[Avodah] Names of the Months

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 11:33:06PM -0500, Brent Kaufman via Avodah wrote:
> From: Alexander Seinfeld <seinfeld at daasbooks.com>
>> Not only did Moshe have many names, few people called him "Moshe" in his
>> lifetime. (His father called him Avigdor, his mother called him Tovia,
>> Bnai Yisroel called him Sofer etc.)

(Then there's Yekusiel...)

> I have no reason to think that Moshe was called anything other than Musa.
> It was an Egyptian word (ie. The consonants m-s) meaning 'born from'. Hence
> Ramses was 'born from Ra'.

I think "Moshe" was more like the number of Koreans in the US named "Kim";
it's popular in their community because the name exists in both cultures.
It's not that the pasuq is saying "ki min hamayim meshisihu" was her
motive to the exclusion of calling him her son. Rather, she used the
name because it had meaning to her in both languages simultaneously;

> The people knew him by that name as part of the royal family. It's unknown
> whether Bnei Yisrael knew that he was one of them and the story behind his
> birth and being found by bad Paro....

Except that even as a newborn, he "looked Jewish" to Bas-Par'oh.
Moshe Rabbeinu had textbook Israelitish features and/or coloring,
not Egyptian ones. So it is likely everyone knew he was one of us the
same way.

>> You con?t ask about days of the week (in English) -- Rav Hirsch writes in
>> one of his essays how much it bothers him that people use idolatrous names
>> for the week days.

> I didn't ask about them because those names were not brought into the
> Torah world by a consensus of chachamim as the months were. Nisan, Iyar,
> Sivan are now the official Jewish names and are used in Halachik discourse.

But only Tammuz is idolatrous. As as is the meaning of the names Mordechai
and Esther.

And why doesn't R Hirsch discuss contemporary month names? Are Janus,
Mars, Maia, or Juno less pagan than Woden, Thor, Tiw or Frig? (Saturday
is named for Saturn via the planet, so I'll cut that one a little
more slack.)

Off-the-cuff, I am thinking it's the fact that he is in Germany that
gave the names of Teutonic gods a little more grouding in the surrounding
culture, and thus the name's origins less forgotten.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 Take time,
http://www.aishdas.org/asp   be exact,
Author: Widen Your Tent      unclutter the mind.
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF          - Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv, Alter of Kelm