old testament insight

Brianne lent me this book about a guy trying to find out about the part of his family who died in the Holocaust. He shares readings and studies from the Torah. Mostly about Cain and Able and some about Abraham and Sarah. He talks about the part when the Lord changes Abraham and Sarah’s names and I find it interesting...

"The tale of Abram’s wanderings as he made his way to the Promised Land is a story that’s preoccupied with increase: increase of territory, of decedents, or wealth. (and, presumably, of knowledge, too.) Abram’s burgeoning wealth, following his advantageous stay in Egypt, ultimately causes a rift between his employees and those of his nephew, Lot, and in order to avoid conflict Abram and Lot agree to split up and occupy different territories, the nephew claiming the plain to the east of Jordan (a plain occupied, disastrously, by Sodom and Gomorrah), and the uncle claiming the land to its west. But increases of other kinds preoccupy Abram even after he is comfortably settled in the lad toward which he was told to “got for himself.” After all, God repeatedly promises him that he will be fruitful and his offspring will be as innumerable as the dust and stars; and yet Sarai his wife, has failed to conceive. So among the plenty there is, too, dearth. Abram, aware of this paradox, bitterly lashes out, at one point, wondering what good his vast wealth is when strangers will inherit it. The problem is solved (seemingly) when Sarai offers her Egyptian-born, slave woman, Hagar, to Abram, that she herself, Sarai, “might be built up through her.” Abram obliges- although not without some resultant marital tension-and Ishmael is born. Thirteen years later, when Abraham (as his name has by then become) is ninety-nine and Sarah (whose name also changed) is eight-nine, God announces that in the next year, she will give birth to a son. Not surprisingly, this announcement evokes from Abraham a certain incredulity, and he falls, literally, on his face and laughs. In due course, the child is indeed born, and the Hebrew name that is given to this child fittingly recalls his father’s reaction to the news of his conception: the name means “he laughed,” which in Hebrew is Yitzhak.

"The unique dynamic of Lech Lecha [The name of this particular reading in the Torah is Lech Lecha] is, indeed one of movement between opposites: increase and lack, activity and stasis, barrenness and fertility, and – as is always the case with tales of adventurous travels-solitude and crowds, the loneliness of the traveler on the one hand, and the multitudinous bustle of the places he sees but cannot belong to, on the other. To my mind, this constant tension between opposing forces, this tortured and expressive dynamic (which seems, I often think, a metaphor for the way in which we always want more, want to add to ourselves and grow as we move through our lives, even as we fear that that very addition and increase will make us lose our own past) is most concisely and elegantly expressed toward the end of Lech Lecha, when God promises the nearly centenarian Abram that he will indeed be fruitful and multiply. As a symbol of his new status as the father of great nations, Abram will be the beneficiary of another increase: his name will gain a syllable and become “Abraham.” The name of his wife, too, will undergo a chance, from Sarai to “Sarah.” Various explanations of the significance of the name change have been offered; Rashi [a theologian] goes to no little trouble, for instance, to explain how the Hebrew Avaraham can, in fact, be construed in the way God wants it to be construed, which is as a contraction Av-hamon, “father of multitudes.” The r in Avraham, not present in Ac-hamon a problem, although Rashi as usual solves this with considerable ingenuity. Similarly, much thought is devoted to Rashi to what happens to the final I in Sarai, once she becomes Sarah, sine once a letter has been part of the name of a righteous person, it is an insult to the letter itself to remove it. (No worry: the final letter in the Hebrew spelling of Sarai was, we’re told, later added to the name of the hero Hoshea, who was thereby reborn as Joshua).

"As ingenious and indeed satisfying as this is, I find myself agreeing with another commentator (not Friedman [another theologian] who passes over the name-change passage in silence), who argues that the significance of the name-enhancement process lies less in what the names might actually mean but in the larger sense that, as he accepts the covenant with God, Abram must have a new name, just as monarchs assume a throne name on their accession. The significance of the name is, in this reading, more psychological than philological. This makes perfect sense to me, who by now have become all too familiar with the checkered careers that names can have: how there can be a certain yearning to change the name, and in so doing to signal a necessary break with the life one has lead; and yet how crucial it can be that the name is recognizable, too, because it’s not always clear what parts of the past will turn out to be worth saving."