Sanctifying God's Name

Rabbi Elliot Dorff, PhD

Sol & Anne Distinguished Professor in Philosophy, Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies

University Rector, American Jewish University

Rabbi Elliot Dorff, PhD is AJU’s Rector and Sol & Anne Dorff Distinguished Service Professor in Philosophy. He is Chair of the Conservative Movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards and served on the editorial committee of Etz Hayim, the new Torah commentary for the Conservative Movement. He has chaired four scholarly organizations: the Academy of Jewish Philosophy, the Jewish Law Association, the Society of Jewish Ethics, and the Academy of Judaic, Christian, and Islamic Studies. He was elected Honorary President of the Jewish Law Association for the term of 2012-2016. In Spring 1993, he served on the Ethics Committee of Hillary Rodham Clinton's Health Care Task Force. In March 1997 and May 1999, he testified on behalf of the Jewish tradition on the subjects of human cloning and stem cell research before the President's National Bioethics Advisory Commission. In 1999 and 2000 he was part of the Surgeon General’s commission to draft a Call to Action for Responsible Sexual Behavior; and from 2000 to 2002 he served on the National Human Resources Protections Advisory Commission, charged with reviewing and revising the federal guidelines for protecting human subjects in research projects. Rabbi Dorff is also a member of an advisory committee for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History on the social, ethical, and religious implications of their exhibits. He is also a member of the Ethics Advisory Committee for the state of California on stem cell research.

He has been an officer of the FaithTrust Institute, a national organization that produces seminars and educational materials to help people avoid or extricate themselves from domestic violence. For eight years he was also been a member of the Board of Directors of the Jewish Federation Council of Los Angeles, chairing its committee on serving the vulnerable. In Los Angeles, he is a Past President of Jewish Family Services and a member of the Ethics committee at U.C.L.A. Medical Center. He serves as Co-Chair of the Priest-Rabbi Dialogue of the Los Angeles Archdiocese and the Board of Rabbis of Southern California.

posted on September 25, 2010

Torah Reading

Exodus 33:12 - 34:26

Haftarah Reading

Ezekiel 38:18 - 39:16

Maftir Reading

Numbers 29:17-22

"I will make My holy name known among My people Israel, and never again will I let My holy name be profaned. And the nations shall know that I the Lord am holy in Israel." (Ezekiel 39:7)

In this verse from today's haftarah, God is announcing that His great war against Gog, symbol of all God's enemies, will make it clear to the nations that God rules the world. This is parallel to the theme we read in the Torah concerning the Exodus, where God brings on the plagues to convince both the Israelites and the Egyptians of His power (Exodus 7:5, 17; 14:4).

Great wars against enemy nations may be the way that God buttresses His reputation among the nations, as both the books of Exodus and Ezekiel attest. Even there, we might wonder whether this is the best way of spreading honor for God. Shouldn't God - whom we just described over and over again on the High Holy Days as good, caring, and merciful - be made known more by divine acts of healing and comfort rather than of war? One understands the need to defend oneself, and one certainly understands, from an historical point of view, that in the ancient world a god, like a human king, made his reputation by military conquests. Still, I, for one, am much more attracted to the biblical doctrines of God's name becoming known for teaching us and the other nations of the world what it means to live by Torah, as the visions of both Isaiah (2:1-4) and Micah (4:1-5) describe.

In any case, even if military conquest is one way that God makes His name known among the nations, that certainly is not the way that we human beings sanctify God's name. The concepts of kiddush ha-shem(sanctifying God's Name - or reputation) and its opposite, hillul ha-shem (desecrating God's Name - or reputation) are important values built into the Jewish tradition. They call on us to live our lives in an exemplary way so as to reflect well on our God, our tradition, and our people, and also to do our best to avoid embarrassing or destructive behavior that would reflect badly on both Israel's God and our fellow Jews.

I first learned these concepts when I was a counselor at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin. The closest town of any size to that Ramah camp is Eagle River, which has a winter population of about 1,000 people. At the time (1962), there was an ice cream parlor named Zimpleman's, which many of the Ramah staff frequented on their days off. Rabbi Burton Cohen, then Director of the camp, told us during staff week that when we go into Zimpleman's, we need to remember that all the townsfolk know that the only large camp in the area is Ramah and that therefore it is not just we as individuals who are going into Zimpleman's, but we as Ramah staff members. Moreover, because the townsfolk know that Ramah is Jewish, it is not just Ramah staff members who are going into Zimpleman's, but Jews who are going into Zimpleman's. Therefore our behavior there reflects not only on ourselves as individuals, but on Ramah and on the entire Jewish people. How is that for a good dose of guilt! He did not mean to emphasize the negative, though. On the contrary, he taught us then that our visits to Zimpleman's actually provided us with an opportunity to sanctify the reputation of God, Judaism, and the Jewish people if we acted responsibly and even kindly to the staff there, for that would be an act of kiddush ha-shem.

We often think of kiddush ha-shem in its later meaning of martyrdom. Much more pervasively, though, kiddush ha-shem calls on us to act in a way that both we and our fellow Jews - and indeed God Himself - could be proud of and to avoid the opposite kinds of shameful and embarrassing behavior. We all know how powerful that motivation is: we burst with pride in the accomplishments of our fellow Jews in all sorts of fields, and we cringe with embarrassment when a Jew is indicted for a crime. We not only respond to what other Jews do in these terms; we also take the potential for honor or dishonor into account - or we should take that into account - when we decide how we ourselves are going to act.

Everyday Jewish liturgy has us recite the Kaddish in its various forms a number of times. It begins "May His great Name be exalted and sanctified." That is a prayer that we dare not just recite by rote and leave it at that. We should not even think of it as just a vague hope. We must instead translate that commitment into the ways we treat other people in our daily interactions with them. It is precisely in that arena that we can know whether we mean what we say when we utter the first line of the Kaddish. May our lives be filled with acts of sanctifying God's Name as we treat people in ways that bring honor to God, Judaism, and the Jewish people.