About Us
Words from the Head of School

Every Word a Name

“4”
Dear Brandeis community,
 
I had the great good fortune to spend the long weekend in Oaxaca, Mexico, on a mole-making and mezcal-tasting trip to celebrate my father’s 70th birthday. And while it was a wonderful trip, filled with colors and flavors and learning and time together, I found myself contemplating something unexpected: the names of God.
 
It began in Oaxaca City, when I managed to snap a photo from our van of an Apple store, or something like an Apple store. A store with an apple or Apple on it, which goes by the name Adonai. We were in this van with other travelers on our foodie tour, and the apparition of this conjunction in the crowd, between technology and theology, provoked some thoughtful discussion. Was it a commentary on the ubiquity of Apple’s products, perhaps? An invitation to critical reflection on our relationships to our phones?
 
I often like to take the work of local poets along with me when I travel, as a kind of linguistic map and tour guide. On this trip, I brought Natalia Toledo’s brilliant book The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems, carefully translated by Clare Sullivan. In addition to descriptions of some of the sights and sites we were seeing, the book offered a fascinating opportunity to engage for the first time (for me) with Zapotec, a tonal indigenous language that has no connection to the 300 or so other indigenous languages of Central America. A typical Zapotec line in the book looks like this: “zuba galaa gui'xhi',” and means something like “in the midst of the jungle.” As I read the Zapotec-English translations, I kept searching to try and get any kind of toehold in the Zapotec, any words that would look familiar to my English or Spanish-reading eyes. Again and again I came up empty, staring across at strings of vowels and unfamiliar punctuation marks. Finally though, I found the word God, across from Diuxi, which looks a lot like Diós, God in Spanish. A connection! Our guide Goyo explained to me that the Zapotec culture has many named gods, and so the language likely brought over the capitalized monotheistic name in the wake of the Spanish and Catholic conquest. Later I found diuxi, not capitalized, and wondered what forms for God or gods it imagined with that lower case.
 
As we traveled, we shared stories of our perceptions of or connections to notions of God. My dad shared Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s teaching that the name YHWH, being all vowels, is the sound of breath. As Kushner writes, “The holiest Name in the world, the Name of the Creator, is the sound of your own breathing.” This concept is put into practice in many Jewish meditative traditions; I certainly seek my connection to all things in my morning mindfulness practice, as do our students at Brandeis. In my experience careful, intentional breathing is a way to slow down, and loosen the particularities—I tend to find in it the absence of names, rather than the Name or any name as such.
 
All this talk of names called to mind the delightful Ursula Le Guin story “She Unnames Them,” in which Eve takes back all the animal names that Adam has given. It is quick and hilarious—the yaks have a debate within the community as to the strength of their connection to the name “Yak”—and well worth a few minutes of your time. One fascinating moment in the story comes when “none were left now to unname,” and Eve goes among the animals and suddenly “they seem[…] far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier.” In this little feminist fable, the fact of naming at all stands in the way of connection; could the same be true of our names for God?
 
And yet somehow this seems to me a loss of richness, not just for our tradition but for our world. Perhaps it is just the poet in me, understanding the world through its language. The words Judaism assigns to God or the divine, to my ears, speak to the interpretive tradition in the culture—to the many ways that Jewish people have always engaged and wrestled with Judaism itself. El, Elohim, Yah, Shekhinah, Adonai; Nature, the Universe, nothingness, connection, breath. (As the title of a great Juliana Spahr book has it, “This Connection of Everyone with Lungs.”) Ultimately, however one individually defines God or gods or the divine, I believe the act of asking the questions—What is God? How do I think of my connection to something larger than myself?—is both a moral and spiritual practice and a connection to this long and winding tradition of ours.
 
As is often the case for me, I find that I am closest to the thinking of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who wrote in his work as a poet the following:
 
I'll make every word a name for You!
I'll call you: Forest! Night! Ach! Yes!
And collect all my moments,
Weave a bit of eternity, a gift for You.
 
While I’m not sure if it’s You or you or us or Us, or perhaps no pronouns at all, I am grateful—Ach! Yes!—for the many words and ways we find to speak to our connections.
 
Wishing you all weekends full of words, my friends.
 
Warmly,
 
Dan
 
Back