Mordecai Marcus

The Name of God

Some people believe in a God
whose presence became real for them
from their parents’ faith and love.
Others, no matter how they reach for faith,
feel only a terrifying absence
which they struggle to shape
from blocks of ice
that protect them from the fire of doubt.
Hearing the names created by faith
they may remember, as I do,
an unbelieving father,
whose sun’s rising and setting
circled the fact that he was a Jew
and who said his prayers
to confirm his unity with his people
and thereby his reality as a man.
I enter that long-perished brain
and feel him ritualizing
a body of faith into a being
that he knew was shadow, not substance.
Why, therefore, after he explained to me
the old faith that the most high and secret name of 
    God,
now every day pronounced as Yahweh,
was to be spoken only once a century
by the high priest in the main temple?
I asked him to tell me what it was
but he gruffly replied: I don’t want to.
We went on walking
in a cool companionship
for many years.
But I could never ask him
why he wouldn’t pronounce that name,
and I had to learn on my own
that he needed to preserve
the hard edge of prohibitions
that mark true borders of existence,
and as always it was too late
to call his bluff
and pressure him to acknowledge
that his forced faith was a frightened cloud of dust
it would have pleased him
to have me imitate.

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Mordecai Marcus lives in Nebraska.