What’s in a name?
This weeks parsha starts off with a series of names of places (don’t think that sentence was structured very well grammatically, but……who cares), and if we look back to last weeks parsha, where ALL the places which bney yisroel traveled to were mentioned we will realize that some of the places mentioned this week weren’t even mentioned last week! what’s going on?
Rashi indeed asks my question (or is it the other way around……whatever), and he answers that these places indeed had other names (as were mentioned in mas’ey), but the names in this weeks parsha were given to them too cuz they remind us of a certain occurrence which took place in that place.
What’s in a name?
Let’s take “di zahav” for example, the place was known as Sinay and now cuz of the sin which bney yisroel did there it was called something else, which means that the action which took place there changed the entire nature of the place, that is the power actions have.
Every point on the map, as well as every point in time has the potential to go either way, everything begins “nameless” and is named based on the actions of the ppl which lived thru those times and places, Dor hamabul, Dor hamidbar, the occurrences of those times had such a strong effect on the dor that the entire generation was named after what went on.
In every situation we face we can always go 2 ways, many times we think that even if we mess up it’s not a big deal cuz we messed up for that second but once the next second comes up, nobody remembers that we messed up and we can go on with life like nothing ever happened, but that is a very wrong way of looking at things, our actions do indeed leave a trail, the action which we did now labled that entire place, time or situation, and now every time someone looks back at it, it still has that name.
Bney yisroel had long left sinay, 40 years had passed, the whole generation already died out, moshe was on his way out, so many things changed yet hashem is pointing out to us that it is still called “di zahav” the strong effect that the actions had still remained and they continue to till today, the place which originally carried the good and innocent name “Sinay”, had been changed to the tainted “Di zahav”, and it remained so, cuz the actions which bney yisroel did there had changed the entire nature of the place, it gave the place a negative ting, a sin “feeling”, a dark shade (k, k i’ll stop now, i know i’m not very good at painting pictures with words, it’s not my fault that all the words needed for this our 10 levels above mine vocabulary wise!).
THAT’S what’s in a name. and WE r the ones that have the power to name everything………. so take responsibility for your actions, cuz they don’t really go away that easily.