“G-d” Is Not a Jewish Word

A few years ago, an old friend and her husband were visiting Israel from the US, and I invited them to my Jerusalem home for a Shabbat meal. As we chatted over the appetizers, my friend’s husband, Steve, suddenly asked me: “Do you believe in G-d?”  

 I was somewhat taken aback. Steve was an intelligent academic, proud cultural Jew and supporter of Israel, but he did not have much formal Jewish education. We had never discussed theology—the way he asked was a kind of dare. “Belief in G-d” is also a question I’ve struggled with through many decades of studying literature, philosophy, and Torah. What works at one stage in life doesn’t work at another. The questions change; the answers change. How to respond?

A long pause—I needed to think. Finally, I said: “No, I don’t believe in ‘G-d.’” Another pause. “Not with the meaning that word has in English. I do believe in ‘HaShem,’ though, and that is entirely different.” He looked perplexed but intrigued. “HaShem” is a phrase in Hebrew that literally means “The Name.” It’s what religious Jews often use in conversation and writing instead of the English word “G-d.” Ask a religious Jew, “How are you today,” and the conventional answer for “Thank G-d, I am fine” is “Barukh HaShem,” literally meaning “Blessed is the Name!”

I understood Steve’s confusion. In the Chicago suburb where I grew up during the 1950’s and 60’s, Jews were a minority. The word “G-d” would awkwardly slip out of their mouths every now and then, but it felt to me like they were not quite sure what it was referring to. By contrast, when I moved to Brooklyn as an adult, and began to study Torah with Chabad Chasidim, they could not stop talking about “HaShem” or “Ha Kadosh Barukh Hu (“The Holy One, Blessed Is He”) or Der Abishter—Yiddish for “the Highest One; the One Above.” The way they spoke made G-d feel to me like a warm, wise, kind, intimate presence—a close family member instead of a cold, starched Episcopalian.

Now I too find myself going around Jerusalem saying “Barukh Hashem” all day. 

But really, what kind of answer is this? What’s the difference between believing in “G-d” and in “HaShem?” It’s a vast subject, at the very heart of Judaism. I couldn’t explain it all in depth to my friend’s husband that evening. I just tried to make an opening. 

As we approach Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when we will spend endless hours speaking to “G-d” in so many ways, with so many names, I’d like to think about it more deeply. I feel a special urgency in this year of pandemic, a time so fraught with our sense of human vulnerability, filled with anxiety about what the next year will bring. Who is it we are calling out to? 

“G-d” indeed is not a Jewish word. It comes from medieval German and old English, and likely from an older root from Sanskrit. “So what?” you might ask. Haven’t we adopted it? Yes, and we need various names to help us know the world and other people, but there is also something that eludes all names. “What’s in a name,” as Juliet asks in the famous balcony scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.” We all deeply sense a hidden inner core of ourselves that’s beyond all names, whether names given to us at birth, nicknames, or acquired titles. Our deepest inner selves can’t ever fully be expressed in any name or words—or be fully known to another person—or even to ourselves. Searching for that innermost core leads us to the  deepest existential questions: Who am I really? How did I get here? Who created me and why? And what is the identity of that Source? Is it distant and impersonal—or intimately involved with the world… and me?  

 THE NAME

As the year turns to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we too are called to turn back to that innermost self, to make an accounting of all that has happened in the past year, to repair and improve, and “return” also to G-d. Part of our teshuva or “return,” I want to say here, means returning to HaShem—“The Name” in Hebrew—and to the One beyond all Names. 

What is this power of language? Why does Hebrew especially help “return” us to our deep core and essence, and connect us so much more intimately with the Divine? In his autobiography, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Elie Wiesel explains it movingly in his account of learning to read Hebrew as a child:

My first teacher, the Batizer Rebbe, a sweet old man with a snow-white beard that devoured his face, pointed to the twenty-two holy letters of the Hebrew alphabet and said, “Here, children, are the beginning and the end of all things. Thousands upon thousands of works have been written and will be written with these letters. Look at them and study them with love, for they will be your links to life. And to eternity.”

When I read the first word aloud—B’reshit, “in the beginning”—I felt transported into an enchanted universe. An intense joy gripped me when I came to understand the first verse. “It was with the twenty-two letters of the aleph-beth that G-d created the world,” said the teacher, who on reflection was probably not so old. “Take care of them and they will take care of you. They will go with you everywhere. They will make you laugh and cry. Or rather, they will cry when you cry and laugh when you laugh, and if you are worthy of it, they will allow you into hidden sanctuaries where all becomes…” All becomes what? Dust? Truth? Life? It was a sentence he never finished. (10)

The rabbi was teaching young Elie one of the deepest ideas of Jewish tradition: the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are living, cosmic forces—building blocks of the universe, whose specific graphic forms, combinations, and sequences continuously channel G-d’s creative energies. The graphic shapes of the letters have their own lives; they tell many “other stories” besides the Bible’s literal narrative ones. As Nachmanides famously said in his introduction to his commentary on Genesis, the whole Torah is the Names of G-d, a level much deeper than the stories. 

As a young girl who did not know Hebrew, I would squirm in my seat on the High Holidays, constantly flipping to the back of the thick English-Hebrew prayer book to see how much was left till it would all be over. My attention was always captured when the Cantor would rise from his seat on the large carpeted, raised platform that held the Torah Ark, walk to the large podium facing us, draw himself up tall and intone the Shema. He was a frustrated opera singer, so before reciting it, he would take from his pocket a small pitch pipe that looked like a little harmonica, hum a long note on it to himself, and then—like Pavarotti—dramatically project the Shema in Hebrew to the back galleries of the large hall: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad!

He would take another deep breath, and with his large black robes billowing, belt it out again in the English translation of our prayer book: “Hear O Israel: the L-rd our G-d the L-rd is One!” It woke me up, but I confess I had a hard time with the English—and I still do. Let’s face it: the words don’t make sense. Why not just say, “Hear O Israel, G-d is One.” What’s the difference between “L-rd and “G-d”? Other prayer books try to translate the line somewhat differently, but all struggle with the repetition. The word “L-rd” always also brought me unwanted associations of medieval lords and ladies. No wonder, because the English word “lord” comes from medieval English and Germanic to designate the feudal master of the manor. Not a “G-d” I could connect to then, or years later as a contemporary, democratic American woman, and Jew trying to reach out to the Divine. Even then, I sensed that G-d must be bigger than that. 

   In Hebrew, it certainly sounded better, but still, why the two names—Ado-nai and Elo-heinu— for G-d? More needless repetition? As an adult, I was intrigued to learn that the word chanted “Adonai” was written totally different in the Hebrew text. It’s a substitute—a “nickname,” as it were. The original four letters, translated so awkwardly into the English as “L-rd,” is one of the most holy names of G-d—and so is referred to simply as “The Name”—HaShem. 

HOLY LETTERS, AMBIGUOUS GRAMMAR

 That name is so holy, so high, that according to Jewish law, we are not allowed to pronounce it as written in Hebrew, in the Bible or prayers or in reading from a Torah scroll. I can’t even fully print or spell it out here because the pages of this magazine may be thrown away. That would be desecration of a living, holy energy—of a “part” of G-d, as it were. As if I took a priceless love letter sent to me by my beloved and threw it in the trash. And just as there are certain names between lover and beloved that are hidden and saved for private moments, for Jews, Yom Kippur is such a moment. On the holiest day of the year, when the Kohen Gadol, or high priest, went alone into the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple, he pronounced the Name as it’s written, and so atoned for the Jewish people. 

   There is an ancient Jewish saying, “The letters make one wise.” Among the many rabbinic commentaries on that phrase, is that just seeing, just looking at the Hebrew letters connects you to the flow coming to you from Above. As Elie Wiesel’s teacher said, “Take care of them and they will take care of you . . . and if you are worthy of it, they will allow you into hidden sanctuaries.” So now let’s become a little wiser, and take a closer look. 

That Name is comprised of four Hebrew letters : a Yud י — and then a Hei — ה and then a Vav — ו and then another a Hei — ה. Please stop reading for a moment and gaze at those four letters a bit more intently—at their shapes and flows and forms. If you did that, you will have crossed the threshold into thousands of years of Jewish study and meditation on that Name and its meanings, combining its letters, flowing into and with it and connecting more deeply to “HaShem.” 

    There are traditions in early Jewish philosophy, kabbalistic and chasidic thought, that allow us to rearrange and separate the four letters as ה—ו—י—ה , so it can be pronounced out loud and written as “Havayah.” Now please just try to say the Name “Havayah” softly out loud. You don’t need a pitch pipe; you just have to open your mouth, take a deep breath for the Hei sound, then blow it out with the vaa of the Vav, then open even more as you end with the yah sound. Even if you do not sound like Pavarotti, the word comes from deep inside you, and you breathe it far out. In the book of Genesis, Havayah is one of the names used when G-d breathes the soul of life into Adam (Genesis 2:7). It’s the deep breath of the mystery of life itself.

Mystery indeed. Despite the thousands of years of commentary and explanation of The Name’s meanings, the original correct pronunciation remains concealed from us. Those four letters are some conjugation of the verb “to be,” but Hebrew is written without vowels. (In English, the consonants “CT” could be “cat” or “cute,” and if you play Scrabble you’ll think of many others.)

  How, then, should the Name Havayah be translated? I turned to a colleague, Prof. Edward Greenstein, one of the world’s renowned Jewish biblical scholars of ancient language and rabbinic commentary for his opinion. He wrote to me: “There is no consensus as to its underlying or originary meaning in the Bible. I am torn between the causative verbal form ‘the One who brings into being’ and the simple active verb form, ‘the One who is or is there—with you.’ But of course it can be all of these and more.” 

I loved his answer. Embodied in the ambiguous grammar of The Name, of Havayah is the profoundest question a human can ask, and the deepest mystery of “G-d”: How does the “One who brings into being,” who is utterly outside of all existence, outside of space and time and even the categories of being and nonbeing—how can that One also be “there with you?” You as an individual in your own limited, finite, material life on this planet, subject to all “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”—as Hamlet says when he, too, ponders the great questions of life and death in his “To be or not To be” soliloquy.

That’s what we all really want to know deep in our hearts—even more than in our theological, philosophical minds. It’s the question that the exasperated, frustrated, thirsty Children of Israel pose as a rebellious challenge to Moses, who is trying to lead them through the desert to the promised land: “Hayesh Havayah Bikirbeinu im ayin?” “Is Havayah amongst us, or not?” Or, more literally, “Is Havayah inside of us? Because if not, there is nothing.” (Exodus 17:7). Nothing indeed. No meaning. Hamlet’s despair. “G-d” could be a vast cosmic impersonal force creating Big Bangs and a universe that will ultimately implode on itself in billions of years; or some force that created the universe and left it to run on its own; or an anonymous flow of Being indifferent to human life. Many ancient and modern philosophies have come to that conclusion in one way or another.  

THE SHEMA

What is the answer to that deepest existential and philosophical question? 

The Shema!  

Far from a needless repetition, the answer is precisely in joining those two different names in Hebrew: Havayah and Elokeinu. “Elokeinu” (“Our G-d”—which I am now writing with a “K” instead of an “H” to protect its sanctity) comes from the name Elokim. There is no space here for in depth discussion; suffice it to say that “El” is one of the most ancient Semitic names for G-d. If you are named Joel, or Michael, or Samuel, or Danielle, you have “el” as part of your name. “Michael” means “Who is like G-d?” 

Like Havayah, “Elokim” has a fascinating grammatical quirk; it’s the first name for G-d used in the Bible—in the opening words of Genesis—but it’s plural, and it takes a singular verb. Not to worry; the rabbis have many explanations to ward off anyone mistakenly thinking it refers to many gods. Among them: this name reflects the plurality and diversity of the created word; it has the same numerical value in Hebrew as the word teva for nature; it is the aspect of G-d, as Rabbi Yosef Caro famously wrote in the Shulchan Arukh (Code of Jewish Law), which is ba’al ha-kokhot kulam, the “master of all these disparate powers.”

   R. Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812), the founder of the Chabad movement, explains in the Tanya, the central work of Chabad Chasidic thought, that Havayah, by contrast, is like the overwhelming intense light and energy of the sun. You can’t look at it directly, or you will become blind from the excess of light. Elokim, he clarifies, is the aspect of G-d that hides and contracts that light so that it can be absorbed and give life to our finite world—from a blade of grass to the beating of your heart. That needed contraction and concealment is so great that you could even think, as have many philosophers and scientists, that the world is essentially a mechanism that runs on its own. When I once expressed my religious awe at what I had read about the impossibly complex functioning of the brain to a young Israeli friend doing an MA in neuroscience, she responded, “It’s just a machine.” She is a native Hebrew speaker, has a Jewish education, and is attracted by Buddhism. Alas, all she grasps and feels is “Elokim” separated from Havayah.

Rather, in Blake’s beautiful words, we need “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.” An 18th century religious British mystic, artist, and poet, Blake fiercely fought against that popular mechanistic philosophy of his contemporaries, the deists, who had the same sensibility as my friend.

The Shema, the credo of the Jew, is that Havayah is indeed amongst us, inside of us, united with the world—that Havayah and Elokim are ONE. This is a radical statement of faith. You can’t grasp it with human reason. Havayah, who is completely beyond even the aspect of G-d as “Creator,” even beyond categories of “finite” and “infinite,” and who so hidden, is yet so “there”….. holding the shimmering universe together at each instant, lest it revert to nothingness. “Because if not, then there is nothing.” The biblical book Song of Songs 2:9 says it beautifully in allegory describing the relationship between G-d and Israel: “Behold my beloved is like a gazelle. He is looking through the windows. He is peeking through the lattice.”

What power makes that extraordinary connection between Havayah and Elokim? In the Chasidic perspective, it’s the deeper inner self, the “I” of G-d, beyond all names, which was given with and in the Torah at Sinai. Hundreds of thousands ofJews are anxiously standing under the mountain in the desert and hear: “I am the L-rd your G-d”—Anochi Havayah Elokekha—who took you out of the land of Egypt (Exodus 20:2). But grammar always seems to go awry when we speak of G-d, or G-d speaks to us. The word to address them all collectively should be the plural Elokechem—“all of you.” Instead, the word used is Elokecha: “you” in the singular. “I”—my deep inner self beyond names—is connecting to each of us, personally. And that also demands changes in how we relate to others, construct a society, and behave in the world; these demands are described in the very next words of the Ten Commandments. The world radically changed with the giving of the Torah; heaven connected to earth, and the spiritual to the physical in a new way. “Der Abishter” (The Highest One; The One Above) became a family member and a beloved.

That’s what we bear witness to, as Jews for the world, and that is how we bring the world to redemption. Or, as the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, wrote in his preface to the English translation of the Tanya, this book “sees the Jew’s central purpose as the unifying link between the Creator and Creation. The Jew is a creature of ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’… whose purpose is to realize transcendence and unity.”  

We now have our mission, and we also now know that all the names for G-d, even the highest, are no more than pseudonyms. They point to something deeper, to what the Kabbalists call the En Sof. “Sof” means “end” in Hebrew; “En Sof” means literally “No end” or “Endless.” One of my teachers explained the term En Sof beautifully: “there is no end to searching for G-d”—and I would now also add, “no end” to the ways in which HaShem searches for us, urging and aiding us to reconnect and return.

If you have stayed with me this long, you now understand much better why, when my friend’s husband suddenly asked me over appetizers, “Do you believe in G-d?”, I answered: “No, but I do believe in HaShem.” We each have our own way of asking: What is the world? Where is G-d? Who is G-d? The real questions and answers can only come from the personal, deepest inner core of each one of us. That deep inner point of the heart is what the Tanya identifies as the very spark of the Divine within us.And that is where we are finally brought on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with the blowing of the shofar. We call out to Hashem from the prayer book with many names and tens of thousands of words; we sing soulful melodies. But the piercing blow of the ram’s horn, that wordless raw sound, is what finally breaks through to that deep inner core, the heart beyond all thoughts and words, and connects us to the “I” of Hashem.