For My Name’s Sake

“And Hashem made from the earth, every animal of the field and every bird of the sky, and He brought [each] to Man to see what he would call it, and whatever Man called each living thing, that was its name.” (Bereishis 2:19)

Reb Shlomo Kluger explains that a name depicts the nature of that being. Hashem didn’t place any nature upon the animals. Rather, when Adam assigned each creature a name, that caused its nature.

Hebrew words aren’t just a means for identification; rather, Lashon Hakodesh identifies what the essence of the person or object is. Hashem looked into the Torah and created the world based on the holy letters of the Torah.(Rabbi Yankie Schechter, Parsha Pshetel).

I’m named after Rebbetzin Chaya Faigel Heiman, wife of the legendary Rav Shlomo Heiman of Torah Vodaath. When my grandfather first brought his family to America from war-torn Eretz Yisrael, they were still reeling from the murders of my grandmother, aunt, and uncle by the Arabs — Hashem yikom damam. Rebbetzin Heiman, a cousin of the family, was a widow and had no children, so she offered to raise my mother, the only daughter left in the family. My mother merited to spend her childhood years under the care of this ishah tzadikah.

A person’s Hebrew name isn’t merely a means of identification. The name expresses the true essence of the person — his strengths and tafkid in This World; it defines his neshamah. Although a person’s name is generally chosen by his parents, Hashem inspires them to give the name by which Hashem Himself called that neshamah in Shamayim before descending to This World.

Rebbetzin Heiman eventually remarried the chief rabbi of Israel, Rav Isser Yehuda Unterman, and relocated to Eretz Yisrael, where she passed away and was buried.

When I came to seminary, on my to-do list was to daven at the kever of my illustrious namesake. Equipped with (what I thought were correct) directions, I took a bus to Tel Aviv and walked several blocks in the heat until I reached the beis olam. I began searching for the section and row I’d written down, but I couldn’t find it. The cemetery was deserted, and I wandered in circles in the heat, coming close to tears.

Suddenly, an old man approached carrying a spade. (Eliyahu Hanavi, was that you?) Not only did the man work there, he also had a photographic memory of all the graves he tended and the ones he didn’t.