What is the deal with God’s Name? We learn in the Torah:

And you shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and burn their Asherim with fire; and you shall hew down the graven images of their gods; and you shall destroy their name out of that place. You shall not do so unto the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 12:3–4)

From this it is understood by the rabbis that one should not erase or blot out the name of God. The general halachic opinion is that this only applies to the sacred Hebrew names of God, not to other euphemistic references. It is prohibited to take God’s name in vain. This makes sense for all things sacred. It gets interesting is that this prohibition extends to banal documents that have God’s name on it as well. Even a simple shopping list cannot be simply discarded if it has God’s name on it. To this ends we have a Geniza, a sacred storage space. It is a repository for “Shaimos” – texts containing God’s name, because the normal trash just will not do.

All of this is particularly interesting today, the 12th of Kislev, because it is the 110th Yahrzeit of Rabbi Solomon Schechter, the first president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is an important figure in Jewish studies and Jewish history, particularly his study of the Cairo Geniza, an extraordinary collection of over 100,000 pages (around 400,000 documents) of rare Hebrew religious manuscripts and medieval Jewish texts that were preserved at an Egyptian synagogue due to the unique confluence of Jewish law and arid environment in Egypt. His excavation in 1896 of the papers of the Cairo Geniza revolutionized the study of Medieval Judaism.

It has been close to 130 years since this project has started, but only recently we made a huge jump forward with this vast trove of medieval Jewish records which has been opened up by AI. Stokl Ben Ezra , the current head of this project, said, “The possibility to reconstruct, to make a kind of Facebook of the Middle Ages, is just before our eyes.” This Geniza will give us deep insight to an entire world that was. In an interesting way this makes Rabbi Solomon Schechter the OG Mark Zuckerberg.