“Lord our God, make the teachings of Your Torah pleasant in our mouths, and in the mouths of Your entire people, the House of Israel and may we, our children, and the children of Your entire people, the House of Israel, all be knowers of Your Name, and students of Your Torah for its own sake. Blessed are You, Lord, who teaches the Torah to His people Israel.”
Siddur Tehillat Hashem
From a Jungian perspective, the name “I was, I am, I will be” represents a universal and timeless concept of the divine. The “I was” refers to the past, which is no longer embodied and is associated with the Jungian idea of the Collective Unconscious. This collective unconscious contains archetypes that we, psychologically speaking, mythologize and project onto nature and the cosmos. These archetypes are always in the background, imparting meaning to the present.
The “I am” refers to the present, which is associated with consciousness and the masculine principle, which is the sphere of order. In psychology, we turn to secondary personalization and project archetypes onto human relationships, like the biblical story of Jacob (Moon/Introverted/Heavenly) and Esau (Sun/Extroverted/Worldly). We often associate this principle with the father God.
The “I will be” represents the future and is associated with the Feminine principle, which precedes the masculine. In Jewish thought, this is known as the Shikhana, the feminine aspect of the Divine – representing endless potentiality and the sphere of creative Chaos. In Jungian thought, this principle is also associated with the collective unconscious, which represents the final connection to the start or the past, symbolized by the snake swallowing its own tail in the ouroboros.
Psychologically, this represents the ultimate, never-ending step of individuation, or secondary mythologizing. Here, we acknowledge the historical religious archetypes of the Divine and see them in our current lives, projecting mythological motifs onto our own, firsthand experiences. This allows the divine to be embodied in and by us, as it is (part of) us.
Furthermore, time in creation appears linear, but in truth, it is one whole, just like Hashem, emphasizing the concept of wholeness and unity in the universe.
“The most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living?”
C.G. Jung