www.reformjudaism.org.uk

Names for God - Page 2

Written by Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet Sunday, 01 June 2003

A Prayer Book in the Making

So how do you translate YHWH?  Do you translate the substitute consonantal form as ‘Lord’ as has been done for centuries?  If so there is a powerful masculine overtone to the term that feels out of place today, perpetuating mediaeval images of male power and authority.  Moreover that deliberate vowel change in the Hebrew, to give the word a unique sense, is lost.  So some have suggested not to translate it at all and simply use the word ‘Adonai’ in the English.  But that makes it into a proper noun, a name, e.g. ‘Adonai said’, just like ‘Baal said’, which contradicts the message given to Moses at the burning bush.  Some traditional prayerbooks have replaced it with the word ‘haShem’, literally ‘the name’ which raises similar problems.

An entirely different approach is to go back to what is perceived as being the meaning of the word YHWH itself, which leads to two directions.  If it is about ‘being’, ‘existence’, then a philosophical approach leads to the idea of God as a timeless presence, hence the German translation ‘der Ewige’, and in English, ‘the Eternal’, which is used in some American prayerbooks and in our own Pilgrim Festival book. However this raised grammatical questions in English.  Is the word ‘Eternal;’ an adjective (in which case one solution is to add the word ‘One’ each time it appears) or a noun that can stand alone?  But grammar apart and more seriously, it feels very abstract and technical, hardly conducive to intimacy and prayer.

A different approach entirely was adopted by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig in their German translation of the Bible, understanding the name to refer to God’s ‘immanence’, immediacy, presence, nearness to us.  Rather than supply a name for God they replaced the name with YOU (DU) or HE (ER), capitalised, as appropriate to the context.  However this solution breaks down today where we are conscious of gender-based language – unless we can use SHE in an equal number of cases.  (My Bible teacher at Leo Baeck College, Dr Ellen Littmann pointed out that when Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck wrote his first book, ‘The Essence of Judaism’, the used ‘Der Ewige’ throughout.  However in his book, ‘This People Israel’, written in Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, he changed to ‘He who is’, the God who is present in suffering, using the Buber-Rosenzweig form.