Thursday, February 24, 2005
Jewish God
For the 30+ who have found my blog in the last couple of days via searches for "Jewish God" and the like, I have a little something for you that's been on my mind...
In the book, The Jewish Lights Spirituality Handbook, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner wrote a piece called Breathing that examines the name of God.
The letters of the name of God in Hebrew are yod, hay, vav, and hay. They are frequently mispronounced Yahveh. But in truth they are unutterable. Not because of the holiness they evoke, but because they are all vowels and you cannot pronounce all the vowels at once without risking respiratory injury.
He goes on to note that this word is perhaps the sound of breathing (1 Kings 19:11-12). The letters of the Name are the root letters of the Hebrew verb "to be." Also, scholars have suggested the name to mean The One Who Brings Into Being All That Is, as if God's Name is the Name of Being itself.
He is the one who appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, "the many breasted, all-nurturing one" (Exodus 6:2). And He had Moses be His emissary to Israel under the name Ehyeh-asher-ehyeh, "I will be who I will be" (Exodus 3:13-14).
Imagine the depths of meaning in the scriptures concerning breath and breathing, or perhaps your own life giving breath, when it is so closely associated with the Name of God.
