struggling over Yom Tov

[cellio]

Today is the seventh day of Pesach. The Torah states quite clearly that this is a festival day (like the first). Yet here I am at work, just like last year and the year before and...

I don't know why I have so much trouble with this one. (And, correspondingly, the last day of Sukkot.) There is natural resistance -- it's another vacation day, and clumps of holidays disrupt work schedules already, and there's no real ritual associated with it (unlike the seder), and -- locally, at least -- there's basically no community encouragement for it outside the Orthodox subset. (Yes, everyone has holiday services, but the presumption that of course you're observing the holiday is absent.)

But the Torah tells us it is a festival and to "do no work", just like the others, and that ought to be sufficient. And every year I feel a little more guilty and become a little more aware that I am sinning.

Maybe next year I will finally overcome this. (Once I start, I will feel bound to do it every time -- no "just when it's convenient" observances here.)

Comments

Why "G-d"?

[goljerp]

Because you're not supposed to erase/desecrate the name of God. This leads Jews to interesting practices; for example, used prayer books are sometimes buried with scholars rather than being tossed. Another practice is to put documents in a "Geniza", which is basically an attic/etc out of the way. This practice was invaluable to scholars of Jews in the middle ages, as the Geniza in Cairo was particularly big, and contained all sorts of documents which were written in Hebrew, and since it was discovered (in the 1920s?) it's been a veritable treasure trove of information about the Jews of Cario and Egypt in general in the middle ages.

Now I personally tend to vacillate about "G-d" vs "God". Because, well, neither is really G-d's name, since that's the four letter hebrew word which nobody knows how to pronounce anymore. When I'm writing by hand I often end up writing "Gd" with a big horizontal dash in the G. Some Orthodox jews write "Hashem", which literally means "The name", and others go further to write "H-shem", which I think is really going too far. When I'm writing on the computer, it's also complicated because nothing is as permenant as on paper...

Re: Why "G-d"?

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Hmm.
It occurs to me that it's good for this purpose that it's a phonetic writing system being used. If it were an ideographic writing system, you would never be able to write a replacement nonword like that, because any symbol you came up with to replace the symbol for God's name would become equivalent to the original, a symbol for the name of God, through its use as such.
Hmm... this ties into idea that whatever you write to mean the name of God really is the written representation of that name as long as other people can understand it and pronounce it equivalently to the original--all you've done is introduce a spelling irregularity into the language.

Anyway. Does this mean that the name of God is actually written out in those stored/buried prayerbooks? Is the abbreviation only used for documents which are doomed to destruction at their time of writing? I can see why it would be necessary for computer communications--if it were displayed on the monitor you might be obligated to wait until the next power outage before you could use the computer for anything else. :)

Re: Why "G-d"?

[cellio]

Anyway. Does this mean that the name of God is actually written out in those stored/buried prayerbooks?

In passages that are taken directly from the Torah (such as the Shema), the name is written out so as not to corrupt Torah text. In other passages (constructed prayers that are not Torah text) it is usually abbreviated[1], presumably to reduce the chance that it will be erased.

I write "God" rather than "G-d", both on paper and electronically, because "God" is not God's name -- it's just a handle to God's name. I don't write the real name (the 4-letter Hebrew name) at all, and of course I don't say it because we don't know how. [2]

As Goljerp said, some write "Hashem" (which literally menas "the name"), and this has led some to write "H-shem". I think this is not only incorrect but actively destructive, causing people who learn that tradition but not all the reasoning behind it to lose sight of the real purpose of all of this.

[1] For reasons unknown to me, this is usually abbreviated as the Hebrew letter "yud" written twice. This letter is one of the four letters in the true name, but it does not appear twice, only once. I don't know the origin of this practice.

[2] Actually, when we encounter the 4-letter name, we substitute the Hebrew word for "my lord", which is "Adonai". Some people abbreviate/corrupt the word "Adonai" in writing (and similarly write "L-rd" instead of "Lord").

Re: Why "G-d"?

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Why is substituting a different word better than substituting an approximate pronunciation? Is this a recent thing because you don't know how to pronounce it, or did the Jews previously avoid speaking the name of God as well? (I suppose it's very hard to misuse the name of God if you don't use it at all, so that's a bonus...)

I'm sorry if these questions are either annoying or trivial, feel free to ignore at any point...Also, I'm coming from a background where they've been freely corrupting God's proper name (and that of every other person who appears in scripture) for centuries, so this is a little different...and makes me wonder why no common Christian prayers use the proper name of God-the-father when they're so free with the proper name of God-the-son.

Re: Why "G-d"?

[cellio]

Why is substituting a different word better than substituting an approximate pronunciation?

Just a guess, but if you substitute a different word then anyone looking at the text and hearing you knows you're not speaking the true name. Since we're not supposed to speak the true name (even if we knew how), this is good. There is a concept in Judaism called "marit ayin", "giving the wrong impression", that says that you don't do things that are ok if they can reasonably be mistaken for not ok, especially if this might cause someone else to imitate you and sin. So, as a minor example, if you're going to serve those fake bacon bits with the salad, you put out the jar of fake bacon bits on the table, but you don't spoon them into a serving bowl and lead people to believe you're serving pork.

Is this a recent thing because you don't know how to pronounce it, or did the Jews previously avoid speaking the name of God as well?

When the Temple stood, the high priest spoke the name of God once per year, on Yom Kippur, inside the holy of holies (not publicly). This is the only sanctioned usage as best I recall, though clearly there must also be a mechanism to transmit this knowledge to the next high priest.

And yeah, if you never say the name at all then it's harder to take it in vain, which is a big bonus.

Re: Why "G-d"?

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

When the Temple stood, the high priest spoke the name of God once per year, on Yom Kippur, inside the holy of holies

Woah, and I thought that the movie Pi was just making that up.

Okay, so, considering that the name of God has a standard meaning, that being "I am", how do you prevent people accidentally saying it if the need to assert their existence arises in a conversation?

Re: Why "G-d"?

[cellio]

Actually, God has several names, only one of which is the name (by which I mean the four-letter Hebrew name). As far as I know, that word doesn't have any other meanings and is unlikely to come up in casual conversation.

You're probably thinking of God's answer to Moses' question at the burning bush. God doesn't actually use the four-letter name there; he says "ehyeh asher ehyeh", approximately "I will be who I will be". Volumes have been written on what this means.