~ How many times does Moshe finds an excuse not to go? Can you summarize each excuse?
~ How many times does God say "I will be with you"?
~ Moses grows up vayigdal moshe (Ex. 2:11) through an irrepressible selflessness: Without thinking about his personal reputation, standing within Egyptian society, or necessity for anonymity as a political refugee, he saves a Jew from being flogged to death (2:11), another from being beaten by a fellow Jew (2:13), and Yitro’s daughters from being harassed by male Midianite shepherds (2:17). More significantly, he never stops growing. He once claimed lo ish devarim anochi “I am not a man of words” (Ex. 4:10) matures to such an impressive level of expressiveness that the name of the Torah’s final book, Devarim, (Deut.1:1), honors this achievement.
~ The five-fold presence of "I will be" also points out that nothing is really set in stone. We make our future as we go, nothing is written in our destiny. ‘What is’ is not inevitability ‘what will be.’
~ Just before Musaf we will say the opening word of the Kaddish, yitgadal, praising ‘God magnified’ (from the same root for ‘growth’ g.d.l.). May we hold into our consciousness the goal of growing the divine image in each ofour lives, just as Moshe did.