What God Is, and What Can Be

Sermon Shabbat Shmot 5782

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

You are no doubt aware of the tendency of Jews who immigrated to America to change their names, particularly last names.  Greenberger became Green; Katznelson became Katz, or sometimes even Nelson; Belinsky became Berlin, and so on.  Movie and TV stars were legendary for doing this, of course.  Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas; Jacob Garfinkle became John Garfield; Bernie Schwartz became Tony Curtis.  Even Jon Stewart Leibovitz became Jon Stewart. 

First names, too, changed with the geography.  Lazer and Soreh became Louis and Sarah, but they named their kids Sidney and Brenda, and they named their children Steven and Heather, and they named their offspring MacKenzie and Austin.  But sometimes things changed differently in the next generation. 

This is an update on a classic Jewish joke about names. 

A young boy is walking with his father in the middle of the 21st century. A passerby ends up chatting with the child and is impressed with the interaction, and so he says to the father, “Your little boy is so smart and handsome.”  And the father says, “Thank you. I'm flattered. And so is my son.”  And the stranger says, “What's your son's name?”  And the father says, “His name is Shlomo.”  The man is taken aback.  “Shlomo? What kind of name is Shlomo?”  And the father says, “Well, he was named after his late grandfather, whose name was Scott.”

So this week the name of the Torah portion is Shmot which in Hebrew means “names.”  That is, the name is “names.”  Which raises an interesting question: how much does what we name someone, or something, matter?

A name is a funny thing.  Superficially a name seems unimportant, an arbitrary designation.  Would you really be a different person if you had been given a different name? 

Yet in another sense names can hold great meaning indeed.  William Shakespeare famously has Juliet say, “What’s in a name?  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  It would, surely, but would it be the same?  Names do matter; would that play have been nearly as successful if it was called, as author Tom Stoppard suggests in “Shakespeare in Love,” “Romeo and Ethel”?

In Ashkenazic Jewish tradition we never name a child after a living relative, partially out of the superstition that it will be a jinx to both the child and the one he or she is named for.  On the other hand, Sephardim often name after living relatives, leading to jokes about all Sephardim being named David ben David ben David on Israeli comedy shows.  Some authors are quite good at creating memorable names for characters: Oliver Twist’s life takes many turns; Holly Golightly floats elegantly just above reality; Han Solo is not going to be a team player.  Sometimes names appear to predict greatness; at other times they foreshadow misfortune.  Can anyone forget the acronym of the Committee to Re-Elect the President when Nixon ran back in 1972—CREEP? 

The significance of a name is just as true of places as it is of people.  Would the town of Tombstone be quite as infamous if it had been called “Harmony, Arizona?”  What if “Deadwood, South Dakota” had been called “Live Oaks” instead?  And how many of us would like to admit that we were natives of a place named “Oxnard”?  Of course, there are some locations that seem almost miraculously misnamed: Yerushalayim, Jerusalem, means City of Peace, ir shalom, but it has been forcibly and brutally conquered some 44 times throughout history.

This week’s Torah portion of Shmot, the great parsha that begins the Book of Exodus is called quite literally “Names.”  As Nancy has explained so well, it is an extraordinarily rich Torah portion, filled with famous stories and powerful experiences.  At the heart of it, in a section that I will chant tomorrow morning, the Burning Bush episode fills up an entire aliyah and it raises a deep and elusive subject: how do we understand the essence of God?  The answer begins with the names we use for God.

Now you need to know that Jews, while we have just one God, have many names for that God.  The first name used in the Torah is Elohim, which is kind of a generic word for God, and when someone speaks of God in Israel today in a popular or expressive context, they might just use that word, Elohim.  Actually, Elohim is in the masculine plural in the Hebrew, and it technically means “gods.”  In fact, it’s used to describe the gods of other peoples, the “non-gods” if you will, in some Biblical and rabbinic contests.  A shorter version of it, Elim was in our Mi Chamocha prayer tonight, taken from the Song of Moses at the Sea a little later in Exodus, where it is used to say that other gods aren’t comparable to our own God. Yet we use it consistently in Jewish liturgy—most blessings begin Baruch Ata Adonai Eloheinu… and Eloheinu is just a conjugation of Elohim, God, into “our God.”  So even this very first name of God isn’t simple in Judaism.

I once taught a class on the many names for God in Judaism.  I listed all the ones I could think of, checked around to see which ones I’d missed, and finally ended up totaling, I think, about 70 fairly common names we Jews use for God.  It’s likely, however, that there are many more.  These names evolved over time as we changed as a people, and as we became acquainted with names that other people used to describe God.  Instead of accepting that they were the names of the other gods, we simply believe that they described other aspects of the same one God.  Still, the names reveal important things about our own understandings of God. 

There is a famous section of Genesis in which Jacob, our patriarchal ancestor, has a great dream of a ladder or perhaps a stairway to heaven, with angels ascending and descending.  At the top, God appears, and offers reassurance to Jacob that he will become the father of a great and populous nation, and that the land he is lying on will become his people’s eternal home.

Jacob awakens from this dream and says, “Achein, yesh Adonai bamakom hazeh v’anochi lo yadati,” a phrase usually translated as, “Behold, God was in this place and I, I did not know it.”  That translation doesn’t truly capture the nuances of Jacob’s statement, in particular the ways he refers to God.  First, God’s name is given as Yud Hay Vav Hay, the holiest four-letter name of God.  In addition, the word hamakom is another name of God, meaning “the place,” which seems particularly appropriate since by tradition the place that Jacob is lying on will someday be the location of the Holy of Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem, the “place” where God dwells most intensely in all of Jewish belief. 

But most interestingly, when Jacob says, “God was in this place v’Anochi lo yadati,” that is, “and I, I did not know it” he uses Hebrew in a peculiar way.  Jacob need not actually say Anochi at all, since by saying lo yadati he has already said, “I didn’t know it.”  But by adding the grammatically unnecessary extra “I” he has done something commentators see as a theological statement, a description of God and God’s essence.  He doesn’t say, “God was in this place and I, I did not know it,” but “God was in this place and Anochi, I did not know God by that name.”

The word Anochi means “I” or “me,” but it means a very specific kind of “I” or “me.”  It is a stronger word than the more common basic Hebrew word Ani.  It is a word of presence, a definitive “I” if you will, a powerful statement of existence.  What God is saying to our father Jacob is, “I exist, and I am here; do not be afraid.”  That extra letter, the Hebrew letter chaf, changes the innocuous pronoun ani, I, into an actual name of God, Anochi.   In fact, there is a custom among some Jews, Sephardim in particular but also Chasidim, to make the symbol of the letter kaf with their hands, signifying the presence of God. 

Our patriarch Jacob, in one of the great moments of his life, comes to understand God as Anochi, the God who is always present and who will be with him through all his many trials and tribulations.  Anochi, the God who is most definitely here.  That very name will eventually be the way God begins the Ten Commandments: Anochi Adonai Elohecha… I, Anochi, am the Lord your God; I, God, am here, now.

And in our Torah portion of Shmot this week, Moses has his own first great moment of personal revelation.  Like his ancestor Jacob, the encounter comes as a surprise to him.  Unlike Jacob, the meeting with God is not a dream sequence, but occurs in the form of a vision.

Moses is pasturing sheep in the desert when he sees that famous bush that burns but is unconsumed.  This Burning Bush is an arresting site, and he turns from his path to approach it.  Out of the bush comes the voice of God, and Moses, startled, engages in a long dialogue with God.  God urges and finally demands Moses take up the call to fight for the freedom of the Israelites, become God’s emissary to free the Hebrew slaves serving Pharaoh in Egypt.  Moses is beyond reluctant to take on this great task, arguing repeatedly he is unqualified and should not have to go.  At one climactic moment in this dramatic dialogue, Moses asks God to identify God’s self, so that Moses can tell Pharaoh—and even the Israelite people—just who is demanding freedom for the slaves.

God’s answer appears to be ambiguous in the extreme: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, God says, I will be what I will be, or perhaps I am that I am.  

Ehyeh shlachani elayich, God continues—Ehyeh sent me, you should say to the people.  Ehyeh is my eternal name and how I will be remembered from generation to generation.  God adds that the four-letter name, Yud Hey Vav Hey, is a name by which God was not known to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob.

But simply put, that’s wrong.  God was known by that holiest of names to all three patriarchs, and this is not actually a new name at all.  What’s going on here?  What is God trying to tell Moses?

Again, the commentators weigh in.  It’s not the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter-name of God, Yud Hey Vav Hey, that’s a unique new designation, a fresh name for God.  It’s actually Ehyeh that’s a new name for God.

So just what does Ehyeh mean?  Literally, “I will be.”  That is, God is infinite potential, capable of anything, up to and including redeeming the nation of Israel from slavery, splitting the sea, bringing us to Mt. Sinai and an eternal covenant, and giving us the Promised Land.  Ehyeh, God can do anything.  Ehyeh, God is absolute potential, the unlimited divine energy to transform things as they are into things as they should be.

According to this interpretation, Jacob knew God as Anochi, the God who is, the God of what is, a reassuring presence.  But Moses comes to know God, through this Burning Bush episode and more elaborately in the next four books of the Torah, as the God of infinite possibility, the God of what will be.  It is this not-so-small difference between God as Anochi and God as Ehyeh that transforms an acceptance of what is into the realization that something great can be, and that we have the potential to be part of that greatness.

I believe that this has great resonance for each of us.  Faith in God as an existent reality is a wonderful thing, Anochi, and it can provide reassurance and support throughout our lives.  But belief in a God of infinite possibility, a faith that supports the incredible potential God has implanted in this universe of ours—that is the God of the Burning Bush, the Ehyeh that provides hope and promise that anything can happen if God wills it, the assurance that redemption and help can come for each of us.  

What’s in a name?  In this case, it is a gift: a gift of hope in times of distress, of light in times of darkness, of belief in moments of doubt.   

On this Shabbat of Shmot, of names, may we each find reassurance, promise and inspiration in our own understanding of Ehyeh, the God of the infinitely possible.  And may that knowledge of what can be bring us the hope, and energy, to seek to accomplish true good in our world.