postscript

A friend of mine emailed me yesterday about the whole name-changing thing. What happens, she asks, when you change the name of a dying person and the person doesn't die?

What happens is that you jump up and down and cheer and continue calling her by her new name. (The person doesn't have to be actively dying, either--just sick enough to be in danger of it.) Their new name is their new name, and it stays that way.

What does this mean, in practical terms? No, you don't have to go and change your driver's license, but yes, you do change your identity. (Many people, by the way, have both Jewish and secular, or "English" names. MHH, Barak and I all do. It's confusing, but it's easy to see why people do that--if you want to name your baby Shlomo Mordechai after your grandfather, for example, but you'd like the kid to have a chance of getting a job one day, you might write Steven on the birth certificate.)

My husband pointed out to me, after I wrote that post, that there is much more to the idea of name-changing than just fooling the guy with the hood and the scythe. The Friday night before the shinui shem (namechanging), as we were eating dinner, we had a pile of seforim (religious books) out on the table, looking for the origin of the practice. It turned out that it starts with Sarai, way back in Genesis. She's infertile, and God changes her name to Sarah and gives her a child (Itzchak/Isaac). This qualifies as a hard-core miracle, since Sarah is, at this point, not only childless but ninety years old.

We also found in a Gemara (don't remember which one) the idea that there are four things to do when petitioning for a reversal in a divine decree. One changes one's ways, changes one's name, prays and gives charity. So the idea is really more than just telling the Angel of Death that you're a different person--it's becoming a different person. You increase your observance of the commandments, you pray more, you give more to others, you try to be better than you were before--and you take a new name too. Of course, many people who have their names changed are not in any condition to start doing very much, but I guess the idea is that when they're better, they do.

It's not bargaining, though--it isn't saying to God, "Please cure me, and I promise I'll be better." It's, "Please give me a new life instead of this one, and I'll remember that it's not the same one I had before."