is where spiritual authority often gets misunderstood. We are taught to look for a voice outside ourselves that tells us what to do, to defer, to silence our own knowing in the name of obedience.
Torah tells a different story.
The fire appears once.
Then Moses must learn how to carry it.
He argues.
He hesitates.
He resists.
He makes mistakes.
And still, the authority remains.
Not because he is perfectly obedient,
but because he is no longer ruled by voices that consume him.
This is what mature authority looks like:
not being driven by fear,
not governed by approval,
not compelled by threat.
It is being guided by an internal fire that illuminates without burning.
There is a difference between being commanded and being called.
A command overrides.
A call takes root.
Moses does not become powerful because he keeps hearing God’s voice.
He becomes powerful because he learns to trust the fire he now carries.
The Mirror
At a certain point, Torah stops being something we read.
It becomes something we’re living inside.
If this story is stirring you, it’s not because Moses is unfamiliar.
It’s because you’ve been here.
You know what it is to hear a call before you have language for it.
You know what it is to hesitate—not because you doubt yourself, but because you’ve learned what it costs to speak and not be met.
As you read this, notice what’s happening in you.
Where have you learned to soften your voice?
Where have you learned to wait longer than you should have had to?
Where have you been told—explicitly or quietly—that access, attention, or care would come later?
And notice something else.
What fire have you already internalized?
Not the kind that burns you out.
The kind that steadies you.
The kind that hasn’t left, even when you tried to put it down.
This essay is not asking you to agree with me.
It’s not asking you to take a position.
It’s asking you to locate yourself.
Are you still waiting at the edge, hoping someone else will authorize your presence?
Or are you beginning to trust what has already taken root in you?
Torah becomes a mirror when we stop asking, What does this mean?
and start asking, Where am I in this?
If you feel unsettled here, that’s not failure.
It’s movement.
If you feel recognized, that’s not coincidence.
It means you’re already responding.
Hineni doesn’t arrive all at once.
Sometimes it begins as a quiet awareness:
I am here.
Something in me knows this.
I’m no longer willing to disappear.
The Turn
There comes a moment when survival gives way to something else.
Not rage.
Not exposure for its own sake.
Refusal.
Not refusal of relationship—
refusal to disappear.
I will not stop until I am blessed was never about conquest.
It was about dignity that does not require permission.
Here, in Shemot, that dignity matures.
Moses is not authorized by his wound.
He is authorized by his clarity.
He is no longer ruled by voices that consume him.
He is guided by a fire he can carry.
He does not lead by recounting injury.
He does not persuade by fluency.
He becomes a steward of meaning—someone who holds truth steady when fear distorts it, who speaks without guarantee of being heard, who remains present without asking for applause.
This is what dignity looks like when cruelty fails.
What I Choose
I am choosing to keep speaking without spectacle.
I am choosing presence without self-erasure.
I am choosing tables where access is assumed and voice is not negotiated.
I am no longer asking to be let in.
I am creating something that does not require permission to exist.
If you know what it is to wait at the gate,
if you have learned to carry truth alone,
if you are done shrinking to preserve comfort—
there is room here.
Blessings
May you know the difference
between being unseen and being untrue.
May you trust the clarity that emerged
where fear once tried to quiet you.
May you carry what sustained you
without apology.
May you refuse disappearance
without becoming cruel in return.
And may you recognize dignity
when it meets you—
quiet, intact, and whole.
If this reflection resonates, you are welcome to read, share, or sit with it quietly.
Torah as Mirror is a weekly practice of truth, dignity, and presence.
If you want to keep walking together, you are welcome to follow or save.