Illustration Credit: Rivka Tsinman
Halakhah הֲלָכָה
Name Changes
In Lekh Lekha, Sarai becomes Sarah, and Avram becomes Avraham. These changes are set in motion directly by God, and are meant to set these two up for leadership of a new people. But did you know that there is a long Jewish tradition of people changing their own names for other reasons?
One of the scariest things in life is to get very sick. We are lucky today to be able to use our knowledge about the human body and medicine to help people. But we can’t fix everything, and this was even more true in the past, when medical science was more limited. So, we also pray for those who are sick, and ask God to send them healing. You may be familiar with this from special prayers said during the Torah reading for people in the community who are in need of healing. Here is how Rema (R. Moshe Isserles, Poland, 500 years ago) describes that practice:
...וְכֵן נָהֲגוּ לְבָרֵךְ חוֹלִים בְּבֵית הַכְּנֶסֶת, לִקְרֹא לָהֶם שֵׁם חָדָשׁ, כִּי שִׁנּוּי הַשֵּׁם קוֹרֵעַ גְּזַר דִּינוֹ.
…And it is the practice to bless those who are sick in the synagogue, and to give them a new name, because changing a person’s name tears up their prior fate.
Wow! We see here that sometimes, when people were really sick, communities didn’t just pray for them, they gave them a whole new name! The Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 16b) says that getting a new name helps a person start over; they can now think of themselves almost as being a new person. Some famous rabbis went through this process. The author of the Kli Yekar commentary on the Torah was born named Efrayim, but after he got deathly ill, he changed his name to Shlomo Efrayim—and recovered! He went by this new name for the rest of his life.
- Do you know anyone who has changed their name midway through life? What were they trying to accomplish when doing that?
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