Sometime more than two thousand years ago, Jews stopped pronouncing the four-letter name of God used in the Torah. For some time, the sound of the Name was probably kept alive in mystical groups; but it has long vanished. When the Second Temple stood in Jerusalem, the Name was pronounced on Yom Kippur by the Kohen Gadol, the Chief Priest, on the one day of the year when he would enter the innermost holy place within the Temple. The people gathered in the courtyards of the Temple could hear it. But even then, the Kohen as he said the Name would see only a cloud of incense, obscuring the ark and its covering, a reminder of the tablets engraved with God's original words from atop Mt. Sinai.
Words lose their edge, their punch, as they are used and reused. This year's arresting call to action becomes next year's cliche. Our most important words lose their lustre with much repetition. And when that happens, our ideas and visions become cloudy, if not dull. Our ancestors had the insight to remove the divine Name from circulation even among the learned and pious, to prevent it from becoming corrupted. Each year, in the most holy place, the Name would be recalled. Not just the word but the reality of God would be reglorified and renewed in the process. Somehow, the community would have to live for as long as it could off the pure sound of the Name, before the notion of God would once again become routine and cloudy.
We may not want to remove certain words from our daily use, but we ought to fear for the corruption of our best words and the visions they are supposed to capture. As Jews, we have words like tikkun olam, tzedakah, chesed, brit. As activists in the English-speaking world, we have a corresponding vocabulary about justice, action, service, community. We see these words corrupted all the time. Any act of volunteering is called "repairing the world", even when the volunteers never question why people are suffering and what can be done to change those conditions. Any gift of money to any good cause is called tzedakah, whether the beneficiaries are poor or not, whether the work promotes justice or not.
And it isn't just "others" who do the corrupting. Those of us who tend to be on the political left often lend our words and their credibility too quickly or too certainly to whatever is going as "progressive", "liberal", or "pro-peace" at a given time.
Periodically, we need to restore the force and essence of the fundamental words we use in Jewish service and activism. Maybe some words or concepts need a rest--has tikkun olam become so popular that it can be used for almost anything? Or maybe not rest, but recalibration--we resolve only to say "community" when people are actually meeting, talking, looking one another in the eye. Perhaps it is time to rescue overlooked meanings--chesed not just as good deeds and "lovingkindness", but as the challenging combination of caring and duty.
Yom Kippur is really a day all about words. Unlike almost every other Jewish occasion, on Yom Kippur we dissociate from our bodies--we don't eat or drink, we dress in a manner that is simple, or perhaps the manner of the angels. The service is extended and elaborated with poems and recitations--there is even the whole extra service of Neilah invented just for Yom Kippur, beyond the standard evening, morning, and afternoon prayers. We recite our confessions quietly to ourselves, and then in full voice with the congregation. The rituals of the day enact a belief that words recited in sincerity and community can affect our destiny, as individuals and nations and as the world.
That belief belongs not just to the day of Yom Kippur. So the matter of the hidden Name, recited only in the Holy of Holies, teaches us to respect and protect the words we rely on, as our tools and as our vision. Whatever words are at the center of your social action, find a moment of sanctuary on Yom Kippur to meditate on them, to renew them. And to hear them again, as if they had been long lost, or speaking to you for the very first time.
