Our names matter. It’s a funny thing, because as far as you and I are concerned, our parents made an arbitrary decision when they named us. They may have had a reason for their choice, but it was just a word that had nothing to do with our essence.

The essence of a person emerges slowly. And it changes over the years as we learn, and change, and grow.

As we change we sometimes change our names too. We want our name to reflect our inner self.

In this week’s Torah portion, God gave Avraham and Sarah new names. Not very different from their old names, Avram and Sarai. I imagine that God didn’t especially want them to change, but rather wanted them to expand, to be ready for new growth.

Early in the narrative God told Avram, “I will enlarge your name,” which we usually translate as “I will make your name great.” But it turns out that God was being both literal and metaphorical. God added the letter hey, the letter that appears twice in the unpronounceable Divine name, יהוה, changing Avram to Avraham and enlarging his name, both literally and figuratively.

Sarah’s name also received a hey, although it lost the letter yud. Where did it go? It remained as the first letter of God’s name, and it became the first letter of the word Yisrael.

Abraham and Sarah would become the forebears of an entire people, called in the Bible the Children of Israel. A people who have survived for thousands of years, despite relentless persecution and hatred.

I don’t understand hating someone because of their religion. I really don’t. I don’t understand hating someone because of where they live, or who governs them, or what they look like, or who they love.

Spending that amount of energy on hatred seems to me to be horribly wasteful, of both one’s physical and spiritual energy. Hate eats away at the hater, poisoning them. When it spills over, death and destruction follow.

I apologize if this sounds naive. I understand that the world and especially humans are complicated and I indeed may be over simplifying. But I can’t help believing that we are hardwired to be decent human beings. That everyone deserves a piece of God’s name inserted into their own.

In the Hebrew alphabet the letter yud is foundational. Every letter in a Torah scroll incorporates it, and when a scribe writes, they begin with that part of the letter.

This tells me that when anyone’s name is written with the letters from Biblical Hebrew, the first letter of God’s ineffable Name is included.

I am perhaps fortunate that the first letter of my Hebrew name begins with the letter yud: יהודית. Yehudit. But that’s only because my parents chose it. I am responsible for living up to it.

May we each be blessed to incorporate into our own names, our own essential souls, the pursuit of Divine goodness and peace.