(a PDF of the poems can be found here)
I. It doesn’t often happen that a poem enters the public domain, becoming a “fixture” of community life and speaking to a wide range of people in a meaningful way. This is most likely to happen in the face of death, when nearly everyone struggles in finding the right words to capture an awesome and painful reality.
Over recent decades, a handful of poems have emerged within the Jewish community as staples, and gone on enter the general culture. Above all and increasingly, the stock of memorializing poetry includes a surprising choice: a poem written in Hebrew by an Israeli Orthodox poet, Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky, known to her readers before and after her death in 1984 simply as “Zelda.”
The outlines of Zelda’s biography are well known: immigration to Palestine from the Ukraine with her illustrious Schneersohn family at the age of twelve, the death of her Chabad father and grandfather shortly thereafter, attending a religious girls’ school and then teachers’ college, living in Tel Aviv and Haifa before returning to Jerusalem to stay, teaching school and then marrying Chayim Aryeh Mishkovsky, becoming widowed after twenty one years of a strong marriage, and —most important— publishing five books of poetry between 1967 and 1984. Zelda won important literary prizes during her lifetime, and her reputation has only increased since her death.
Zelda’s most famous poem “L’khol Ish Yesh Shem” (“Each of Us Has a Name”) uses simple words and sentences to generate strong emotional power. Since its publication in 1974, it has been gaining admiring and grateful readers in and beyond the Jewish community. The poem’s palpable usefulness to people coming to it in English led to a gradual evolution from the strongly gendered, literal translation of the sentence that serves as its title and that recurs at the beginning of each stanza. The translation of that line evolved from “each man has a name” to improvising a feminine replacement when applying the poem to a woman (“Every woman has a name”); next, coming up with a gender-neutral singular version (“Each person has a name”); and finally, creatively achieving a formulation that invokes both the individual and the community (“Each of us has a name”— Marcia Falk’s translation that I’ll be using throughout this short essay).
The poem has achieved iconic status in Israel, where it is recited on every Holocaust Memorial Day and at military funerals. It fits well within a life-and-death setting because it traces the life cycle: its first stanza refers to the name given at birth and the final stanza, to the name that is, as it were, given at death. The intermediate seven stanzas gradually expand the world in the process of adding elements to the “name” of the human being who is born and eventually dies. As the baby, then child, and eventually adult grows up and older, internal developments and outward experiences transform a core identity that is fairly simple into an ever-enlarging, increasingly complex human being. As the person’s world expands, their self expands; in the poem’s terms, they gain a new name with each expansion.
The poem’s process of adding naming elements to a gradually expanding life becomes clear as we consider the poem’s nine stanzas one by one. In each stanza, the repeated opening line “Each of us has a name” is followed by two what I call “name-granting sources”—two elements of being alive that impact a person’s identity.
When we read or hear the poem in a cursory way, each stanza’s pairing of “source elements” seems to be arbitrary, with the second element simply added to the first. But on more careful consideration, we see that tension is likely to arise between the two sources of “naming”; that is, they are likely to pull the person’s emerging identity in two different directions. And surely it is identity—personality, selfhood, the core of who someone is—that the term “name” betokens in this poem. Perhaps “name” stands for the person’s soul, in the way that the poet John Keats uses that word when writing in a letter that “life is a vale of soul-making.”
II. Now, let’s take up the stanzas in sequence:
1) Each of us has a name/given by God, and given by our parents. This stanza, and the poem as a whole, builds upon a midrash from Tanhuma, Parshat Vayak’hel according to which “There are three names by which a person is called. One which his father and mother call him, and one which people call him, and one which he earns for himself. The best of all is the one that he earns for himself.” It also calls upon a Talmudic teaching (Kiddushin 30b) that there are three partners in the creation of every new life: the mother, the father, and God. Here at the poem and life’s outset, we might assume that the hopes and expectations of Elohim (the name of God used in the poem) will align with those of the parents; in a way, that’s what’s indicated when we give a Jewish name to the child and bring it into the Covenant ceremonially. And yet, we all know instances where the religious direction taken by a child or adult—the direction that leads them closer to God—diverges from their parents. With regard to naming specifically, it is still a popular practice to give a Jewish child both a generally used name in their native language and a Jewish name in Hebrew or Yiddish; is this sign of dualistic identity a source of ambivalence or richness, of a split or of complementary facets? I suppose that from the perspective developed by “Each of Us Has a Name,” having multiple names indicates a capacious inclusion of possibilities, but I’m not sure.
2) Each person has a name/given by our stature and our smile/and given by what we wear. Through reference to stature, this stanza captures the way in which humans are physical beings whose bodies define and present them, while also pointing to the child’s remarkable physical growth after having been brought to life. As part of the first naming element in this stanza (even if in on a separate line in the Hebrew) the poem refers to the person’s smile, which conveys feelings and creates social relationships. And then the stanza’s second naming element takes the social dimension even further by bringing in clothing, which both presents and disguises us even as it protects us from the elements. Consider the degree to which babies and young children are already strongly marked by how their parents dress them, including the worn or dirty clothes that are often the best that poor parents can provide their children with. Consider too the degree to which adults dress to impress others or encourage/discourage contact with them. And finally consider how often we pick up mixed signals from a person’s dress on the one hand and their facial expression plus body language on the other. Especially during puberty, it’s a challenge to bring stature, smile, and clothing into a unified personhood.
3) Each of us has a name/given by the mountains/ and given by our walls. And so it is that the child’s world expands beyond the boundaries of its own body and those people to whom its first smiles are displayed. The natural world, with its mountains and valleys, trees and flowers, impacts all living creatures; and, following Psalm 121, human beings often look upward to the hills when seeking divine help. And yet, at the same time that we are enlarging our outlook and identity, we struggle to maintain the boundaries and rootedness that provide security. We move with some trepidation beyond the walls of our homes, where ideally we have been well-nurtured; after all, walls keep out bad things and hold us safe, even if they do limit our scope. Over time, each of us combines mountains and walls in a different way, and we typically spend our days moving back and forth across a spectrum between these two poles.
4) Each of us has a name/given by the stars/and given by our neighbors. Once again, this poem stretches the emerging person between two physically and emotionally divergent poles: from the stars billions of light years away to the neighbors right next door. Spiritually and morally, one’s obligations to what is universal can pull against what’s due to our own, close at hand. A variant reading of this stanza focuses on the Hebrew meaning of mazalot—translated by Marcia Falk and others simply as “stars” but referring also to the constellations, hence potentially to the zodiac and horoscopes, and so also to fate or luck. This meaning of mazalot expresses the reality that aspects of the selves we become are determined from outside ourselves and even outside our parental inheritance. At the same time, how we draw upon what’s close at hand in our “neighborhood” can soften, even change, our fate.
5) Each of us has a name/given by our sins/and given by our longing. As the emerging self negotiates the territory between the vast universe of what’s fated or luckily bestowed on the one hand, and what’s in the neighborhood of easily available support and allegiance on the other, bad things will inevitably happen and mistakes will be made. Judaism does not emphasize sin except during the High Holy Days; but it does stress tshuvah, and it knows full well that people do things of which they are ashamed and other people are critical. At bar/bat mitzvah, parents traditionally cease being responsible for the acts of their children, and so the reference to “sins” at this point in Zelda’s poem may allude to that stage of development. As for “longing” (or “yearning” in other translations), doesn’t this too enter the arena with puberty? Moving toward adulthood, and for the rest of life except maybe near the end, longings pull us beyond established practices while the teachings of home and religious community warn us of sinning. We are shaped by what we yearn for and where we stray, as much as by what we stand strongly against.
6) Each of us has a name/given by our enemies/and given by our love. As we move through life, it’s hard not to make enemies; that is, people who don’t like us and don’t wish us well. It goes with the territory and is part of who we are—as much as “our love,” which derives both from our loving of others and their loving of us. The mutuality of loving requires greater maturity than did mere longing. Intimacy with friends and eventually with a life-partner is the counter-part, in a way, of being enough of a self to have enemies. It’s worth noting that sociopaths are loners who typically have neither friends or enemies.
7) Each of us has a name/ given by our celebrations/ and given by our work. Having achieved a certain level of selfhood and maturity, an adult stands able to fulfill Freud’s definition of what a normal person should be able to do: “Lieben und arbeiten”— to love and to work. That kind of loving normatively brings the Jew under the chupah, which ideally comes along with the capacity for meaningful, productive, and socially-acknowledged work. And then, again ideally, further ceremonies take place, as a new generation bends the life cycle back toward the beginning. At this ceremony-rich time of life, people’s actual names often change, directly or indirectly. With marriage, many women take their husband’s name, while some couples handle the coming together of two family names in other ways. With the birth of children, parents’ Jewish names are affixed to the ben/bat of their offspring when entering the Covenant and later, when rising to the Torah. In good times and environments, love and work complement one another to provide a foundation for the next generation and for moving the world forward. But too often, life seems like a “zero sum game” in which people have to choose between them.
8) Each of us has a name/given by the seasons/and given by our blindness. With this reference to “seasons,” we are reminded of the yearly cycle (indeed, the Hebrew here is literally “seasons of the year”) in which spring and summer are inevitably followed by fall and winter. As Kohelet puts this, “a season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven”—beginning with “a time for birth and a time for death.” As people get older, they are challenged to comfortably inhabit the stage of life that they’re at, to fulfill its responsibilities and enjoy its benefits. In both positive and negative ways, adults in the prime of life wear blinders, for they must focus on the maintaining the world, both the smaller world of their private lives and the larger social world. Then also, the “blindness” of this penultimate stanza suggests the diminishment of physical capability as well as the narrowing of concern that some people experience when growing older.
9) Each of us has a name/given by the sea/and given by our death. The pairing of this final stanza raises an immediate question: why is it “the sea” that couples with death, the stage of life toward which all the seasons and years have been heading? Here are some suggestions: Remembering that Zelda’s pairings in each case bring two things together and also place them in opposition, we consider the sea as the amniotic fluid of life. Just as the Jewish People was “born” when crossing the Sea of Reeds, so each baby emerges into the world on a flood of salty water. From another slant, the sea flows back and forth endlessly, while death appears to be a fixed point. And yet, consider this oft-quoted and to me spiritually helpful parable: A horizon is a limit, not an end. I am standing upon the seashore. A ship sails out to sea. Then someone at my side says, “She’s gone!” Gone where? Gone from my sight—that is all. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. Just at the moment when someone says, “She’s gone!” there are other voices on the other side ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!
III. So then, Zelda’s well-known, much beloved poem turns out to be meaningful in connection with death because it deals with the fullness of life. It captures the way in which a person grows and changes over time, adding layers of experience as a tree adds rings around its core. Alternatively, we can read the poem to mean that at each stage of life, it’s as if we are starting over, in a good way, by gaining new possibilities—new “names.” There is something to this reading, and finally we don’t have to choose between the two.
On the literal level, each human being typically has a basic name, usually of two or three-words, that remains partially or totally the same throughout their life, as does their genetic make up. At the same time, the flux and flow of growing into and beyond adulthood modifies the person and so, in effect, changes their “name.” To translate a French maxim: the more things change, the more they remain the same.
I find that it takes self-discipline to start calling someone by a new name. Furthermore, because we look at others from our own vantage point, it’s hard not to circumscribe or reduce people as we “name” or encounter them; it’s easy to ignore how others have changed and to scale down the broad fullness of their being. We rarely have world enough and time to let others be all that they are becoming. We allow their insecurity, and our own, to interfere as we simplify for the sake of comfort and easy reference.
We also do this with ourselves, making one small aspect of our lives into our “name” and presenting only one side of ourselves to the outside world. The minister Tim Kutzmark uses Zelda’s poem when urging people to let go of unskillful, ungenerous ways of naming, both of ourselves and others. He counsels thus: “We need one another to point to the light in the midst of the darkness. This need is similar to the need for an astronomer to take the infinite unknown of the night sky and name names and connections. By naming the stars, and connecting those names, the astronomer finds order, design, balance and harmony” (Sermon “I Got a Name,” November 2001, at http://chuckshomeworld.com).
Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky—Zelda— was such an astronomer. She added and also removed layers from her own name, even as she named the bright spots and the dark material of our human lives.