Word: אנכי, Anokhi, “I” or “I am”
Context: The first word of the 10 Commandments: “[Anokhi] I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 20:2).
Elsewhere in the Torah: The word Anokhi is used for the first time in the Torah by Adam in the Garden of Eden after eating of the forbidden fruit: “I heard the sound [kol] of You [God] in the garden, and I was afraid because I [anokhi] was naked, so I hid” (Genesis 3:10). The very first thing that happens to the human anokhi – to our self essence – is that it goes into hiding out of shame.
We lose that strong I-self so early, sending it into exile and spending our lives adopting false selves, trying on new ones in an impossible search for self. In a later Torah use of anokhi, we hear Yaakov declare to his father: Anokhi Esav bekhorekha. I am [anokhi] Esav, your first-born. This is how we feel sometimes, that we need to adopt someone else’s anokhi –to abandon our own essence and pretend to be someone else – in order to fit into societal norms and structures, in order to be loved.
Interpretation: At Mount Sinai, God models a radically different attitude toward one’s Anokhi, towards one’s own inner Self. Instead of hiding it as Adam did, God reveals God’s own Anokhi amidst great fanfare, amidst thunder and lightning, shofar blasts and smoke. Out of all that commotion comes the word Anokhi – I am. I exist. I, Myself, My soul, am here. You can hear it resounding off the mountain walls. Anokhi. Anokhi- i i i i . God fully inhabits and celebrates God’s own Anokhi, the endless strength and power of it, the fullness of it.
And God celebrates God’s Anokhi not alone, but in relationship. Anokhi Hashem Elokekha. I am Hashem your God. You are part of my Anokhi, you as an individual, each of you – Elokekha is written in the singular – each of you is connected, is reflected in this divine Anokhi self, like faces mirrored in water (Proverbs 27:19). As the Sefat Emet says, at Mount Sinai, “each one recognized the divine power from above that is inside him” (Shavuot, 5639). Through God’s powerful revelation of God’s Anokhi, each of us comes to know our own anokhi, the divine aspect of self planted in each person from eternity.
While for Adam, the kol, the sound of God in the garden, led him to hide his anokhi, at Mount Sinai, the many kolot, “sounds” of God – the thunder and the shofar and the speaking of the 10 commandments – at Mount Sinai, the many kolot redeem our human anokhi, bringing it back to life, inviting it home after a long exile: inviting us each to come back to Self.
Message: Don’t think only God is meant to have an Anokhi, to have such a strong self and shout it out with pride. Don’t think: ok, that’s God, but we humans are meant to be humble and low and self-hating. How can that be? We were created in the image of God. God is our mirror, our model. We are all little pieces of the divine, and we are meant to inhabit our Selves with joy, and to shout out from the rooftops – out of the fullness of our Selves — I am! I exist! See me roar!
We spend a lot of time feeling small, unworthy, unlovable, not mattering, not enough (fill in the blank), but maybe this week we can take a page out of God’s book (literally) and revel in our own divinely granted glorious anokhi self..
And when we do inhabit that full self and celebrate it, love pours out of us to all the other divine souls around us, a love that is the essence of the 10 commandments, and indeed, of theTorah as a whole.
