Names of blessing, and names to be forgotten

Talking with a rabbi earlier this week, I learned that the Hebrew language has (perhaps not surprisingly) both the most beautiful blessing in the world and the darkest curse.

We were talking about Jewish history and mythology, and the rabbi said "So Hitler, yimach sh’mo, believed that the Jewish legend of the golem was real and tore apart Prague trying to find it..."

After he'd told the story, I asked him to backtrack and repeat what he'd said.

ימח שמו (sounds like yimakh shemo): "May his name be erased".

That was both chilling, and perfect. The rabbi expounded further (as rabbis apparently are wont to do) that in Jewish culture, to be remembered is to continue to exist; every year, there is a ceremony of writing or reciting the names of the blessed dead in a book. If someone's name is erased, the memory of them will die; and if they are no longer remembered, they never existed.

What made it more chilling and perfect was the tone in which he'd said the words. It managed to simultaneously be the tone of someone casually, reflexively saying the thing that always gets said, like we say "How are you?" without actually waiting to hear a reply; and AT THE SAME TIME the tone of an Old Testament prophet who had invoked the Power, rent a hole in the fabric of reality by speaking the words, and made it so.

That's how the Jewish people feel about Hitler. He doesn't deserve to be remembered; he doesn't even deserve to be spoken of with loathing. He deserves to be as if he never existed, his name and memory erased from this world and the next.

And that's exactly right. Why should we make the serial killers, the mass murderers, the monsters, famous in news accounts and history books? That's what they wanted, and what they committed their crimes FOR - power and fame (infamy is still fame, after all). Let them be staked through the heart, their bodies burned, their ashes buried in the local dump with all the other waste, and then let them and their influence end.

Let the news articles and history books remove their names and pictures, and name instead the victims and the heroes, tell the stories of those who were hurt by the monsters and those who finally destroyed the monsters; and let the monsters themselves be referred to only by the words He is erased. Let no one even care enough about them to spend the time and energy it takes to hate them or remember their names. Let them no longer have power even to anger anyone; let them be treated with the contempt with which we treat a mosquito that has been swatted.

Let them no longer have been.

May their names be erased.


Then I asked the rabbi whether there is a corollary blessing when a righteous person passes away. There is: זיכרונו לברכה (sounds like zikhrono livrakha) - "May his name be for a blessing."

How cool is that? How beautiful to be remembered forever as a blessing, your very name a benediction, your life continuing in the lives of others who have become better people just by hearing about you. How wonderful for your name to be invoked when people pray for their friends to have their burdens eased, or for themselves to be better people. How wonderful to be remembered  like Gandhi, or Mother Teresa, or Oskar Schindler - people whose very existence was a rebuke to those who deserve the epithet yimakh shemo; people who will never die because their deeds are now woven into the fabric of the world, into how human beings define what human beings ought to be.

May you, and I, and all of us who try our best but continually fall short of our own standards, someday become the people we want to see in the mirror, the people we wanted to be when we were kids and imagined ourselves as grownups, the people we want to be for our own children.


May your name be for a blessing.


© John M. Munzer