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Back to Question of the Week Richard |
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A: Names have great importance in Jewish tradition. Ecclesiastes says "A good name is better than good oil." (This is definitely a sentence that looses something in translation. Listen to the poetry of the Hebrew: "Tov shem mishemen tov." And there's cultural translation, too: in the Middle East, good oils were highly prized for saving the skin from the damaging effects of the hot and dry climate.) A good name was synonymous with a good reputation. And to give someone a bad name, as in English, means to ruin their reputation. The rabbis associated the affliction of the "metsora," often translated incorrectly as "leper," with the sin of giving someone a bad name -- in Hebrew, "motsi shem ra." And the emblematic case of this connection is the story in Chapter 12 of the book of Numbers, in which Aaron and Miriam speak about their brother, Moses, in an unfavorable way. Their complaints have first to do with the "Cushite" woman that he married, and the Torah informs us that he did, indeed marry a Cushite woman. Secondly, they complain that they, too, are prophets; not just Moses. Miriam is punished for this speech with "tsara'at." Now we might understand the problem to be that Miriam and Aaron were giving Moses a bad name. Alternatively, or additionally, the problem may lie in the part about the "Cushite woman." Most of the commentators identify this woman with Moses' wife that we all know about, Tsiporah. There is a bit of a division, though, over whether the term "Cushite" is complimentary, in which case they are accusing Moses of mistreating his wife, who is too good to deserve it, or "Cushite" may have been considered derogatory, in which case they are calling Tsiporah a derogatory name. In any case, giving a bad name or name-calling was a sin punishable by turning Miriam a deathly white. The rabbis noticed that the punishment, in this case, fits the crime. They pointed to the fact that one who is humiliated in public blanches -- the blood drains from their face, and they turn white. From this, the rabbis concluded that "one who causes another's face to blanch in public is like one who has spilled blood [i.e. has committed murder]." (Talmud, Bava Metsia 58b.) Further, Rabbi Haninah said (ad. loc.) Everyone who goes down to Gehinom comes back up, except for three [kinds of people] who go down and do not come back up. And they are the following: the adulterer, and the one who causes their companion's face to blanch in public, and the one who calls their companion a bad name. But, the anonymous Talmudic scholars object, isn't name-calling just a special case of face-blanching? Why state it as a separate category? And they answer their own objection by explaining that it is even forbidden to call someone by a name that they are so used to hearing that they no longer blanch. Let's conclude this discussion of name-calling with a brief consideration of the names we call God. Any name we call God -- the Almighty, the Lord, our Father, our King, the All-Merciful, the Eternal, God, Adonai ... -- is in a way a degradation of God; it conveys less than the truth of what/who God is. What to do? One possibility is to accept the problem and to continue to use a variety of names that each imperfectly point to God, hoping that the names lead us towards understanding, and trusting that God can put up with the imperfection of our minds and languages. Another is to give up on naming God, and simply call God "Hashem" -- the Name. Barukh Hashem -- Blessed is the Name. written by Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz |
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