Rabbi Dr Rene Pfertzel is Rabbi of Maidenhead Synagogue. This sermon was delivered at Maidenhead on Rosh Hashanah morning.
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Yesterday, in New York, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers, families stood at Ground Zero and did what they have done every year since. They read out, one by one, the names of those who were killed. It takes hours, but they do it to keep their memory alive. This year, for the first time, they added a silence at the end for those who have died since from illnesses linked to the toxic dust of that day.
There is a poem by the Israeli poet Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky called L’khol Ish Yesh Shem, “Each of Us Has a Name”. In her poem, Zelda imagines each of us receiving our name from God and our parents, from the mountains and our walls, from our neighbours, our sins and our longings, from our enemies and our love, from our celebrations and our work, and finally from our death.
L’khol ish yesh shem. Each of us has a name.
For us, each human being is unique. Each human being is a reflection of the divine countenance. Each human being deserves care, love and respect. On Yom Kippur, we recite the names of our loved ones during Yizkor. On Yom HaShoah, we remember the names of those who perished. And our Torah contains names and stories that all try, in different ways, to answer an old question: what is a human being?
Our tradition has set aside two boys to be remembered on Rosh Hashanah: Ishmael, son of Hagar, on the first day of the festival, and Isaac, bound on the altar, on the second. They are both tragic stories, with parents whose parenting skills could be improved. Most synagogues that mark only one day of the festival choose the second, the binding of Isaac. And yet the two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, are profoundly connected.
Let us explore the first story, the story of Hagar and Ishmael. He is named before he is born, when the angel tells Hagar: “You shall call him Ishmael, for the Eternal has paid heed to your suffering” (Genesis 16:11). Yishma’el: God hears. He is named at his birth and again at his circumcision. And yet in the chapter in which he is sent into the desert, the very reading of Rosh Hashanah morning, the Torah stops using his name. He becomes “the son of the slave woman”, “the boy”, “the child”. You will not find the name Ishmael.
Why does that matter today of all days? Because today, our tradition says, is the birthday of the first human being. After each set of shofar blasts we will say three words: Hayom harat olam, today the world was conceived. In the Talmud, Rabbi Eliezer teaches that the world was created in Tishrei (Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 10b). Another midrashic tradition places the beginning of creation on the twenty-fifth of Elul, so that the sixth day, the day on which the human being was created, falls on the first of Tishrei. And on that very first day, the midrash goes on, the human was formed, placed in the garden, commanded, transgressed, judged and pardoned, all before sunset (Vayikra Rabbah 29:1). All in one day!
So Rosh Hashanah carries a question that has crossed the whole of human history: what is a human being? Jewish tradition asks us to live our lives in coherence with our values: how we live, what we make of the gift of life, and where we need to turn back and change course. And that means that the question which comes before “What have I done?”, so central to Yom Kippur, is “What is a human being?” That is one of the great questions of Rosh Hashanah.
Our Torah gives a first answer in Genesis 5: “Male and female God created them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam, on the day they were created” (Genesis 5:2). On the day the human was made, humanity was given a name. And the Torah says “male and female God created them”, acknowledging from the start that human beings are complex beings. To be a person is to be named, heard and seen by someone else. That is what gives each of us a unique place within humanity, not in isolation, but in relationship, in dialogue with other human beings.
But what happens to a person when their name is taken away?
Sarah has waited a lifetime for a child. When Isaac is weaned there is a great feast, and Sarah sees the son of Hagar, her Egyptian maidservant, metzachek, playing or laughing. That is all the text tells us. But Sarah sees something more threatening in the scene. Whatever the boy is doing, she sees a danger to Isaac and his future. She turns to Abraham: “Cast out this slave woman and her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit with my son, with Isaac” (Genesis 21:10).
Of course, Sarah is a mother protecting the child she waited so long for. She is no simple villain. And the Eternal tells Abraham to listen to her. Abraham rises early, gives Hagar bread and a skin of water and sends her and the child into the wilderness of Beersheba. The water runs out. Hagar leaves the child under a bush and walks a bowshot away, saying, “Let me not look on as the child dies” (Genesis 21:16). She weeps.
And then the verse says: “God heard the cry of the boy” (Genesis 21:17).
The Torah has stopped calling him Ishmael. But God has not forgotten what Ishmael means.
Yishma’el. God hears.
Human beings can erase the name; God refuses the erasure.
What strikes me is what the chapter leaves out. From the moment Sarah sees him until the end of this episode, Ishmael is never named again. He is “the son of Hagar the Egyptian”, “this slave woman and her son”, “the boy”, “the child”.
This is not an accident. If a person is made by being named, heard and seen, then a person can be unmade by reversing it. Withdraw the name, refuse to hear, refuse to look. You cannot cast out someone whose name you have just spoken. The name goes first. The exclusion follows.
Our own history knows the same order of events. In the Nazi camps, deportees lost their names and became numbers. The number on the arm was the last step of a process that had begun years earlier with words, when neighbours became simply “the Jews”. Again and again, history teaches us that dehumanisation begins by erasing individuality. A person becomes a category, and eventually a number, an object to be disposed of.
Later, Ishmael and Isaac became associated with two peoples and two religious traditions. Jewish sources came to use Ishmael as a name for the Arab and Muslim world, while in Muslim tradition the Prophet Muhammad’s lineage is traced through Ishmael. Isaac, of course, stands within the covenantal ancestry of Israel.
The Qur’an also tells the story of Abraham being commanded to sacrifice his son, in its thirty-seventh surah, but there the son is not named (Qur’an 37:100–113). Muslim exegetical tradition debated the son’s identity, although Ishmael became the predominant identification, and the great medieval commentator Ibn Kathir explicitly identifies the son as Ishmael in his commentary on Qur’an 37:101.
So Isaac and Ishmael became more than two boys in an ancient family. They became part of the language through which Jews and Muslims have understood themselves and, sometimes, each other.
And today their names inevitably carry us towards the conflict in the Middle East. As in so many conflicts, the “other” can become dehumanised, nameless and faceless. It is time for the children of Isaac and the children of Ishmael to call each other by name and say: “I see you. I acknowledge you. You are still my brother.”
Even if Abraham’s family is highly dysfunctional, and aren’t they all, perhaps we can begin with that small step: to give each other our true name, even when we are enemies.
In the Talmud, in tractate Megillah, the ministering angels wish to sing as the Egyptians drown in the sea. The Holy One silences them: “The work of My hands are drowning at sea, and you wish to sing?” (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 10b). The enemy, even in the hour of defeat, remains the work of God’s hands. And a people that knows what it is to be reduced to a number carries a particular responsibility never to surrender the humanity of another people, even in the midst of conflict.
And here we arrive at three gifts of being human: to have a name, to be heard, and to be seen. These are also the gifts that make a community.
The Torah says something similar in the wilderness. When the Eternal tells Moses to count the people, the instruction includes the unusual phrase b’mispar shemot, “listing the names” (Numbers 1:2). It is not simply a head count. A community counts its members by naming them. So in a congregation, to see each other clearly and to say each other’s name is one of the ways in which each of us is given our legitimate place.
In the Mishnah, in tractate Sanhedrin, the judges explain to witnesses in a capital case why one human life matters so much. A person stamps many coins with one seal, and they all come out alike; the Holy One stamps every human being with the seal of the first human, and not one resembles another. Therefore, each of us must say: “For my sake the world was created” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5).
Not because I matter more than anyone else, but because there has never been, and will never be, another human being quite like me. And the same is true of the person standing opposite me.
One seal. Countless faces. To be human is to be one face carrying the divine seal.
And perhaps this is where Rosh Hashanah turns the question back towards us. Whom have I stopped seeing? Whom have I reduced to a category? Whose story have I decided I already know? Whose voice have I stopped hearing? Whose name have I forgotten? It may be an enemy, a stranger, a colleague, a neighbour, or even someone I love.
I am not a diplomat, and I do not know how the conflict in the Middle East will end. But I know where we can begin to heal, to restore and to mend. The simplest first step in every conflict, in the Middle East, in Ukraine, wherever people have become “them” to each other, is to start again by giving the other a name.
That is within our reach today, on the birthday of the first human being and on the birthday of the world. We can refuse the language of “those people”, on any side. We can refuse to dehumanise, even our enemy. We can say their name. We can decide to hear and to see the other in their splendid uniqueness.
Yesterday in New York, it took families hours to read every name. Twenty-five years later, they still say them, one by one. Because to say a name is to refuse to allow a human being to disappear.
May we be a people brave enough to say the name, to hear and to see the one who is different, the one whose otherness may make us uncomfortable. May the Eternal, who heard the boy under the bush, hear us too. And may the year that begins this morning bring Isaac and Ishmael a little closer to standing side by side, and bring a little more peace and harmony to our wider human family.
Shanah tovah.