When I lived in Israel in the early 1970s, I visited a lake in the northern part of the country that Israelis call Kinneret. It is called that, I was told, because its roughly triangular shape resembles a kinnor, a certain kind of hand-held harp mentioned many times in scripture. Some linguists say this is merely folk etymology, due to the similarity of the sounds. They offer other, more prosaic, stories, the evocative notion of a lake that is somehow also a harp sings in my memory.
In this week’s Gospel reading, more than 5000 people follow Jesus to a grassy area near the banks of Kinneret, and he turns a couple of fish and five rounds of pita into a feast that leaves everyone feeling satisfied. Then, when his disciples row across the lake and leave him behind, he scares them half to death by walking over the water to join them on the other side.* These stories, and others that take place on its shores, on its surface, and in the surrounding hills, make this otherwise insignificant body of water a place we remember.
We remember it by other names, as well, and each name contains a story about who was in charge, what they believed, and where they came from. The Greeks who conquered the Holy Land in the fourth century BCE called it Gennesaret or Ginosar, which is how they pronounced Kinneret. Because the writers of the New Testament used Greek, those who translated it into English sometimes used those names, too. In the time of Jesus and his disciples, the Romans called it the Sea of Tiberias, after a town they built on its southwestern shore in honor of one of their emperors. In modern Arabic, the lake is called Buḥayrat Ṭabarīyā (a translation of “Sea of Tiberias”), but medieval Persian and Arab scholars named it Bahr al-Minya, the Sea of Minya, after an Umayyad palace and mosque built near the north-eastern shore of the lake in the eighth century. Modern English-language maps usually say the Sea of Galilee, referring to the biblical name of a fertile area of rolling hills and farmland in the northern part of what is now the modern country of Israel.
I guess this all captures my imagination because, like that lake in Galilee, I, too, have had a lot of names. When I was born, my parents wanted both to honor their Jewish ancestors and to assimilate into the larger American society, so I was given two sets of names, one in English and the other in Hebrew. As a child, everyone called me Debbie. As an adult, I am mostly known as Deborah. When I lived in Israel, they called me Dvora, the Hebrew name I was given at birth.
I’ve been married three times, and twice I took on my spouse’s family name and left my own behind. For the last thirty years, I have used my original surname professionally and my married name in other situations. Now that I am retired, I often have to ask myself what name someone might know me by, or how to introduce myself to someone new. Since I have used so many different names, I sometimes get confused about who I am. All I can say for sure is that God is calling me to become more truly myself in Christ, no matter what name I might be using today or what story I am telling.
–Deborah Sokolove, Seekers Church
Questions for reflection:
- What does your name say to you or to others about your life story?
- What do you hope that other people will remember about you?
- What helps you know who you are?
