Before We Speak of Names

Where does our understanding of a thing come from?

For most people who believe in G-d, it doesn’t come from study. It comes the way family stories come. Through repetition. Through the phrases that surface at important moments throughout our lives. Through atmosphere. This isn’t a critique. It’s an observation.

Human beings are shaped more by what we absorb than by what we ever stop to examine or investigate.

And sometimes—without realizing it—we inherit a picture of the world, and of G-d, that feels familiar and settled, even if we’ve never actually looked closely at where it came from.

So let’s slow down. Not to argue or persuade. Just to look.

Something You’ve Seen Your Whole Life

If you’ve ever opened an English Bible, you’ve already encountered what we’re about to explore.

You’ve seen the word LORD. Not “Lord” with a lowercase L. But LORD in all capital letters.

Most people read straight past it. It feels like a title. A respectful way of speaking about G-d. Something familiar.

But LORD is not a title. It’s a substitution.

The Name Behind the Substitution

In the Hebrew text, the word behind LORD is a proper Name.

Four Hebrew letters: י–ה–ו–ה  Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, sometimes written Y-H-V-H

These four letters appear thousands of times in the Hebrew Scriptures—far more than any descriptive title like King, Creator, or Almighty.

This Name is sometimes called the Tetragrammaton. That word sounds technical, but it simply means “four letters.”

And here is the part most people were never told: This Name is written constantly— but traditionally, it is never spoken. When readers encounter it, they say something else. Or they pause. Or they remain silent.

The English word LORD (all caps) is doing the same thing השם HaShem does in Jewish speech: the Hebrew word HaShem translates literally as “the Name” and it stands in for a Name that the text itself refuses to treat casually.

Why This Is Strange—and Worth Noticing

That alone should make us curious.

Why would the most central Name in the Bible be preserved so carefully, and yet withheld from speech? Why write it thousands of times—only to train readers not to say it?

Most people were never invited to notice this. Translations smooth it over. The question disappears. But in the original text, the restraint is unavoidable. The Name is there. And it resists being handled.

What This Name Is—and Is Not

This Name is not a nickname. Not a personal label. Not a sound meant to create emotional closeness.

It comes from the Hebrew verb to be—pointing not to a character description, but to existence itself.

What was. What is. What will be.

Not a sentence. Not an acronym. Not a code to decode. A verbal form that refuses to settle into grammar. This isn’t because humans are flawed— but because language itself collapses under the weight of it.

The Hebrew Scriptures here again do something unexpected. It does not make the Divine familiar or common. It does the opposite— it withholds.

This silence is not a matter of distance but of precision.

An Undomesticated G-d

The G-d revealed by this Name is not abstract—but neither is He manageable.

He does not exist to soothe anxiety. He does not exist to confirm belief. He does not exist to be emotionally accessible on demand. He appears as reality itself—ordered, consequential, morally structured.

That’s why this Name shows up most often not in mystical poetry, but in commandments about justice, restraint, honesty, power, and responsibility.

This G-d does not ask, “Do you believe in Me?” He asks, “Are you aligned with what is real?”

That is a very different question. And a far more demanding one.

“You Shall Not Take the Name in Vain”

This is where a familiar phrase takes on a very different meaning.

Most people were taught that the commandment “You shall not take the Name in vain” means: Don’t use G-d’s name as a swear word.

But that is not what the text actually says. In Hebrew, the commandment is not about saying the Name. It is about carrying it.

The verb means: to bear, to carry, to take upon oneself.

And the word translated as vain does not mean “cursing.” It means: empty, false, deceptive, contradictory.

So the warning is this: Do not carry the Name of Y–H–V–H in a way that empties it of truth.

In other words: Do not attach G-d’s Name to injustice. Do not invoke Him to sanctify harm. Do not claim Him while living in contradiction to what He demands.

The gravest misuse of the Name is not a word. It is misrepresentation.

Why Restraint Makes Sense

Seen this way, the silence around the Name is no longer mysterious. It is ethical caution.

If carrying the Name falsely is one of the deepest violations— if the danger is not pronunciation but contradiction— then restraint becomes wisdom.

Better to withhold speech than to attach the Name to actions that hollow it out.

Better to say HaShem. Better to say LORD. Better to pause.

A Human Impulse Worth Noticing

There is something else worth observing before we go further.

Across history, whenever human beings encounter something sacred that resists them—something that cannot be named, controlled, or mastered—they tend not to leave it alone. They study it. They argue over it. They try to recover what feels withheld. They assume distance must mean something was lost. But that assumption itself deserves examination.

What if nothing was lost? What if the silence is not an accident—but a decision? What if the boundary is not a punishment—but part of the relationship itself?

Let’s stay with the question a little longer.

If the Name functions as a boundary— if silence is part of the relationship— if encounter requires restraint— then something important follows. It means the problem was never distance. It was impatience.

Human beings do not struggle with believing in G-d. They struggle with waiting on G-d. Waiting without explanation. Waiting without reassurance. Waiting without resolution. And over time, waiting begins to feel like absence. So we reinterpret it.

At first, distance is experienced as awe. Later, as discomfort. Eventually, as deficiency. Something must be missing. Something must have gone wrong. Something must need fixing. And once that assumption takes hold, the work shifts.

No longer: How do I align myself with what is real? But: How do I regain closeness as quickly and reliably as possible?

This is where systems begin to form—not around encounter, but around access.

Access Is Easier Than Alignment.

Alignment is slow. It requires: discipline, restraint, moral change, endurance over time

Access is faster. Access can be taught. Access can be repeated. Access can be guaranteed. And most importantly— access can be offered without demanding transformation first.

So the spiritual center of gravity begins to move. From who must I become to what must I accept. From obedience to affirmation. From a practice to a declaration. The difference is subtle, but decisive.

Maybe this is not as much corruption as it is convenience… because convenience sells.

The Cost of Making G-d Safe

A G-d who is always accessible is also easily bypassed. A G-d who never withholds never forces maturation. A G-d who resolves tension for you no longer requires you to live inside it. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, responsibility migrates away from the individual. Not all at once. Just enough to feel relief. Just enough to feel a degree of peace. But, unfortunately, not enough to produce depth.

Why This Matters Before Naming Anything

It would be easy to point at one tradition and say, this is where it happened. But that would miss the point. This is not about a single movement. It is about a universal human preference.

Whenever the sacred resists us, we look for a way around the resistance. Whenever G-d refuses to be grasped, we look for something—or someone—to hold instead.

The Hebrew Scriptures do not remove this cost. They normalize it. They assume relationship with G-d will be demanding, incomplete, and sometimes even unsettling. They do not rush to make it feel finished.

For Now, Let This Be Enough

Only now—after sitting with all of this—does it become meaningful to ask: What happens when a tradition emerges that promises to finish what the Torah deliberately leaves open? What happens when mediation becomes substitution? What happens when tension is no longer something to inhabit—but something to escape?

Those questions don’t belong to one group.

But one tradition, by its own claim, stands closest to this inheritance. And because it claims continuity— because it says this is the same G-d— the comparison matters. Not to accuse. To understand.

We don’t need to answer that yet. In fact, answering it too quickly would repeat the very pattern the text resists.

For now, it’s enough to notice:

• There is a Name at the center of the Hebrew Scriptures most people were never introduced to
• It is hidden in plain sight every time you read LORD (written in all caps in translations)
• And it carries with it a demand—not for belief, but for alignment

Next week, we’ll take one careful step further and ask what happens when traditions grow uncomfortable with this restraint—when silence becomes explanation, when tension becomes resolution, when mediation becomes something else entirely.

Until then, letting the question remain open is not avoidance. It is fidelity. Because— if a single word in our Bibles—LORD—has been covering something far more demanding than we realized… If an entire commandment has been reduced to etiquette instead of ethics… Then we should at least have the courage to ask: Where else have we confused familiarity for understanding? What else have we repeated without examining? What else have we been certain about that was only ever a proxy?

G-d willing, we will pick up there next week.

Amen.