Two Names, Three Opinions
Noah found favor with the LORD. He was a man of compliant integrity—in his generation. With God did Noah walk [hithalech] (Genesis 6:8-9).
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am El Shaddai. Walk [hithalech] in My ways and have integrity. (Genesis 17:1)
Martin Buber: “How can you love an Idea?” Hermann Cohen: “How can you love anything but an Idea?”
Does it matter if your therapist knows algebra? Does it matter if your plane pilot is kind? Would you rather be evaluated by a computer algorithm or by someone who knows you? Whose voice should get more weight in shaping public policy: sociologists or engineers? How much should someone’s identity matter in how you treat them?
If there were only one name for God, the message of the Torah—and the answers to the above questions—would be more straightforward. Instead, the Torah uses a handful of names for God, suggesting that there is no end to the conflict between science and art, head and heart, rule and exception. One person’s fairness is another’s rigidity. One person’s self-control is another’s aloofness. One person’s compassion is another’s favoritism. One person’s sense of purpose is another’s delusion of grandeur.
The two most common Biblical names for God are Elohim and YHWH (aka the Tetragrammaton aka Adonai aka The Lord aka Hashem).
Elohim, which also means gods—as in “you shall have no other gods [elohim] before me” (Ex. 20:3)—is the more generic, categorical name for God. YHWH—heretofore Hashem—is the more singular, special, theurgic, personal name. Rabbinic tradition associates Elohim with judgment, Hashem with love and forgiveness.
Elohim is the aspect of divinity that is impersonal, rational, logical, universal. Even atheists accept Elohim insofar as they accept the concept of laws of nature. Elohim is the God of gravity and 2+2=4. Elohim doesn’t really care what I’m doing in this moment. Elohim is more about the zoom-out view, the order of things. Genesis 1 tells the story of Creation from the point of view of Elohim.
Hashem, by contrast, is the aspect of divinity that we connect to when we feel that our lives matter, when we feel stirrings of conscience and existential dread, when we sense that we are loved by unending love. In Genesis 2, Hashem enters the picture in the guise of Hashem-Elohim, creating the Garden of Eden and placing human beings in it. It is Hashem-Elohim who observes that it is not good for us to be alone. It is Hashem-Elohim whose voice roams about in the garden after humans eat from the tree of knowledge.
In their brief dialogue in Genesis 3, the snake and the woman invoke Elohim, but critically leave Hashem out. It’s as if the snake is saying, you’re too small for Elohim to care what you do. Your actions don’t really matter. Live it up. And perhaps the woman buys it. “Elohim has all these cosmic rules, but what does any of that have to do with me?”
In Genesis 4, Cain kills Abel, and now Elohim is gone from the text. It’s all Hashem Hashem Hashem. We now witness the inverse problem. Cain takes everything so personally. God is rejecting him. Cain reacts in uncontrollable envy and anger. But is God really rejecting him, or this just the result of living in a world where religion is seen to be zero-sum?
In a world where God is experienced viscerally and possessively, religion becomes synonymous with politics. God is the CEO of Creation Inc. and we are all employees jockeying to get a raise or promotion. Elohim would never put up with this nonsense, but then again, Elohim is never in the office. Elohim might not even be the CEO. All we see is the plaque on the wall naming Elohim the founder.
The first theft comes when there is no Hashem. The first murder comes when there is no Elohim. In a world without Hashem, I don’t matter and so the only rule is “don’t get caught.” In a world with no Elohim, by contrast, I think I matter way more than I do. As Yeats puts it “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The Hashem-less world is the world of secularism. The Elohim-less world is the world of violent religious fundamentalism.
All of this is backstory for this week’s Torah reading, parashat Noach (Gen. 6:9-11:32), where the text flips between using Hashem and Elohim. Most notable are verses 6:8 and 6:9—the first time in the Torah that Hashem and Elohim are so closely juxtaposed. Noah finds favor with Hashem, but walks with Elohim. On my read, the text presents us with a tragic moment. Hashem—the aspect of God that emphasizes human agency and relationship—pursues Noah. But Noah misses the cue. Noah takes refuge in Elohim, which is to say, Noah prefers to walk in the realm of pure ideas than in the messy realm of disappointing (and dangerous) people.
Noah is right, but in being right, misses an opportunity to build community with others. He’s the ultimate contrarian, completely unaffected by social approval. Had he walked with Hashem, perhaps he could have changed society instead of run from it. Perhaps he would have felt called not to build an ark, but to ask God how to fix the issues of human corruption causing the flood in the first place.
We can’t blame Noah. In a world gone so toxic he had nowhere to go but back into the cerebral realm where “facts don’t care about your feelings,” but the Torah will suggest that Abraham represents an advance over Noah in being more of an advocate for humanity—even arguing with God on behalf of those who deserve to be destroyed. Both walk with God. Both are described as having integrity. But Abraham walks with Hashem, not Elohim.
If Elohim were unimportant it wouldn’t get the dignity of starting the Torah. The world rests on foundations that are abstract and that are true, independent of our knowledge and feeling about them, says Elohim. Yet by the time we get to Exodus, it is Hashem that opens the Ten Commandments—because questions of how to live and behave well are not the province of Elohim, but Hashem. Innovations in physics don’t guide us to become better people. And ethical conventions and political slogans can lack metaphysical rigor and still be necessary for holding us together as a society. As Leo Strauss comments on the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” if they were self-evident we wouldn’t need to hold them so.
We can reason our way to Elohim, but not to Hashem. Hashem is revealed. Hashem is felt, intuited, experienced. Because of that, because Hashem is subjective, Hashem is often a source of divisiveness and intolerance. But Elohim alone doesn’t get us very far.
How do we place ourselves at the center of the world while remembering that we aren’t actually its center? How do we emulate the chutzpah of Abraham in arguing with God—in not accepting our reality as a given—without becoming narcissistic like Cain? How do we acknowledge that the foundations of the world are deeper and more enduring than the news cycle—without becoming misanthropic like Noah?
The Torah challenges us to walk on both the absolute and relative planes, and thus to be at home in neither. The question is not whether we believe in God, but whether, in this moment, we will walk with Elohim or Hashem, abstract reasoning or emotional intuition.
If “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” then perhaps we do best to prefer Hashem to Elohim.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
