Sermon Shemot “What is your name?”

Written by Rabbi Nicola Feuchtwang — 18 January 2025

What is your name?  How many different names do you have?

Is your answer always the same, or does it depend on the situation:  who is asking, and why you think they want to know?

After all, the same person in the course of just a single day might be – for example – John, Johnny, “oy you”, Mr Smith, Captain or Rabbi or Doctor, Dad, Daddy, Darling, and so on.  These names reflect different parts of our selves, for even our closest family do not know every single aspect of who we are.

There is a poem which appears in our High Holyday Machzor by the 20th century Israeli poet Zelda.  It begins as follows:

“Each of us has a name[1]
given by God
and given by our parents…”

Each of us has a name
given by our stature and our smile
and given by what we wear

Each of us has a name
given by the mountains
and given by our walls……..”

Or as Shakespeare’s Juliet put it:

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.”[2]

 

In some settings, we can choose which name to use – in other words, to choose which part of our identity we share and what we conceal.  But telling you my name also gives you a certain power over me.    One of the curious characteristics of angels and ‘divine beings’ in Torah is that they refuse to tell their names.  Jewish tradition has dozens of different names for God, some of which we are not allowed to pronounce.

What does it mean to us – to be named, or NOT named?

Does it matter? When is a roll-call essential, and when might it be unnecessary, or potentially dangerous?

In addition to being a label or a title, a name (Shem in Hebrew) also means ‘reputation’.  And it also means Memorial – something by which we can be remembered – as in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial museum in Jerusalem, which takes its title from a verse in Isaiah.[3]

 

Think how important it feels that the yahrzeit list we read out here is correct, how incredibly ‘closing’ it has felt for some families when a Stolpersteine is installed in front of the last known home of their murdered relatives.

Last week I read a memoir by a woman called Sophie Friedlander – written 40 years ago when she was in her 80s. She and her friend Hilde escaped from Germany in the 1930s and later ran a hostel for refugee children in Reading which was my mother’s first home in the UK.  I did know Sophie when I was younger, and I knew she had taught and cared for many many children, but even I was surprised how thrilling and validating it was to see that my mother Edith was one of the youngsters she actually named and described in her autobiography.

 

Our Torah reading this morning began with the statement ‘Eleh Shemot…’ – ‘These are the names of the children of Israel coming to Egypt with Jacob…’

Curiously the identical phrase – ‘eleh shemot…’ ‘These are the names….’  can also be found just a couple of columns back in the scroll, in last week’s sidra – except that that list – supposedly from 400 years earlier – named not just Jacob’s sons, but also his wives, his daughter and his grandchildren.

And then, within this week’s parasha, something interesting happens with names:

  • Joseph is mentioned – although we are then told that the new king ‘did not know him’.
  • The king himself is not
  • We know the names of the midwives – Shifrah and Puah
  • Moses is named – not by his unnamed birth parents or sister (whose own names we only learn later in the story), but by the woman who finds & adopts him, whose name we are not

 

Is it an insult to be anonymous, or might it just perhaps have some advantages?

 

 

If we are talking about names… in addition to our BM this morning who is Hannah, and our own Rabbi Hannah, I want to mention (yet another Hannah) my friend & colleague:  nearly-rabbi Hannah Altorf.  In a piece written this week for the website of Leo Baeck College, she has written that ‘there is power in being ignored’.[4]  The Pharaoh will learn this to his cost:  he ordered all Hebrew boy babies to be thrown into the Nile, but let the girls live – he assumed that girls don’t matter at all, or may be useful later…  yet it is women, named and unnamed, Egyptian and Hebrew, who between them ensure that Moses will survive to lead the people out of slavery..

 

If people think you are insignificant, you may have the opportunity to do important work behind the scenes…you can develop your own identity, not just what others expect of you…

 

And yet you can’t stay anonymous for ever – or not in the Jewish world if you do something really important.  As Hannah Altorf points out, Moses’ mother is named as Jocheved in chapter 6 (next week).  And then after we cross the Red Sea, we learn that his sister is Miriam.  And later Jewish tradition can’t cope with the Pharaoh’s daughter being unnamed, and suggests that she be honoured with the name Batya/Bitya (daughter of God).  In fact, the only individual in the story who remains nameless is the one who sought to destroy the identity of others – the Pharaoh.

 

Vanessa Freedman wrote in a Limmud article a few years ago:[5]

The perpetuating of names is important, but they don’t tell the whole story. Ultimately, it’s through our actions that we make a name for ourselves.

 

And so, returning to the final few lines of Zelda’s poem:

Each of us has a name
given by the seasons
and given by our blindness

Each of us has a name
given by the sea
and given by
our death.

But I like to add my own last stanza:

Each of us has a name

We can make or choose for ourselves.

 

Shabbat Shalom…

[1] Poem by Zelda (1914-1984); original in Hebrew, this translation by Marcia Lee Falk 2004

[2] Shakespeare: Romeo & Juliet Act II Scene 2

[3] Isaiah 56:5  I will give them an everlasting name, That shall not perish.

[4] https://lbc.ac.uk/parashat-shmot/  January 2025

[5] Limmud on One Leg 28th December 2018