Judith Kaplan's Bat Mitzvah (1922)

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:09 PM -0400 6/23/02, James A. Landau wrote:
>In a message dated 06/23/2002 8:29:49 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>dumasb at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU writes:
>
>>  >>  Q:  How do Reconstructionists spell the name of the Deity?   Pr-cess.
>>   >>  A:  Pr-cess.
>>
>>   I'm glad someone got it. I didn't. Why is the word repeated? And how is it
>>   pronounced?
>>
>
>Repeating the word was a typo.

Indeed; my bad.  And the rest of Jim's exegesis is exactly correct.

>
>As for "how it is proinounced?", the proper question is whether it is
>pronounced.
>
>The Old Testament generally uses one of two names for the Deity.  One is
>"Elohim"(frequently shortened to "El"), usually translated as "God".  The
>other is the Tetragram, consisting of the four consonants Y-H-V-H (or if
>you're German, as the leading Biblical scholars were in the 19th Century,
>J-H-W-H), generally translated into English as "Lord" although "Eternal"
>would be more accurate.  There is much colorful lore and mysticism about the
>Tetragram, but for this discussion all you need to know is that
>1)  the Name (that is, the Tetragram with the proper vowels) was only to be
>uttered by the High Priest
>2) the proper vowels have been lost
>3) the Tetragram (in Hebrew, not Latin, letters) must be written only in holy
>works, or more exactly, writing the Tetragram makes the parchment or paper
>holy and therefore requiring special handling.
>
>So what happened when Jews moved into the English-speaking world?  Some pious
>Jews felt that it was wrong to write the English name of the Deity, and so a
>custom grew up among SOME Jews to write "G-d" instead of "God".  (You will
>not that I do not follow this tradition.)

There's also a hot and ongoing dispute about whether it's OK for the
name to appear on a computer screen, given the temporary nature of
this electronic appearance.

>
>Imagine the consternation of a Gentile who was an English teacher at a Jewish
>day school.  He assigned some homework about Jonathan Edwards and to his
>total confusion received papers talking about "Sinners in the Hands of an
>Angry G-d".
>
>Reconstructionism is more interested in Judaism as a community than in the
>spiritual side of Judaism.  (Someone correct me here if I'm wrong).  Hence to
>them the Deity is more of a Process than a Being, or something like that.
>
>The spelling "Pr-cess" is therefore a satirical in-joke.
>
>      - Jim Landau
>
>P.S.  "Bethany" is Hebrew for "my house"