This is the sermon I am giving tonight at Temple Beit HaYam in Stuart, Florida.
I was born with a name. My parents named me Jeffrey Wayne Goldwasser. That’s what it says on my birth certificate. Today, I have a different name. I am Rabbi Jeffrey Wolfson Goldwasser. The title “Rabbi” I acquired eleven years ago when I was ordained, and the middle name “Wolfson” I adopted sixteen years ago when I married my wife. I have also had other names over the course of my life.

When I was still very young, I was aware that I also had a Hebrew name, Yosef Aryeh, which was given to me on the day of my bris. I knew that I was named after my grandfather’s father. I saw his portrait hanging in my grandparent’s apartment whenever I visited them. Each time I saw it, I thought, “I’m named after that old man with the gray beard. We’re both Yosef Aryeh.”

When I was a kid, for reasons that are still unknown to me, my father called me “Bean.” Was he thinking about the time that I was the size of a kidney bean in my mother’s womb? Was it a reference to my energy level as a six-year-old boy who was “full of beans”? I don’t know. But I was Bean. That’s what my father called me.

When my little sister was old enough to give me a nickname, she called me “Jay,” which makes sense as an abbreviation for “Jeffrey.” Eventually, when I was in high school, the two nicknames were combined and I was known at home as “Jay Bean.”

Each of those names stir a lot of memories in me. Those names have the power to take me back to specific, cherished moments.

When I was a rabbinic student, I once led High Holiday services at Duke University in North Carolina. The non-Jewish cellist, whom the school chaplain had hired to play Kol Nidre, spoke to me in the deferential tones he probably used when talking to his minister. He kept calling me “Reverend.” I got a chuckle out of that. I never thought of myself as “Reverend,” but for one weekend, it became part of my name.

Today, I am “Jeff” to some. I am “Rabbi” to others. I am “Abba” to two people. And, I am “Mr. Goldwasser” to the hotel clerk who asks for my credit card, or the TSA agent who checks my driver’s licence at the airport.

Each of us is made up of many different identities and, sometimes, those identities each carry different names. Our names tell others, and they tell ourselves, who we are.

This week’s Torah portion is called, “Sh’mot.” Literally, Sh’mot means “Names.” The portion opens the book of Exodus and it begins by telling us the names of the children of Jacob who came down to live in Egypt: Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah; Issachar, Zebulun and Benjamin; Dan and Naphtali; Gad and Asher. Their descendants grew up in Egypt and stayed there. Over time, they earned a new name for themselves in the mouth of Pharaoh. Pharaoh called Jacob’s children, “Am B’nei Yisrael,” “The Israelite People.” By uttering that name, Pharaoh changed us from being a family into being a nation (Ex 1:9).

According to a teaching of the rabbis, the Israelites soon forgot the name of the God who had made a covenant with their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But God did not forget them. Why not? According to the rabbis, it was on account of three things: they did not forget their native language, they did not stop circumcising their sons, and they did not change their names.” (Midrash Shocher Tov 114). Names are sacred in Jewish tradition. Names connect us to each other—like the way that different people know us by different names. And names also connect us to God.

When we wish to remember someone who has died, we mention his or her name and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish. Tonight, we are remembering Debbie Friedman on the occasion of her first yahrzeit by singing her songs and by repeating her name to keep her and her memory alive within us. Names have that power.

This week was also the yahrtzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the greatest Jewish thinker of the Twentieth Century. There is a collection of poems that Heschel wrote when he was a young man living as a Polish foreigner in Berlin. The title of the collection is, The Ineffable Name of God: Man. In this title, Heschel suggests that God’s deepest identity, his unspeakable name, is to be found in humanity, in each of us. 

This weekend we also sanctify the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., whose birthday is celebrated this Monday. By naming this day, “Martin Luther King Day,” our society has decided to make his memory a lasting part of our identity as a nation. By invoking his name on our calendars, on a special day off, and in our hearts, we recommit ourselves to the ideals that he stood for: freedom, equality, fellowship, peace, the beloved community and the pursuit of our highest dreams. 

Heschel and King knew each other. They marched through the streets of Selma, Alabama, together. By naming these two great men together, we affirm the universalism of our values. The things held dear by a chasidic rabbi from Poland are also dear to an African-American Baptist minister and minister’s son from Atlanta, Georgia.

If our names connect us to God, it is also true in Jewish tradition that God’s name connects God to us. In this week’s Torah portion, Moses spoke to God through the Burning Bush and said, “When I go back to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is this god’s name?’ what shall I say to them?” God answered Moses by saying, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, I-am-that-I-am. You can tell the Israelites that 'Ehyeh' sent you” (Ex 3:13-14). 

One of God’s deepest and truest names is simply Ehyeh, “I am.” God’s name tells us that God not only exists, but that God is existence. The God whose name is “I am” is a God who presence can be experienced throughout all of being, throughout all of everything that is.

By what names are you known? What do each of your names say about who you are? What do your names say about your values and the ideals that are most important to you? What are your most important relationships and what do your names say about those relationships? What are the names in your heart right now? Which names, when you hear them, warm your soul? Which names connect you to the highest within you? Which names connect you to God?

Each of us is born with a name which identifies us throughout life. But the names we acquire in life, and the names we invoke to say who we are and what we believe in, tell a great deal more about us. On this Shabbat, Shabbat Sh'mot, the Sabbath of Names, we sanctify our lives with the remembrance of names.

Shabbat shalom.



Other posts on this topic:
The Last Miracle
Ha'azinu: Forgetting

At the beginning of the book of Exodus in this week's Torah portion (Shemot), we read that there were two midwives, Shifra and Puah, who refused to carry out Pharaoh's order to kill the newborn boys of Israel. Because of their act of civil disobedience, baby Moses was saved from being thrown into the Nile to drown. He was, instead, placed in a basket to ride on the surface of the Nile to live in the house of Pharaoh. Nice irony.

It is hard to imagine that the midwives would have done anything other than save the baby boys. Murder a newborn baby? Who would do such a thing, even under the orders of a powerful king? Such an act would haunt the soul of any normal person for the rest of her life. It is painful to consider how a person would overcome the quaking fear within that warns us against committing such a horror.

Indeed, the Torah tells us, in its own way, that Shifra and Puah did save the Israelite baby boys because of exactly this capacity to be horrified at the thought of committing murder. The Torah says that the midwives "feared God" (Exodus 1:21). 

The "Fear of God" is not, as some imagine, the cowering fear of a divine being who will come to smite the wicked with lightening bolts. Rather, when Jewish tradition talks about "fearing God," it is talking about the innate human response to the thought of committing an immoral act. This is the kind of fear (yirah in Hebrew) that we feel in our gut that sets a boundary against doing what we know is wrong.

The Torah says that because of their fear of God, Shifra and Puah were rewarded by God who "established households for them" (ibid). According to some commentators, this reward should not be understood only on a literal level. Those "households" may also have been the figurative four walls, floor and ceiling that define our moral universe and make us feel secure in who we are.

In his collection, Degel Machaneh Ephraim, the late-eighteenth-century chasidic master, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudilkov made this connection. He wrote that the fear of God can be called a "house" because it is the capacity within us that establishes our limits and boundaries. It creates a vessel into which we pour our lives. 

This capacity to tremble at immorality is something that almost everyone discovers in childhood. We recognize the suffering to others that results from our bad choices, and we are repulsed instinctively by the idea of being the cause of such suffering. This is a quality that we share with other animals. Monkeys and apes also show a innate discomfort in causing harm to their fellows, even when it is to their own immediate benefit.

As we grow older, the ability to respond to the discomfort of causing harm to others is something that we can develop into a mature moral sensibility, or it is something that we can learn to ignore. It is up to us to choose. 

People who choose, as Shifra and Puah did, to harness their actions according to that gut feeling, tend to feel more secure about themselves. They have a set of personal boundaries that help them to understand who they are and their own, personal expectations for themselves. Those boundaries help them to discover a sense of purpose and find happiness in life.

On the other hand, people who develop the habit of ignoring the feelings that tell them when they are stepping over the line, tend to feel ungrounded in life. WIthout a set of boundaries, life can seem purposeless and unrewarding. People who habitually act on their instincts to satisfy their desires without regard to the affect their actions have on others, over time, begin to feel that their unbounded desires can never be fully satisfied. They often grow unhappy with a world that never seems to give them what they want because they fail to recognize any limits on themselves or on their desires.

There is also an unhappiness that can result when people place too stringent limitations on the boundaries of their behavior. A person who convinces himself that everything he does is wrong is also likely to be unhappy, of course. We often think about people who are "wound too tight" when we imagine how people can make themselves unhappy, but we do not always recognize that having loose or missing boundaries can also lead to unhappiness.

God rewarded the Shifra and Puah's fear by establishing "households" for them. That may really mean that they found their own reward by living lives of moral order. By knowing themselves and setting boundaries for their actions, they found a sense of meaning and purpose in life. We can help ourselves to become more fulfilled by listening, as they did, to our own feelings. When we are aware of the trembling within that warns against harming others, we come closer to finding our own happiness.


Other posts on this topic:
Fearing God
Shelach Lecha: Getting Up Close and Personal