LORD's Prayer 1

Dear All,
 
Probably the most famous prayer in Judaism is the Kaddish, which is used often to memorialize someone who has died.  The text of the prayer doesn’t refer to death at all.  It is simple praise for the name of God, beginning, “May his great name be exalted and sanctified.”
 
What is this name?
 
Before we get there, let’s pause to marvel that the most famous prayer in Christianity is also about the name of God, and also asks that it be sanctified:
 

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

 
Maybe this name in such need of special attention actually matters.
 
Well, the name of God is:

TO BE

That’s what historical linguists make of the Hebrew letters YHWH -- variously transliterated as Yahweh or Jehovah, but never pronounced at all in Judaism.  It appears in the Bible about 8000 times, but you won’t see it there.  Where it appears in Hebrew, the English translation says, “LORD.”
 
It’s not, then, “The LORD is my shepherd,” in the 23rd Psalm, but “TO BE is my shepherd.”  It’s not “The LORD said to Moses,” but something more like “BEING spoke to Moses.”  And so on.
 
This should give us pause.
 
The prayer Jesus is shown providing for his disciples in Matthew and Luke rhymes with the emphasis in the John Gospel on those I AM’s that we have been meditating.
 
Still, before we go further with all that, our next session will focus simply on the gathering in the word “Our” at the very beginning of the Lord’s Prayer (or: the Prayer of the Being).  Who is the us of this “Our”?  Who all are we willing to include as springing from the same ultimate Source as ourselves? 
 
All blessings,
 
Michael