Baraita has a long and fascinating entry on blasphemy, the name(s) of God, and the implications of the Jewish tradition of writing “G_d” (I had known about the avoidance of blasphemy but hadn’t thought about the practicality of not having to worry about disposing of the paper). Furthermore, the comments section has an interesting discussion of Québécois cussing (which involves not sex or scatology but chalices and tabernacles).
Update (Feb. 2025). Alas, Baraita is long gone; I’ve substituted an archived link for the post, but the comments section appears to be irretrievable. Just in case, here’s a substantial chunk of the post:
These collapsed distinctions reminded me of a related issue visible in contemporary Jewish practice: Wheel of Fortune theonymy, i.e., “Rabbi, I’d like to buy a vowel.” It has become customary for pious traditional English-speaking Jews to write the word “God” as “G-d” — presumably by analogy with the usual substitution of adonai, “Lord,” or even ha-Shem, “the Name,” for the proper name of God in prayers or Scripture readings. “G-d” is actually a conflation of two commandments, one against blasphemy and the other against destroying or damaging Jewish holy books or holy names — that is, one writes “G-d” so that one can toss or rip the paper with no qualms later on. Otherwise, one might have to treat the paper as one treats a used Torah scroll or even notes from studying Torah, putting it into a central storage facility and eventually having it buried. (And, yes, by extension one types “G-d,” although I think the accepted opinion is that it’s OK to delete a file with God’s name in it in English as long as you don’t tear up a printout. Maybe. It’s still under discussion.) If I sound a bit bemused about all of this, it’s for good reason: my Jewish upbringing was spectacularly unOrthodox, and I didn’t encounter this orthographic peculiarity until I went off to college. I didn’t think much of it then, either. It was, I decided, silly. Over the years, my views have evolved slightly: I no longer find “G-d” silly (well, maybe sort of goofy-looking); in fact, I’d really like to keep the commandment in question. Nevertheless, I think this particular custom has some implications which its proponents haven’t really considered.
I mean, c’mon. We can probably agree (and by “we” I mean me, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, and anyone else who’d like to join us) that all the available names of God are singularly inadequate when it comes to representing God. But I also happen to believe — and I can argue this historically, methodologically, or theologically — that names have power, and that God has more names than any of us. Hence my appreciation of the principle underlying “G-d.” However, the Jewish tradition is fairly explicit about God’s having one Really Important Proper Name and a bunch of secondary names or attributes (see above). And “God” is not the proper name of God, any more than “dieu” or “Gott” or even el in Hebrew would be; all of these are category terms, referring to other deities as well as the One God with whom I tend to be concerned. (Although el, being in Hebrew, is probably a special case, for some of the same reasons “Allah” would be in Arabic. Sacred languages complicate things.) For that matter, odds are good that none of the available pronunciations of the Tetragrammaton** are the proper name of God, either, especially once they’ve been transliterated into English. However, someone who wanted to be consistent about omitting letters from any translated name or attribute of God should be typing things like “m-rciful,” “c-mpassionate,” “h-gh,” and “pl-ce.”*** In all available languages. Including, presumably, ones without the same kind of vowel/consonant distinction that English has… and I’m having trouble believing that a bunch of people who speak Hebrew think a word doesn’t count without a vowel, but I suppose “Go-” or “-od” would be a little too goofy-looking even for them. Clothes in tatters, indeed! Me, I’m sticking with one sacred language and one proper name for God. So, yeah, I type “God.” And I’m not especially worried about it. If you ask me, “G-d” is way more a hole in God’s name than “God.” Think about it.
Of course, the logical corollary to this line of argument didn’t dawn on me until pretty recently. If I object to writing “G-d” out of the conviction that nothing except a certain four Hebrew letters in sequence is even close to a proper name for God in my tradition — thus falling in line with the Mishnah’s, if not the Gemara’s, view of what constitutes blasphemy — what do I do with the four Hebrew letters in sequence? Usually, this isn’t a problem; I don’t doodle them on my notepads, my prayerbooks and commentaries substitute other Hebrew phrases for them, and English-language scholarship tends to circumvent the issue by avoiding the Hebrew and talking about “the Tetragrammaton” wherever possible. But I hit a snag last month when I found myself printing out unpointed (that is, vowel-less) passages from the Torah for the entirely legitimate purpose of preparing to read a passage from an actual Torah scroll (equally vowel-less) during Saturday morning services next week. The CD I was printing from was, in fact, of Orthodox origin, and when I used its “print” command, it popped up a window warning me that I might be printing material containing the name of God. As it happened, I was. And now I’m not entirely sure what I should do with this piece of paper once I’m through with it. I mean, sure, I can stick it in a folder, but what then? Is dropping it off at an Orthodox synagogue in the middle of the night too extreme? Somewhere, God-with-an-o whose proper name is properly inexpressible is probably laughing Her (entirely figurative) head off.
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