This is my D’var Torah for April 25, 2026, Parashiyyot Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, particularly chapters 16 and 19 of Leviticus. (If you’re reading it right away, I have to go and fix up where italics go to make it easier to read.)
Imagine a world where the more important a word was, the harder it was to say.
So it would be easy to say helicopter, and difficult to say truth.
I realize that helicopter is often a very important life-saving word, so in those situations there will be an emergency override — helicopter will always be easy to say for one reason or the other.
Anyway in this world, if you did want to use one of the important words you could if you really knew how. And if you did hear one of the important words, you would really hear it. You would know, in your bones and your body, that you were hearing a very — significant — thing that someone else was saying. It would be like hearing the most resonant cello ever made, the lushest sound played as if by Yo-Yo Ma, and it would be soothing and if necessary wake you up — maybe just for a nanosecond, but you would really hear.
Can you imagine what “I love you” would be like in that world? That’s three words, each of them deserving that same kind of pronouncing and reaction.
There are some details that would have to be worked out. If we got the technology right, this world would run itself and if someone tried to say a word like shalom without really being able to say it right, either their tongue would get heavy and it wouldn’t come out — or maybe on the other end would just be annoying static in the middle of a sentence or some kind of really grating muzak version of “Imagine” by John Lennon.
Until we got there, maybe there could be a training and certification system. We could start with the twenty most important words, proposed by a committee of spiritual elders, and people could get the equivalent of merit badges. So if someone did say justice, you could consult their collar or their kippah and see if they were an authorized gold-star user for that word.
Imagine a world where the most important words could not be said or heard, except when someone really knew how to say them.
Judaism at one time had such a thing, for one word. The word came to be known in our tradition as הַשֵׁם הַמְפֹרָשׁ, ha-shem ham’forash, the explicit name of the Divine. The one with the four letters י-ה-ו-ה yod-hay-vav-hay, called in Greek the “tetragrammaton.” During the time of בַּיִת שֵׁנִי Bayit Sheni, the Second Temple, it was forbidden to pronouce the shem ham’forash, except in special circumstances like the ritual described in the Torah in our reading, the Yom Kippur ritual conducted by the High Priest, the כֹּהֵן גָדוֹל Kohen Gadol.
On that day, the Kohel Gadol would enter the קֹדֶשׁ הַקֳדָשִׁים Kodesh Ha-kodashim, the Holy of Holies, which he had filled up with a cloud of incense, and in the presence of the אֲרוֹן הַבְּרִית Aron Habrit, the ark of the covenant, he would make confession and pronounce the Divine name, the shem ham’forash. Even though he was in this enclosure all by himself, the tradition says that all the people in the outer Temple courtyard would hear the Name and bow low to the ground, and respond: בָּרוּךְ שֵׁם כְּבוֹד מַלְכוּתוֹ לְעוֹלָם וָעֶד. Baruch shem k’vod malchuto l’olam va’ed, which means something like “Blessed is the Name-the Presence-the Divine realm throughout all space and time.”
In a way this was an echoing back of the actual Name, in a faint way, the way we refer to the Divine as Hashem which means literally “the Name” and is a reminder that we are in fact deliberately not saying the name and not in fact trying to say it because we can’t say it right. And/or that sentence was an acknowledgement that yes, we have indeed heard this one time that very – special – important – word.
I’m endlessly fascinated by this part of the ritual, which until I got to rabbinical school was just this long jumble of a description that I could never picture or make any sense of. I have imagined that ritual in the Second Temple as a kind of spiritual sonic boom, and every few years we’ve recited a version of it that I wrote, where the Kohen Gadol would try three times to say the Name. The first two times the sounds would come out but it wouldn’t come together, and then the third time he said it quietly and finally all the people could really hear.
I have pictured having a room in one’s house that was completely white, all the walls and ceiling and floor, where one could go and meditate on a single important word and practice saying it. To redeem it from getting stale from overuse or just frequent use during the year. Not just the Divine name, but any of the words I’m sure you are thinking of that you might propose as one of the twenty most important words.
It’s noteworthy that the one person who was allowed to say the Name and who could say it in exactly the right way was initially Aharon. He was the very person who had said the Divine name wrong in the Golden Calf episode. Initially he tried to get around using the Name, creating the calf and calling it Eloheicha, “your god”, trying to fudge by using a serious word but not the actual Divine name. But then when he saw that things were really out of control he called out: Chag L’Adonai Machar, a festival for Y-H-V-H tomorrow!
Some have said that because of this, Aharon was sentenced to a role where he was basically silent except when sometime he was permitted to speak a script. Some have said more hopefully that this is to show how much teshuvah is possible for words said wrongly, for even Aharon after what he had said was chosen to be the one saying the most holy words. And he was helped to do this by having a script, which included going over his own wrongs and regrets, and those of his family and all the leaders and all the people. And of course this special setting.
All of this added up to a situation where he could say an incredibly important word in the best way possible, in a way that also healed his whole people.
We should be able to draw from this for not just the Divine name, but for all the really important words.
The Oxford English Corpus, from the same people as the iconic dictionary, has a list of the most frequently used words in our language. They scan all kinds of contemporary texts, written and spoken and online, to create this list. In the top 18 recently, are a lot of words that don’t reveal that much — the #1 word is “the”, and it’s mostly like that.
The only three significant words in the top 18 are have at #9, I at #10, and you at #18.
I could say that this tells you a lot about how we talk and use words. That have is the most frequent word with any semantic content — not surprising in our materialistic, transactional age. That I is right after, and that both of these are so far above you — not surprising. We doesn’t show up until #27.
On the one hand, it should be incredibly hard to say any of those three words, except with kavannah, with real intention.
On the other hand, I don’t want to make it harder to say those three words. We have already lost entirely the ability to pronouce the shem ham’forash at all. In the Mishnah, a sage named Abba Shaul opined that a person who does pronounce the Divine name with its actual sounds is banished from the World to Come. So now there isn’t even one person who knows how to pronounce the sounds anymore, much less say it carefully and with proper intent the way the Kohen Gadol used to.
The Kabbalah says that on all the other days of the year the Kohen Gadol experienced what the rest of us experience all the time, which it calls galut hadibbur, the “exile of speech.” This is described in Kabbalah exactly as I started with, as a kind of static where certain words are used but they don’t come across right. It’s like if all you got from hearing the word God was the bearded dude in the sky. If have only means acquisitiveness; if I only means ego; if you is only how I command you for my own purposes. That’s the connection with the second parasha today, Kedoshim, which has the law against r’chilut — gossip, but literally being a traveling merchant with words.
I was thinking that this is also part of the symbolism of the two goats in the ancient Yom Kippur ritual. Acccording to the Mishnah required to be identical; One to be kept close and the other sent away, la’azazel, el eretz g’zeirah — to an opposite place. That’s like what happens to important words. One version of each important word is sent off, along with all the falseness and shallowness that has been associated with that word. The other version is held close, and does its sacred service.
What we need is not to make saying and hearing the important words harder. What we need is to be able to reclaim the important words, one by one. To do more than pronounce them. To say and hear them with timbre, with a lush waveform.
We need sanctuaries for that which are meant to be like what the Kohen Gadol had. That’s what this is. It’s where we fill ourselves with special words, scripted out for us so we can bring them back each week from their exile. We say them here in a setting that is the opposite of cloudy. It’s sweet and urgent; we summon our best intention to say them bim’forash, pronouncing them carefully and explicitly and with all their meanings.
The Kabbalah teaches that the Divine Name isn’t limited to four letters pronounced a certain way. Every letter is a part of that Name. Every word is really just a version of the shem ham’forash. There may be particularly important words, but there is no word that can’t be holy or that is not important.
Every time we pray, we purify words and teach ourselves to say them, replenish the words for the next few hours or the next day or the next week. So that we can bring them out into the world — to our relationships, to mitzvot, to create our world anew as the Divine first did using only words.
We long to say the most important words, so they will be booming and soothing just like in the ancient Temple, when the Kohen Gadol succeeded in pronouncing the Divine name. Each of us is like Aharon the High Priest. We lose the words, we long to say them, and we go back into our Holy of Holiness and learn how to say them once again.
Shabbat Shalom!
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