Sanctifying The Name?
The Strangeness of a Most Basic Commandment
[The priests] shall be holy to their God and not profane the name of their God. (Leviticus 21:6)
I will make of you a great nation,
And I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
And you shall be a blessing.(Genesis 12:2)
“Religion is giving religion a bad name.”
What does it mean to sanctify or profane a name? Common usage tells us that martyrdom—dying for God (kiddush Hashem)—is a form of name sanctification. Meanwhile, publicly violating a core commandment or else simply committing an unseemly act is a chilul Hashem, a desecration of the divine name. But while we throw these terms around quite regularly, the notion that a name can be sanctified or profaned is rarely considered. Adam names the animals, but nowhere are we told that those names might be sanctified or else profaned. They simply are. Perhaps that is because the names Adam offers are generic, not individual. We have a word for types of flower: magnolia, tulip, orchid, rose, buttercup, etc. But we don’t have a word for this very flower. The more specific the thing, the more its name ceases to be a referent and becomes an invocation. “God” is a generic word, referring more to a concept, like “magnolia.” But YHWH, the tetragrammaton, is a name in a more visceral sense. We might imagine that every time we use it, so to speak, God looks up, wondering what it is that we want now. If you hear your own name being called on a crowded subway, chances are you will look up, even if it’s a stranger calling out to someone else.
Name as invocation rather than just a referent is one way to frame the meaning of sanctifying God’s name—make sure to treat the divine name carefully, for when you use it, you aren’t simply mentioning God, you are actually calling God. Since God is for many of us an abstraction, it’s helpful to concretize the point by thinking in human terms. Imagine that every time you spoke about someone, that act magically brought the person into the room with you. Now that person could hear you. Would you still speak about the person in the same way? Profaning the divine name wouldn’t simply be speaking ill of God, but rather, speaking as if God were “over there.” Quite a high bar!
When God tells Abraham to “go” in Lech L’cha, God promises to make his name great. God does not promise to sanctify Abraham’s name, yet the Torah offers us a kind of parallel: just as God makes Abraham’s name great, so must we make God’s. Commentators disagree about what it means that Abraham’s name will be great. In one understanding, it means that Abraham will be well remembered, that many will mention him for many generations, that subsequent ages will recognize him as a great person. This has patently come to pass. But another interpretation takes the verse more concretely: when you go from place to place, you become an outside. People want to know “who is this person?” You don’t have a name. You don’t have a reputation. That casts doubt on you. Nomads raise eyebrows. Abraham is asked to sacrifice his social network, so to speak, by picking up and becoming an itinerant. God thus promises Abraham: “Don’t worry, no matter where you go, I will ensure that your name, i.e., your reputation, is not tarnished, that you will have opportunity to make a living and to integrate even as you might otherwise be treated with suspicion.”
The Midrashic interpretation of Abraham’s great name is helpful when considering what it means to sanctify (or desecrate) God’s name. While mystics might think of the divine name as a kind of living breathing thing that can be harmed or protected, almost as in voodoo, a more basic interpretation is available: how we behave affects God’s reputation. God’s essence is unchanged by human behavior, but the way that others relate to God is a function of how we act, especially in the name of God and religion. To be a religious person is to be a kind of ambassador for the name of God. The more religious one is, the more esteemed, the more powerful or charismatic, the more responsibility one has to ensure that one does not abuse the office. The charge in this week’s Emor is given to the priests, in recognition that it is through religious leaders that we come to an understanding of God. The stakes are high.
So far, I’ve offered two possible interpretations. Option A: the commandment is about addressing God directly rather than simply referring to God. Option B: the commandment is about protecting God’s brand or reputation by being an inspiration rather than an embarrassment.
Little the priests do involves the use of speech. Most of their prescribed activity involves offering sacrifices. The action speaks for itself. It’s all very visual, very tangible. So, why mention naming? Were priests also using incantations and the text is alluding to this? Today, most rituals involve not just a visual component but also a speech act, yet we rarely read in the text about what the priests said before, during, and after their sacrifices. A literal interpretation might be that the text wants the priests to be intentional in what they say, not just in what they do; the rituals they perform require them to be rhetorically mindful, not just mechanically precise. That would be a fascinating possibility given that we have just read about the strict requirements for the sacrifices themselves: no blemished animals. Now, the text adds: it’s not enough to bring unblemished animals; it’s important to also be unblemished, broadly understood, in the way that you talk.
I prefer a less literal interpretation. In Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes between logos as meaning statement or judgment and logos as meaning manifestation. The original meaning of logos, he contends, is revelation, not speech. To sanctify the name thus involves something broader than the good use of one’s tongue, the picking of right words, skilled diction or grammar. To sanctify the name means: to manifest the divine as holy. This could be with words or with actions. Maybe the fact that the text describes the sanctification of the divine name without mentioning words or speech is emphatic: one doesn’t need to be articulate to reveal. Use whatever strategy you have, whatever means you have, but don’t lose sight of the goal: the manifest the divine as holy. The alternative is not neutral. There is no middle ground. To fail to manifest the divine as holy is to manifest the divine as profane.
Profanity is connected to use. To profane something is to use it or use it up. Shabbat, the day of rest, is a day of uselessness, a day to refrain from utility maximizing in the narrow sense (though some might argue that Sabbath is still justified within a utilitarian framework). Don’t treat the divine as something to be used or used up. Don’t treat the divine as a resource. Working in a Temple context it might be easy to fall into a kind of automation, to see the ritual as something mechanical, and to take God as something rote or known or automatic. Don’t do that. Resist the urge to turn spirituality into just another stimulus-response process. Stay open. God is more than “the use case.”
I’ve offered a handful of different ways of reading the same words, some in contradiction to one another. The text presumes we know something about sanctifying a name, and yet the expression itself is rather strange. If nothing else, let us dwell on that strangeness, and in so doing, preserve it from becoming profaned through over-use.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
P.S./ICYMI: Here’s a personal essay I wrote on the power of art to bridge the divide between the secular and the religious.
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