Do names matter? They certainly seem to. In the most primitive societies, names are believed to have power; many aborigine cultures hide the “real” name of a person, because invoking the “true” name is thought to have power over that person.
But why does it matter? Is a person not just the sum of their physical parts, bounded by where their body ends and the external world begins?
My study partner and I realized that there is word play in the Hebrew of the Torah that explains this in an intriguing way. The Hebrew for “Name” is “Shem”. These two letters also form the root of the word for “heaven.”
Right there, we have a breakthrough. We know that the earth is here, beneath us. The heavens are everything else. Vast. Incomprehensibly huge. But also not, in any way our bodies can directly perceive, physical. At most, we receive nothing from the skies except light and other energy particles. So the heavens are the contradistinct basic ingredient in our world. “In the beginning, G-d created heaven and earth.”
What, then, is “making heaven and earth?” We could understand it as the fundamental duality of the spiritual and the physical plane. Or, to pick a scientific duality that seems to be an analog: energy and matter.
Which brings us back to our pun, of name and heaven: A physical person is their body. But their name is their soul, or their personality, or … perhaps basically anything that is not easily deduced from their physical body. Our names are thus twinned parts of ourselves, just like our world is twinned energy and matter, and the universe we can perceive is heaven and earth.
The text goes even further. When Adam is created:
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath [shem] of life; and man became a living soul.
Our very souls (neshamas) contain the same root word as does “heaven” and “name.” The Torah is making this quite explicit: the valuable essence of a person parallels the spiritual essence of the world.
There is a pun in the Torah using these same two letters: shem and sham are spelled the same. The former means “name” and the latter means, in verb form, “to put.”
And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in ῾Eden; and there [sham] He put [sham] the man whom He had formed.
Why is this the same word? I think it is because the very first characteristic of the human soul is that we have free will. We are not deterministically limited by the laws of nature. We can choose to put something somewhere, just as G-d puts Adam in Eden. Freely chosen independent action is the ideal manifestation of our souls in the physical world: because we are invested with souls from G-d, we have the power to make choices. And all of these meanings are linked through the very same two-word root: name, heaven, soul, and the action of free will.
Profaning G-d?
You shall not profane My holy name, that I may be sanctified
What is “profaning” in the Torah? The word used is chol: It is found in the beginning of the Torah, in several instances.
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth (Gen: 6:1) … And Cush begot Nimrod; he began to be a mighty one in the earth. (Gen: 10:8)
Chol does not mean common or mundane at all! It actually means what came first.
The way the Torah defines chol in the verses above is a raw state, a state of nature, of pre-civilization. It is a world before mankind started to improve on it. It is the beginning state.
Indeed, chol is the world the way G-d made it. So in the Torah, G-d is telling us that the world, as He made it in the first six days, was chol, that it was the very opposite of holiness. Why? Because nature is unfeeling, unthinking. It has its own rules, and absent input from G-d or man, it merely exists. Nature, the way the world was created, is essentially a very large and complex automaton. And that automaton, a universe in which neither G-d nor man is involved, does not fulfill any useful – holy – function, because it is incapable of improvement by itself.
Chol is also specifically used to describe a girl who pursues her basest desires:
Do not degrade (chol) your daughter and make her a harlot (Lev. 19:29)… They shall not take a wife that is a harlot, or profaned (chol); (21:7) … And the daughter of any priest, if she profane (chol) herself by playing the harlot, she profanes (chol) her father: she shall be burnt with fire. (21:9)
A girl who chols herself by becoming a harlot is a person who has chosen to be true to her nature – her physical desires – instead of her spiritual calling, of being a daughter of G-d. “Profaning” is going back to her raw animalistic desires, instead of exercising her free will to seek a higher calling.
Similarly, we can understand that the commandment to not profane G-d’s name is about linking G-d with nature, with the physical earth. We are thus forbidden to associate G-d with determinism or even statistics, with the laws of nature, with all the attributes of a pagan deity. If we suggest that G-d is definable as a physical entity, then we are violating the commandment to not profane G-d’s name – to not make G-d’s reputation in this world into a mere reflection of the earthly plane.
So the simple textual idea is that anything we do to make G-d physical or natural, limited or corporeal, is anti-Torah. Holiness is the elevated state, while chol is the base state.