What’s in a Name?

To transfigure destiny

When Abram is old, long after leaving Ur and a famine and a war and an arrangement with his wife’s handmaiden, God appears to him and tells him he will no longer be called Abram. He will be Abraham. The addition of a single letter, a hey, one of the letters of God’s own name, turns “father of many” into “father of multitudes.” The promise is sewn into the man’s syllables. Every time someone calls his name across a tent, they recite prophecy.

His wife too undergoes a unification with destiny. Sarai becomes Sarah. Shifting from “my princess” to “princess”, she becomes a princess to nations. Her barrenness, which had defined her, which had driven her to offer Hagar to her husband’s bed, is rewritten.

Abraham’s handmaiden Hagar also undergoes a transmutation. Hagar means “the stranger”. She is a function before she is a person. And yet it is Hagar the handmaiden who becomes the only figure in the Torah to give God a name. She is pregnant and alone. An angel tells her to return to her mistress. Her response is to name God. El Roi, she calls him. The God who sees. An exiled handmaiden names the creator of the universe. When Sarah dies, Abraham returns to Hagar, herself renamed to Keturah, incense — because her deeds were as pleasant as incense.

Then there is Jacob, whose name means “heel-grabber” or “supplanter”. The man who came out of the womb clutching his brother’s ankle, already scheming, already reaching for what wasn’t his. He lives into the name. He cheats Esau of a birthright. He deceives his blind father with goatskin on his arms. He is cheated in turn by Laban, and cheats Laban back. The name is a destiny and a curse. To be Jacob is to be always grasping, chasing destiny, fleeing its consequences.

And then, at the ford of the Jabbok, alone in the dark, a figure attacks him. They wrestle until dawn. Jacob will not let go. The figure wrenches Jacob’s hip from its socket, and still Jacob clings. I will not let you go until you bless me. The figure asks his name, and Jacob says it. Jacob. Heel-grabber. Supplanter. He confesses what he is. And the figure says: Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have wrestled with God and with men and have prevailed.

The heel-grabber becomes the God-wrestler. The man who worked through deception is renamed. And he bears his life-long limp as proof.

A name is not merely a label. It is a verdict. It is a destiny. In Hebrew, shem — name — shares a root with sham, meaning “there.” Your name is where you are. It is the coordinates of your soul.

This is why the Jewish tradition holds that when a person is deathly ill, you change their name. You call them Chaim (life) or Raphael (God heals) as an act of metaphysical intervention. The Kabbalists taught that the entirety of the Torah is composed of the names of God, and that every human soul has a letter within it, and that to know your true name — your shem ha-etzem, your essential name — is to know your purpose in creation.

After the first moments of creation, man is invited to name the animals of the earth. This recognises his dominion.

So the Bolsheviks renamed the world they wrested. Petrograd (itself formerly St. Petersburg) became Leningrad. Nizhny Novgorod became Gorky. Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad. They exorcised the contamination of the Tsars, of the Church, of everything the new order had replaced.

They renamed themselves. Ioseb Jughashvili, a Georgian cobbler’s son with a pockmarked face and a seminary education, became Stalin — man of steel. Vladimir Ulyanov became Lenin. Lev Bronstein became Trotsky. Vyacheslav Skriabin became Molotov — the hammer. Shed the father, shed the village, shed the faith, shed the ethnicity, and emerge as a pure instrument of history. Name becomes destiny. Stalin becomes steel.

The Zionists too adopted the monikers of destiny. They resurrected Hebrew as a national language and adopted the names of a land they reforged in their image. It was an act of civilisational rebirth. David Grün, a Polish lawyer’s son from Plońsk, became David Ben-Gurion. Shimon Perski became Shimon Peres. Golda Meyerson became Golda Meir. Levi Shkolnik became Levi Eshkol. Diaspora names — Yiddish, Russian, Polish — were shed like old skins. The new names were assertively, aggressively Hebraic.

Ben-Gurion demanded the change of his cadres. Golda Meir resented it for the rest of her life. She had been Golda Meyerson for decades. She was a Milwaukee girl who’d made aliyah. The name Meir — “one who illuminates” — was thrust upon her by a man who believed that the Jewish future could not be built with Jewish past-names.

When Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. declared that he would no longer answer to his “slave name,” he was performing an act of existential secession. The Associated Press did not use “Muhammad Ali” for years — itself an assertion of dominance. Frederick Bailey became Frederick Douglass, after a character in Walter Scott. A man who had been legally classified as livestock named himself after a fictional Scottish lord. Malcolm Little became Malcolm X. X marks the spot where a name had been stolen.

The Pope changes his name. The practice dates to the sixth century, when a priest named Mercury — Mercurius, after the pagan god — decided upon his election that a pope named for a Roman deity might send the wrong message. He chose John II. Ever since, the papal name has been a declaration of intent. Benedict XVI chose a name associated with monasticism and European civilisation. Francis chose a name associated with poverty, simplicity, and the unreformed Church. You were meant to predict their papacies from their names.

A woman takes a man's name. Two people announce a new entity — that the unit now supersedes its components. The family name becomes the name of a thing that did not exist before the wedding and that cannot be reduced to either party. Two become one, and the one needs a name, and the name is the covenant.

The story of migration and assimilation is the story of changing names and re-becoming.

To change your name is to assert that the story your parents began is not the only story available to you, that you can grasp at and transfigure your destiny.