Tradition is strong, and the names of certain gods themselves became sacred, as they were called on as local, special protectors. This is a residue of what was called \u201chinotheism,\u201d and some have noted that early Judaism didn\u2019t so much as deny the existence of other gods as make it obligatory for our tribe\u2014on pain of death\u2014to worship only \u201cour\u201d god, as differentiated from the gods of other peoples in the region.<\/p>\n
Woven into this tradition is the idea that a worthy god has a proper \u201cname,\u201d but it\u2019s a secret name known only to the highest of priests. In Judaism many names are used that aren\u2019t the real name, the correct pronunciation of which is not known today. (Legend has it that only the high priest learned from his predecessor and he only used it fully one day a year when he would enter the depths of the holy temple and say it as part of a very formal prayer. It was all lost when the first temple in Jerusalem was destroyed as part of the Babylonian conquest and exile in around the 6th century before the Common Era.) Most of the words for God are euphemisms in Hebrew, Ha-Shem, being \u201cthe name,\u201d or Adonai, meaning \u201cLord.\u201d The four letters of the proper name are known, y h v h, and translated as Jehovah, though they didn\u2019t have the dj sound of the first letter until as late as the 15th century when French significantly influenced English. Orthodox Jews don\u2019t even write the word, or modify it as G-d. Those who think about it will justify this as a reminder that what is being referred to is so far beyond our being that it would be misleading to think we know what that word really means. I sort of agree with this.<\/p>\n
Anyway, the question comes up whether that local, tribal god, later magnified to be a global deity, transformed into the one God of all creation, etc., if that three-letter German-derived word does the job it\u2019s supposed to do: Does it direct us to the proper set of mental images and associations? (Or do people forget that the \u201cdevil can quote scripture,\u201d and might they be using what they have been taught to justify whatever their current biases, prejudices, entitlements, and political beliefs they find comforting or profitable?)<\/p>\n
Certainly those embedded in tradition would not begin to hear of any proposed changes of the name, but as I\u2019ve been going through my own wrestling with spirituality, certain local names don\u2019t work for me. Semantically, I\u2019m inclined to try to find words that directly remind me of what we\u2019re vaguely aiming at: The Everything, the More, Yet, the Ground of Being, the Living Cosmos (which involves the dimensions of mind as well as matter, space, time, and energy), and so forth. Source, Great Spirit, these aren\u2019t bad. More local names that have no other meaning to the masses tend to lead me to associate that name with the set of beliefs of the masses who worship that name\u2014and I don\u2019t find any commonly used concepts to be compatible with the vast expansion of the knowledge of the size, duration, and subtlety of the cosmos that we\u2019ve been discovering in the last century.<\/p>\n