"Visions of the Divine Name"

Rabbi's Notes - June 2008

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

I love this little meditation in our prayer book: picture the Divine Name written vertically (which I can't write here, having no Hebrew word processor, and also fearing that you may crumple up your Megillah someday and toss it in the recycling rather than burying it in a genizah…) Yud, like a little apostrophe; below it heh, like a table, with a little hole between the table top and the upper left leg; vav, a long stem; then below it another heh. The yud corresponds to the human head; the upper heh to the shoulder girdle and extended arms; the vav to the torso; and the lower heh to the pelvis and two legs.

I can get into it easily -- closing my eyes, then opening them and seeing the people around me as walking yud heh vav heh's, walking inscriptions of the Divine Name. Then I like to picture the line at Savings Bank on a busy noontime, all those Divine Names milling about, meeting other Divine Names at the teller's windows, smiling, exchanging pleasantries, handing things back and forth. Sometimes I let my mind wander further afield, to people I don't particularly care for. I conjure up what they look like walking towards me, and I try to see the yud heh vav heh in them too. Why not try? It's all in my mind's eye.

People keep dying, as they tend to do, and I go to funerals and memorial services, shiva minyanim, drink cups of coffee with grieving beloveds. When I step into these occasions, I've been noticing that there is almost always a little undercurrent of amazement, along with all the other evident feelings. It's as if all of us, thinking about the person who has died, suddenly realize, "So that's who was living among us!" What a remarkable life he turned out to have lived. What epic struggles. What moving achievements. What pure values. She was an angel among us. He was my best friend. She shaped who I am today. I would have been completely different, and so much the poorer, if he and I hadn't met.

That's one of the main reasons we have funerals, to "gather up the memory," as I often say, of the person who has died, to pay more attention than usual, to see the person in all his or her passion and glory, beyond the muted and preoccupied ways we usually see each other in daily life. There are other times when we get these glimpses of each other: when we fall in love, say goodbye before long journeys, come back after near-misses on the road or in the ocean. But we can hardly sustain that kind of vision in our more ordinary lives, of every person at the bank as a walking yud heh vav heh, as a miracle and an amazement. It would be too much; those checks would never get cashed.

Then of course sometimes it takes a feat of imagination to see the Divine Name in that living, breathing person who is wasting all kinds of time in the line in front of me, who won't give me what I need, who is apparently making no effort at all to see me in all my Divine glory. And it takes an extra stretch still to see the Name in a person I have never even seen in the flesh, someone who is only in the newspaper or on TV, someone whom I disparage easily, whom I blame for the world's problems and my own. Sometimes in that little meditation I go further than usual, and I think of the President of the United States -- that, whatever else he may be, he is a human being, with a head, a torso, limbs.

As I write this today, I imagine eyeglasses we could put on that would enable us to see the Divine Name in everyone we look at. Think of the fun we could have, inducing spasms of awe at baseball games, Supervisors' meetings, at the DMV. Just imagine watching the news with our glasses on…

I've been hearing the phrase "culture change" here and there lately, as in "What's needed is a culture change" that will cause us to value elders or children or people of different races or landscapes or natural resources more than we do in our present cultural mindset. Sometimes I even hear the word "viral" alongside "culture change," as in "the new cultural vision needs to spread like a flu epidemic" How exactly do we induce viral culture change? Ah, what a vexing question. We need the yud heh vav heh eyeglasses!

For all the damage we in the religion business do all the time, I think that at best culture change is the proper enterprise of religions in the world: we are supposed to be in the business of cultivating in people a sense of the sacred and values and actions that flow from that sense. That's how it's supposed to be, anyhow. We have the glasses, and we're supposed to try to get ourselves, and each other, to put them on and act accordingly.

June has been designated Torture Awareness Month by a consortium of American faith groups. Lest any of us think that torture will be abolished by a new Administration next January, we might consider the fact that US personnel have been practicing torture since at least the Korean war, and American academics and military researchers have been perfecting techniques of torture since that time. (Remember Stanley Millgrom's shock experiments that determined how far people would follow orders to inflict pain? Remember the Stanford Prison Experiment? Both were funded by the US military as part of their efforts to refine the practice of torture.) What has happened in the past seven years is that the practice of torture has become public, became legislated and litigated and memorandized into a new level of concreteness.

Somehow our culture has strayed so far from the vision of every human being as an expression of the Divine Name that we have actually ratified the practice of torturing people. We have devised methods, manufactured and procured equipment, established and equipped facilities, trained torturers. We have gone to court to secure the right to torture; we have passed legislation to ensure that we can continue torturing.

All of this needs to be undone. I am looking forward to seeing the Military Commissions Act reversed, the right to habeas corpus for detainees reestablished, the secret codicils to the Army Field Manual rescinded, the secret prisons and black sites exposed and emptied as soon after January 20, 2009, as possible. But even all this will only be a beginning. "What's needed is a culture change" that will restore the sense of the amazing radiance of each human life and will consequently make it unthinkable to violate a human being.

That's the "viral" part, the part spread person to person, by human contact, by breath. There are many ways to change the world, and we each have our talents. I've been thinking a lot lately about what the philosophers of the Catholic Worker movement call "personalism" -- which I understand to be the path of changing the culture one person and one interaction at a time, so that the way I behave in the bank line actually is connected to the abolition of torture. It's the path of putting on the glasses and handing them out wherever we go.

Let the day come quickly when torture is not only illegal but again unthinkable. With that hope, happy Torture Awareness Month, my dear community.

PS -- Between the minute I finished writing the above and when I sent it off to our intrepid editor, I checked my e-mail and got the wonderful news of the State Supreme Court's decision, issued a few minutes ago, to legalize same-gender marriage. Talk about culture change! Mazal tov to all our same-sex couples who married in the San Francisco moment and to the Marriage Equality activists who have worked so hard for this decision.

- Rabbi Margaret Holub

© 2008 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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