Shemot 5784

By Michael Redstone

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

This is the second time that I have had the honour of addressing the shul on shabbat. The first time was in 2008 when there was another interregnum between rabbis at Muswell Hill. That time I spoke about the first sedra in the book of Leviticus, Vayikra. Vayikra is about the sacrifices to be made at the temple and does not offer a one-off rabbi like me an opportunity to impress his audience to such a degree that it begs him not to stop. This time round, I have been much luckier. I am to speak about Shemot, again the first sedra of one of the five books but this time, the book of Exodus. This sedra contains an embarrassment of riches. It is full of incident and drama with scenes and dialogue central to the Jewish journey.  It is no surprise that Shemot inspired Hollywood’s Cecil DeMille to produce “The Ten Commandments”, a film redolent with hammy dialogue and acting but with great special effects. I saw it, perhaps for the fifteenth time, a few days ago on the television. Did anyone else watch it?

Perhaps unusually, I have given it a title to my talk. It is: “What’s in a name?” I have done so because today I want to talk to you about names. Shemot means “names”. It is the second word of the sedra and the sedra begins by setting out the names of the sons of Jacob who came down to Egypt with him. But I think there is a much greater connection between the sedra and names than this. Names or the lack of them and the ambiguity in them play an intriguing part in our sedra.

Let us look at a few examples where a character in the sedra has no name. First, there is pharaoh: “Now there arose a new king in Egypt who knew not Joseph”. We never know this king’s name. We soon meet pharaoh’s daughter. Again, we never know her name. She is one of the great heroines of the sedra, all of them (perhaps incidentally or perhaps not) women and some of them (perhaps incidentally or perhaps not) are not Jewish. There are the two midwives who may be Egyptian but who may be Hebrews. We do know their names: Shiprah and Puah. They defy pharaoh’s decree to drown all male Hebrew children in the Nile and because of their courage and morality and because they feared G-d, G-d made houses for them (that is, they became mothers of great families). There is also Miriam and when we first meet her, we do not know her name. Her intercession with pharaoh’s daughter ensures the baby Moses’s survival and continued contact for the first part of his life with his mother. Again, we do not know the name of Moses’s mother, Yochebed, until later in the sedra.

Coming back to pharaoh’s daughter, she appears in a few verses in Shemot but then never again. We learn that she draws out of the Nile the basket containing the baby Moses. She has compassion for him knowing that he is one of the Hebrew children against whom there is a decree of death. Pharoah’s daughter also shows compassion when she agrees to Miriam’s suggestion for a midwife for the baby whom we can safely assume pharaoh’s daughter knows to be none other than Moses’s mother and she promises to pay his mother for this service. We are impliedly told Moses spends his boyhood with his mother and at some point, she brings him to pharaoh’s daughter and pharaoh’s daughter adopts him as her son. We read at this point that: “ve tikra shemo Moshe ki min-hamayim meshi tihu”, she names the boy Moshe “because I drew him out of the water”. I will come back to this naming in a few moments.

We never hear of pharaoh’s daughter again. How did she bring up Moses? Did she hide Moses’s identity from him or did she encourage him to find out about it? Did she rile against pharaoh’s decree to kill the male Israelite babies or was her adoption of Moses her sole act of rebellion? Did she have other children? Was she a good mother? Did she join the mixed multitude that left Egypt when the subsequent pharaoh let the Israelites go? The sedra does not give us answers to these questions. Perhaps pharaoh’s daughter did one good deed but was otherwise unremarkable. Perhaps her one good deed was neutralised by moral failings elsewhere and for this reason, her name is not revealed to us. Perhaps there is another answer. We have a baby, a sister, a mother and a daughter of the king of Egypt, all without names. How it can be when these characters appear to us in the book of names, they have no names? Is that not ironic? Something must be going on here. Perhaps the answer to the mystery is this. The omission to name names in the book of names may be to draw our attention to the deed, the saving of a baby’s life on which so much depended and to deflect from the doer.  Our attention is drawn to one of the noblest acts of all, the act of saving a new life, a child. The act is all the more noble when the baby is not ours, when it comes from the other side, when it is a child of slaves, when we do not know its name.

What’s is a name? At the burning bush, Moses asks G-d to tell him His name as he anticipates the people of Israel will ask him for it. G-d’s cryptic reply is, “E he ye asher e he ye”, “I will be what I will be”. Is this a name or a declaration of the essence of G-d? Is it something else? G-d is known to us as “Hashem”, the Name. The Name which is not a name or is it?

What’s in a name? Let us go back to the naming of Moses by pharaoh’s daughter. The name Moshe consists of three letters: mem, shin and hay. In Hebrew, we say it as “Moshe” but it could also read “Mo-se”, an Egyptian name which means the son of water. Moshe, the Hebrew version, is derived from “masheh” to draw out, the “meshi tihu” or “I drew out” from the verse I read out earlier.  We therefore have an obvious ambiguity. Is Mose Moshe or is Moshe Mose? Does our protagonist bear an Egyptian name or a Hebrew one?

What’s in a name? Have you ever thought about the unusual construction that the English language uses for naming? We say “What are you called? I am called…”. We use a passive construction for asking about and informing others about our names. Our names happen to us. They are given to us, we do not choose them. Other European languages do not do this. For example, comment vous appellez-vous? Je m’appelle… Come si chiama? Mi chiamo…”, literally, what do you call yourself? I call myself…. These languages use an active construction where everyone has the name he or she chooses to use for themselves.  Active or passive for naming names? I think our sedra has something to say about this as I shall soon explain.

What’s in a name? Moses asks at the burning bush “Who am I?” Moses, by asking this question, is querying his worthiness to undertake the task of delivering the Israelites out of Egypt but could he also be asking what his name is? Is he Mose or Moshe? Is he asking if he is a Hebrew, the people out of whom he was born? Is he an Egyptian, one of the people among whom he grew up? Is he a Midianite now that he has spent the majority of his adult life in Midian and into whose people he has married? Who is Moses? We have one clue related to names. Earlier in our sedra, when Moses is in Midian and married, he names his first son Gershom which means literally “stranger there”. Moses declares through the naming of his son that he has been a stranger in Egypt and a stranger in Midian. They are not his home.

“Who am I?” asks Moses before G-d at the burning bush. By the end of his encounter with G-d, Moses knows and so do we. He is a Hebrew. He has accepted that the fate of his people is also his. He has accepted G-d’s call to liberate the people of whom he is a part. He has accepted the mission G-d has asked him to undertake. Moses chooses to be Moshe. He now knows his name is Moshe, not Mose.

“What’s in a name?” I ask for the final time. Our sedra gives us a beguiling encounter with names. We know the names of some of the people we meet in the sedra but not of others and sometimes we meet a character when the sedra delays telling us the person’s name. This is true of Moses himself. He must have been given a name when he was born but it is not until he is grown up that pharoah’s daughter names him. His is a name deferred and even when we know it, there are two possible ways to say it.

What can we learn from the sedra’s puzzling treatment of names? I think one answer is this. The theme of the book of shemot is redemption, the saving of the Jewish people from slavery and exile. A people are free and can be at home when they know their essence, their national goals and when they have a name to call themselves. As it is with a people, so it is with an individual. We are redeemed, we are free when we know our essence and our purpose in life, when we have a name to call ourselves, a name we freely choose in the active rather than a name given to us in the passive. Moshe, not Mose. And how does redemption begin? Like our sedra, it begins with a name.