Jon and I ventured to Landmark Center in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston. I was in search of an alarm clock.
After making Jon suffer through an hour of browsing at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, I agreed to a trip to Best Buy (reminding him that neither one of us has any money to spend frivolously on shark documentaries or lost episodes of Dr. Who).
Knowing that I wasn't going to buy anything, I tired of browsing the DVD isles very quickly. To entertain myself I looked for bad old movies resurrected for some reason onto DVD. I like to read the slogans and cheesy descriptions.
Eventually even that got tired, so I was relieved to see Jon not too far from me in the green polo shirt I had just bought.
"There you are!" I exclaimed coming up next to him. "You keep disappearing! I keep having to track you down!" I laughed and then put my hand on his back, and gave him an affectionate rub.
"Ummm" said Jon.
To my horror I suddenly realized that the dark-haired, goateed man in a green polo shirt was not Jon. Oh. My. God.
"Oh my God!" I exclaimed, and jumped away from him. "I am so sorry. I thought you were some one else, obviously!"
Luckily the real Jon came around the corner at that moment, and I rushed to his side. "There you are!" I said again and did the best I could to hide behind him. "You wander off, leaving me to molest strangers."
If ever there could have been a hole to crawl into .... I would still be there, red-faced with embarrassment.
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Jews do not casually write any Name of God. This practice does not come from the commandment not to take the Lord's Name in vain, as many suppose. In Jewish thought, that commandment refers solely to oath-taking, and is a prohibition against swearing by God's Name falsely or frivolously (the word normally translated as "in vain" literally means "for falsehood").
Judaism does not prohibit writing the Name of God per se; it prohibits only erasing or defacing a Name of God. However, observant Jews avoid writing any Name of God casually because of the risk that the written Name might later be defaced, obliterated or destroyed accidentally or by one who does not know better.
The commandment not to erase or deface the name of God comes from Deut. 12:3. In that passage, the people are commanded that when they take over the promised land, they should destroy all things related to the idolatrous religions of that region, and should utterly destroy the names of the local deities. Immediately afterwards, we are commanded not to do the same to our God. From this, the rabbis inferred that we are commanded not to destroy any holy thing, and not to erase or deface a Name of God.
It is worth noting that this prohibition against erasing or defacing Names of God applies only to Names that are written in some kind of permanent form, and recent rabbinical decisions have held that writing on a computer is not a permanent form, thus it is not a violation to type God's Name into a computer and then backspace over it or cut and paste it, or copy and delete files with God's Name in them. However, once you print the document out, it becomes a permanent form. That is why observant Jews avoid writing a Name of God on web sites like this one or in newsgroup messages: because there is a risk that someone else will print it out and deface it.
Normally, we avoid writing the Name by substituting letters or syllables, for example, writing "G-d" instead of "God." In addition, the number 15, which would ordinarily be written in Hebrew as Yod-Heh (10-5), is normally written as Tet-Vav (9-6), because Yod-Heh is a Name.
I learn something each and every time I come on this website...
new Dr. Who episodes, eh?
OMG! Had I been drinking anything when I read this, it would have most assuredly come shooting out of my nose.
Beach is fun. I'm burnt. See you on Saturday!
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