The Mothers Point The Way

Being a student is inspiring and humbling.  I read a lot of brilliant work from scholars who have dedicated themselves to one corner of the Big Questions. I get daily glimpses of some fascinating idea to explore—it’s as exciting to me as gambling or skydiving must be to others. I sometimes imagine myself as one of these scholars, and then reality brings me down with a thud when I think of how much I would have to learn to really grasp the complexities of a single area of my multi-disciplinary field, how much Greek philosophy or Latin philology or cultural anthropology I would need to study, not to mention the German and French I would need to learn to read the big works in those fields. Probably my other life as an academic needs to remain as the road less traveled. But once in a while the heavens open up, and the angels of learning throw down a shaft of pure bliss (nerd division).

I had one of those recently in Hebrew class. I am already predisposed to loving Hebrew—I love everything about it, the sound of the words, the elegant calligraphic beauty of the letters, the deep pools of meaning that can be contained in a single word. Our class had been introduced early in the semester to group of Hebrew letters called matres lectionis, “mothers of reading,” which our tutor calls the mother letters. Sometimes these words are used as consonants or vowels, but other times they have a special function, to be little pointers that alert the reader to notice the way certain vowels work. Occasionally our tutor would say, pay attention to the mothers and I would think, word to the wise.

So, we were sitting one day recently in our small tutorial group going over our vocabulary words for the week. One of my classmates was puzzling over a word, saying, why doesn’t this one have any vowels, and then we realized that the word was the Tetragrammaton, the four letters, YHWH, that represent the holy name of God. The ancient Jews that preserved the text of the Hebrew Bible believed that name is too sacred to be spoken by the profane mouths of mortals, so they came up with this holy monogram. When it appears in the text, the lack of vowels reminds the reader not to vocalize those letters, but to substitute another word, Adonai, which means “Lord.” If you see the word LORD in small caps in your Bible, that’s the Tetragrammaton. There are others words that mean God used sometimes, but this word represents, not just the concept of God, but God’s name, the answer God gives to Moses when Moses asks who God is, what name he should use when going to the Egyptians to seek the freedom of the enslaved Hebrews. That answer, as a word, is a verb, a verb of being, which you could translate as “I am who I am,” or “I will be who I will be.” This points towards some ideas about the nature of God, the dynamic character of God who exists beyond—well, everything—beyond the limits of language, our small imaginations, the way we try to control things by naming and dissecting them, beyond our desire to have neat categories and solid answers, toward a realm of God’s continual renewing, becoming, inviting.

That day in Hebrew class as we sat around the table, reflecting on the holy name, one of my classmates pointed to the four letters again and said, “Have you ever noticed that all four of the letters are mother letters?” We all looked at each other, quiet for a moment, soaking in the perfection of that metaphor. These letters, YHWH exist to do what mother letters do, to be like arrows, pointing towards a reality so big, words don’t really cover it, so glorious we can really only stutter with awe. And so this word, this name, made up of mother letters is the ultimate big flashing neon sign of a pointer, saying, look around. You are breathing the air that is God every second of your life. Pay attention! You don’t want to miss this!

The mother letters are kind of like Mother Wisdom, gently pointing us toward the Big Questions, and reminding us to be aware that words have great power, not only the sacred name of our creator, but all words. The great Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Words create worlds,” and he may have been referring to the way, in the creation story, that God says the word “light,” and light comes into existence in the world. And he also meant that the way we name our reality shapes that reality. In large ways and small, the respect and compassion with which we speak becomes the compassion we can imagine and therefore give, which the world so desperately needs. The mothers guide us away from falseness and self-seeking toward the becoming of more justice, more kindness, more room for God’s big ideas to take root and make the deserts bloom.

Photo credit:

Nubra River, Kashmir, India

Copyright by Yodod 2006