rear pew mirror • doug brook
What’s in a Name
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William Shakespeare famously stated in his bard mitzvah speech that when it comes to the Torah, “that which we call our prose by any other name would start with Beresheet.” So, what’s in a name? On Yom Kippur, everyone atoned for any name calling they did during the previous year, including for the names given to certain newborns who’ll be haunted for life by their parents’ selections. This raises the related question of who named the weekly Torah readings, and did they atone for it. What were they thinking? Remember, each weekly Torah reading (aka parshah) was named in the same painstaking, descriptive manner as each of the five books of the Torah were named: By using the first distinctive word in it, no matter what the word is. But not the word “is,” it’s not that ridicul… distinctive. The first distinctive word isn’t necessarily the first word. If it were, several parshahs would share names like “And These” or “And He Spoke.” Though “and He spoke” is, admittedly, descriptive of a lot of the Torah. Some scholars opine about the possible existence of multiple authors of the Torah. This notion of different writers could be a corollary to the fact that each book of the Torah has three different names: the Hebrew name, the actual English translation of that name, and the at-best tangentially relevant English name that’s actually used. For example, the first book in Hebrew is Beresheet, which basically means “in the beginning.” In English, it’s commonly referred to as Genesis — a name appropriated by the Torah to ride the wave of popularity from the Genesis device in “Star Trek That’s the Torah’s II.”The second book, Shemot, literally means “names.” Therefore, of course, names, don’t in English it’s called Exodus. wear them out The third book, Vayikra, means “and he called.” This makes the relevance of calling it Leviticus obvious, in no way whatsoever. The fourth book, Bemidbar, means “in the desert.” It’s commonly referred to as Numbers, because during 40 years in a desert with no cellular reception there’s not much to do except count the days, the grains of sand, and the number of times Moses had to talk the Almighty Big G out of wiping out someone. Including himself. Devarim means “words” or “things.” This volume serves double duty as both the fifth and the final book. Thus, it is aptly named Deuteronomy, due to economy in leveraging some ancient Greek into this ancient text. If the names of the books of the Torah are this distinctive, what about the names of each parshah within those five books? Rather than going through each one individually, it might be interesting to explore all the parshah names in each book strung together into a sentence. Perhaps it will give a meaningful summary of what happens in each book. (Perhaps.) For example, from Genesis the names of the parshahs declare, “In the beginning, Noah, get going… and appeared the lives of Sarah, generations he left, and he sent and dwelled at the end, and drew near, and he lived.” That’s as straightforward as the nomenclatured abridgement for Exodus, “Names, and I appeared; go, having sent Yitro laws, an offering you’ll command when you take, and assembled amounts.” For Leviticus, the least clear book has the clearest one-line delivery, continued on previous page
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November 2023 • Southern Jewish Life