The Master of the Name

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Foreword

You are what they name you: Nemo, Meno, Emo, Whatever. No matter if you live up to that name or not, whether you like it or not, everyone—and I mean omnes—has a name.

Yeah, I know. You cannot choose your name. Others do it for you, as always happens in life. Don't blame your parents if they named you Data, Pet, Idol, Halo or Anonymous. Obviously they were taking their daily dose of TV or gaming. Not to mention the crack. You cannot choose them just as you cannot escape your name, since nomen est omen.

But there is no excuse for the castaway Crusoe to call a man Friday, when Jerome, the patron saint of the day of his shipwreck was handy. It sucks even as a nickname: "What's up, Payday?" Surely, if you don't like your name, you can change it. But beware. Every name change comes at a price, like a personality change. Look what happened to Saul. One brief encounter of the seventh kind and he dropped the "S" for "P" or the sin for the penance.

Don't add a middle, third, n...name. One is more than enough. Two is a split personality. Three is a crowd. Otherwise why would God call the first man just Adam rather than Ad Am or Mad A, although the extra word would cost Him nothing. When He created the madam he called her simply Eve, not E. Ve or V. E. E., just enough to wow the man with the woman (which, by the way, means, 'Wow, what a man!').

Are you Forename Surname Jr., the third, the fourth or the x-th in your family line? That means your ancestor had such a big ego that not even death could contain it. He thought he could cheat death with you living in his shadow by forfeiting his conceited, yet mortal life for an everlasting name. Probably he skipped the Sunday Bible study on Exodus 20:5. Are you feeling shame for not living up to his name? Get a life then, I mean get a name. You name it. And I mean it, without being mean.

They say the master of your name is your master, too. So Adam became the master of all beasts as soon as he named them. By the same token your Godfather is your master, whether you like it or not, since you carry the name he gave you at Baptism. The good news is that, unlike your parents, you may choose him. You may also choose your baby's name, the name you have always liked, but nobody cared about that.

For every given name there is a hidden name, which nobody knows but God. This is in compliance with the Creation Privacy Act of 3761 B. C. that you signed before you were born. For your peace of mind, be aware that you may enjoy your right name in the afterlife. But for now, try to live up to your present name.

Even God has a name, which He revealed to Moses on Mount Horeb. Besides Moses, some sages claim that God might also have revealed His name to a few chosen ones—the Masters of The Name. The Hasidim honor them by adding to their name the title Baal Shem. Unlike a secret, that Polichinelle thinks only he knows, the revelation of The Name is a mystery at God's will. That's because "He is God, and you aren't!" (Chevy Chase).

Legend has it that at any given moment there are thirty-six righteous men in the world who keep it rolling. Only they are supposed to know God's Name, and not just how to spell it, but how to utter it—since the power of The Name lies not in the written, but in the spoken word. The one who knows it can then become himself a god. He may use The Name as a gift in order to expand the realm of life, or wield it as a weapon to serve the reign of death. Some have said that even Jesus was such a Master of the Name, who used it to rise from the dead.

I would dismiss such tales as deceitful, not just because I met Him—yeah, don't raise your eyebrows—but on historical grounds. The last High Priest of the Second Temple who knew the correct pronunciation of the name of God, namely the Tetragrammaton—YHWH—was Simon the Just, who lived almost three centuries before Jesus was born. He used to utter it only once a year, on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), in the Holy of Holies. Since the death of this Simon, knowledge of the pronunciation of The Name has been lost. Some say that God took it back because the outcry against the sins of men had reached Him. Some believe that it was lost because pronouncing The Name was forbidden. Truth is that nobody has ever dared, since the third century B.C., to openly claim that he knows how to pronounce the Tetragrammaton.