• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 467 0

of the breath. Indeed, these letters are also used in ancient Hebrew to indicate vowel signs, showing that they are only marginally to be seen as “real” letters. The God who is ever blowing the breath of life into Adam's nostrils in the ongoing renewal of human life now turns out to be that very breath. The name of God is but a breath, nothing you can hold onto very firmly. Indeed, if you try to hold onto it, if you think that Y-H-W-H is a noun that indicates some substantial and definable entity, Scripture laughs at you as God becomes a verb again.

But at the same time that this word bears within it the Bible's most abstract notion of the deity, it also serves as a name. Names are fraught with both power and intimacy, in the ancient world as well as in our own. To know someone's name is to stand in relationship, to be able to call in such a way that the other must respond. “I raise him up because he knows My name” (Ps. 91:14). A pious Jew refers to hashem yitbarakh, “God's blessed name,” in an intimate, familiar way of speaking. To call out God's name in prayer is to transcend all other words one might speak. In fact, a Hasidic teaching claims that in true prayer every word becomes a name of God.60

We do not fully speak the name. Y-H-W-H is too holy a word to be spoken. We for whom words come and go so easily are not allowed to pronounce this word, lest it be profaned by us. Instead we sheathe it in the pious garb of adonai, “my Lord.” But each time we pronounce that word in prayer, the Kabbalists tell us, we are to see the letters Y-H-W-H standing before us, a sort of verbal icon, visually filling us with an intensity of divine presence that we dare not permit our mouths to speak.61

The great calling out of God's name is the recitation of shema’ yisra'el—“Hear O Israel, Y-H-W-H our God, Y-H-W-H is One!” The Torah tells us to speak this verse twice each day, upon rising at dawn and before going to sleep. It is a first prayer taught to young children and it has graced the lips of martyrs from Rabbi Akiva in Roman times to pious Jews in the Holocaust. No act of piety is more characteristic of Judaism than this calling out of shema’ yisra'el. It is a statement of intimacy, devotion, and abstraction all at once. Its recitation is referred to in our sources as yihud ha-shem, the proclamation (but for the Kabbalist “the effecting”) of God's oneness.

The daily recitation of this verse has been the object of a remarkable wealth of reflection throughout Jewish theology. The Zohar contains a particularly wide array of readings of the shema’.62 But here I will content myself by quoting the rather simple mystical confession of a Hasidic master, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib of Ger (1847-1904), author of Sefat Emet. In a letter to his children and grandchildren he spoke with unusual directness about the shema’ and its meaning: “The proclamation of oneness that we declare each day in saying Shema’ Yisra'el … needs to be understood as it truly is. That which is entirely clear to me … based on the holy writings of great Kabbalists, I am obliged to reveal to you…. The meaning of ‘Y-H-W-H is one’ is not that He is the only true God, negating other gods (though that too is true!). But the meaning is deeper than that: there is no being other than God. [This is true] even though it seems otherwise to most people…. Everything that exists in the world, spiritual and physical, is God Himself…. These things are true without a doubt. Because of this, every person can become attached to God wherever he is, through the holiness that exists in every single thing, even corporeal things…. This is the foundation of all the mystical formulations in the world.”63

three

TORAH: WORD OUT OF SILENCE

Sacred Language Then and Now

To find this message — that God alone exists — at the heart of Judaism is to read Torah with the mystics’ eyes. You may find God wherever you are. Everything—“even” the corporeal world—will lead you back to God, since none of it has existence outside God. There is only One. This is the essential teaching of mystics in