Naming the Deity

I’m no theology student. My concept of God is fluid, constantly changing, shifting in shape, flavor and dimension, depending on what I experience in life. Faith is at war with logic, sense and emotion are clashing as I waffle between what I need to believe and what I probably actually believe. In considering the issue of divine punishment, the role of God during the Holocaust, the annual wrestling I did with the Book of Life concept as invoked during the High Holidays, reading the New York Times’ Portraits of Courage in the months after 9/11, I always envied those who could believe unshaken and unquestioning, those who found the answer “God has His reason” satisfying enough to abandon their inclination toward a passionate, emotional reaction and substitute an even more passionate faith.

These days, religious passion can be a problem. Though I’ve only once felt the sting of an anti-Semitic comment (uttered not in hatred, but in ignorance), I think that these days, we’re more afraid than we used to be. (Mel and his “Passion” helped to re-ignite the flame of Christian religious fervor, and after 9/11, everyone knows about Islamic fundamentalism. Not that they’re the same, but they’re both part of the foundation of fear.)

For instance, today I was on Ryze, the online professional networking website, and clicked, as I often have, on someone’s web page. I saw entries in guestbooks, signed with the closing “In Christ.” A shudder went through me, not because I’m scared that the guestbook signer was going to track me down and accuse me of killing his Lord, but because it represented this person’s reality: for him, religion has crossed over into the arena of the professional.

But is this kind of erosion between “church and state” any different from the game of “Jewish geography,” played by thousands of Jews as they try to make connections between the members of their personal and professional networks? In a word, yes. Jewish geography’s social—people meet people through school, professions or other involvements. Signing guestbooks with “In Christ” presupposes that the reader should know and love Jesus, and that if he doesn’t, he should. The hope, one presumes, is that leaving such a signature will plant the seeds for a future conversion.

Of course, I may be oversensitive, but that’s partly because from a very young age, we weren’t even allowed to write the name “God” in English. I went to yeshiva from kindergarten straight through high school, where teachers stressed concepts that seemed, to our young minds, unfathomable. Of course, they were trying to set the foundations of our theology, of our impression of God, or as they insisted we write it, G-D.

It always struck me as more than a little strange, this insistence on the dash between two otherwise innocuous English letters. After all, we were taught repeatedly that the name of God is firstly, not English. Secondly, the Name itself was ineffable, unpronounceable by human voices. The true name of God consisted of all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, joined together and unvocalizable. This practice crossed over to God’s “other names,” from the Torah and beyond, that letter substitutions were used rather than pronounce the nicknames as written. Shaddai became Shakai, Elohim became Elokim, etc. If we slipped and used the actual word, said Elohim instead of Elokim, there was an audible gasp, as if someone had slipped into class munching on a bag of pork rinds. Once any of these “real names” were written on the page or in any kind of permanent medium, the paper became “shamos,” and had to be buried (in something called a geniza) rather than discarded. The only times we were permitted to use the “real names” was when making an actual brakhah (blessing), or when reading aloud from the Torah text in an educational context. I think I remember one of the medieval commentators (Rashi, if memory serves) spelling out the name somewhere, which led to the inevitable, unspoken challenge that we all internalized: to attempt the vocalization might help us to know God. (So that’s what the Tree of Life tasted like…)

One of the biggest adjustments in moving out of the yeshiva world for college was learning to use the “Name of God” in my secular studies. Especially as an English major, you can't read one work of literature without encountering references to God. Of course, it wasn’t really the name of God; it was just the word “god,” but with a capital G and no dash, used to mean the monotheistic, Judeo-Christian God.

As careful we had been in high school to not pronounce and not inscribe the Name of God, that is how frequently the name of God was invoked in the Christian contexts. Father, Son, Holy Ghost, all were fully vocalized and written out, all over the place. Occasionally, Christmas was rendered as Xmas, but it was never clear that holiness was the reason. Maybe, in its removal from the original Hebrew, the sanctity of The Name was literally lost in translation. Not once did my English professors, or even my New Testament teacher, recommend that we bury our notes when we were done with the class.

Considering it today, I don’t know which is better. Maintaining the sanctity of the name of God is good, but imbuing one three-letter English name with divine power doesn’t seem, to me, to be very helpful in education or in developing a personal theology. If Hebrew had a system of capitalization like English does, we’d be able to develop a better approach to the “Names of God.”

Too much thinking about theology makes my head swim. My relationship with God, whatever it is, is more in line with an ineffable string of Hebrew letters, that my heart keeps trying to pronounce and more clearly define.

Naming the Deity

I’m no theology student. My concept of God is fluid, constantly changing, shifting in shape, flavor and dimension, depending on what I experience in life. Faith is at war with logic, sense and emotion are clashing as I waffle between what I need to believe and what I probably actually believe. In considering the issue of divine punishment, the role of God during the Holocaust, the annual wrestling I did with the Book of Life concept as invoked during the High Holidays, reading the New York Times’ Portraits of Courage in the months after 9/11, I always envied those who could believe unshaken and unquestioning, those who found the answer “God has His reason” satisfying enough to abandon their inclination toward a passionate, emotional reaction and substitute an even more passionate faith.

These days, religious passion can be a problem. Though I’ve only once felt the sting of an anti-Semitic comment (uttered not in hatred, but in ignorance), I think that these days, we’re more afraid than we used to be. (Mel and his “Passion” helped to re-ignite the flame of Christian religious fervor, and after 9/11, everyone knows about Islamic fundamentalism. Not that they’re the same, but they’re both part of the foundation of fear.)

For instance, today I was on Ryze, the online professional networking website, and clicked, as I often have, on someone’s web page. I saw entries in guestbooks, signed with the closing “In Christ.” A shudder went through me, not because I’m scared that the guestbook signer was going to track me down and accuse me of killing his Lord, but because it represented this person’s reality: for him, religion has crossed over into the arena of the professional.

But is this kind of erosion between “church and state” any different from the game of “Jewish geography,” played by thousands of Jews as they try to make connections between the members of their personal and professional networks? In a word, yes. Jewish geography’s social—people meet people through school, professions or other involvements. Signing guestbooks with “In Christ” presupposes that the reader should know and love Jesus, and that if he doesn’t, he should. The hope, one presumes, is that leaving such a signature will plant the seeds for a future conversion.

Of course, I may be oversensitive, but that’s partly because from a very young age, we weren’t even allowed to write the name “God” in English. I went to yeshiva from kindergarten straight through high school, where teachers stressed concepts that seemed, to our young minds, unfathomable. Of course, they were trying to set the foundations of our theology, of our impression of God, or as they insisted we write it, G-D.

It always struck me as more than a little strange, this insistence on the dash between two otherwise innocuous English letters. After all, we were taught repeatedly that the name of God is firstly, not English. Secondly, the Name itself was ineffable, unpronounceable by human voices. The true name of God consisted of all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, joined together and unvocalizable. This practice crossed over to God’s “other names,” from the Torah and beyond, that letter substitutions were used rather than pronounce the nicknames as written. Shaddai became Shakai, Elohim became Elokim, etc. If we slipped and used the actual word, said Elohim instead of Elokim, there was an audible gasp, as if someone had slipped into class munching on a bag of pork rinds. Once any of these “real names” were written on the page or in any kind of permanent medium, the paper became “shamos,” and had to be buried (in something called a geniza) rather than discarded. The only times we were permitted to use the “real names” was when making an actual brakhah (blessing), or when reading aloud from the Torah text in an educational context. I think I remember one of the medieval commentators (Rashi, if memory serves) spelling out the name somewhere, which led to the inevitable, unspoken challenge that we all internalized: to attempt the vocalization might help us to know God. (So that’s what the Tree of Life tasted like…)

One of the biggest adjustments in moving out of the yeshiva world for college was learning to use the “Name of God” in my secular studies. Especially as an English major, you can't read one work of literature without encountering references to God. Of course, it wasn’t really the name of God; it was just the word “god,” but with a capital G and no dash, used to mean the monotheistic, Judeo-Christian God.

As careful we had been in high school to not pronounce and not inscribe the Name of God, that is how frequently the name of God was invoked in the Christian contexts. Father, Son, Holy Ghost, all were fully vocalized and written out, all over the place. Occasionally, Christmas was rendered as Xmas, but it was never clear that holiness was the reason. Maybe, in its removal from the original Hebrew, the sanctity of The Name was literally lost in translation. Not once did my English professors, or even my New Testament teacher, recommend that we bury our notes when we were done with the class.

Considering it today, I don’t know which is better. Maintaining the sanctity of the name of God is good, but imbuing one three-letter English name with divine power doesn’t seem, to me, to be very helpful in education or in developing a personal theology. If Hebrew had a system of capitalization like English does, we’d be able to develop a better approach to the “Names of God.”

Too much thinking about theology makes my head swim. My relationship with God, whatever it is, is more in line with an ineffable string of Hebrew letters, that my heart keeps trying to pronounce and more clearly define.