Friday, May 13, 2005

Oh G-d Help Me!

Hindered by a God-damnable virus (not the dreaded meningitis surfacing all over Delhi, you’ll be glad to know), sitting in a musty, dusty little room which in better days has seen brightness (can’t say the same about it ever having been non-dusty: in Delhi, dust is all-pervading at any time of the year – kind of like God), I am wondering what to do.

And why not write something about God?

Jews don’t like saying ‘God’ as in ‘God’. They call Him (or Her), “G-d”, or ‘Gd’. (When I was in school, ‘Gd’ was a short form for ‘good’, by the way. Teachers who had a stack of notebooks to correct often resorted to this, if I remember right) Anyway, the idea is that one shouldn’t invoke God’s name unnecessarily – it becomes a violation of one of the Ten Commandments . That is what a Jewish friend of mine said. I did further research on it and found here that:

“the basic concept is actually that Jews do not write the name G-d in full in disposable media such as pieces of paper or more recently, online. Books are OK as these are not regarded as disposable. This is to avoid the possibility of disrespect being given to G-d by throwing the paper in the garbage etc. In fact, when Jewish prayer books etc. are no longer serviceable, they are first stored until there is a sufficient number of them, and then they are respectfully buried (rather than burned, thrown in the garbage etc.).”

Interesting, huh?!

No comments: