365 Names: “Der Aibishter”

DER AIBISHTER IS FROM THE Yiddish word meaning “uppermost” or “the highest one.” It’s a good Name for at least two reasons: 1) you can never have too much Yiddish, and b) it’s a nice descriptor of the nondualist perspective. For me at least, “God” is not Something to believe in or pray to, but rather to experience: “choiceless awareness,” “wordless consciousness,” “oceanic unity,” call It what you will. (Or better yet — don’t.)

Once upon a time, in 2011 in fact, The Metaphorager aspired to feature a year’s worth of different names for that-which-some-people-call-God: some creative, others traditional, each unique. For reasons, instead we’re going to post them until we run out of the considerably fewer we’ve collected so far. If you want to see your favorite here, but haven’t, send it along with the subject line “365 Names” and let us know whether or not you want to be credited.

5 comments for “365 Names: “Der Aibishter”

  1. Ian
    2022.07.14 at 0114

    Nice! It is like my tribe the Chickasaw’s traditional name for the Creator, “Aba’ Biniily” or “One Who Sits Above Us”. They never wrote, so they had no abjad or ABC symbols, but had they, I believe they would have written a full Torah equivalent before the Europeans came, as they have always had a love for a single Creator and their ethical and moral ideals were sincere, strong, and humble, which lead them to seek sacred rules for themselves to follow. It was all oral, and therefore much was lost with assimilation.

    The Chickasha greeting is actually “Chokma”, and as a Jewish friend of mine once said, “Your tribe greets people with wisdom.” My mystical experiences concur with this sentiment. We have several non-cognate homophones. For example, our word for “uncle” is “l’moshe”.

    Alas, the pink-skinned Europeans came (who I also come from) and exiled us from our home in modern Mississippi to modern Oklahoma (which means “Red Lands” and derives from Chickasaw/Choctaw and Muskogee-Creek-Seminole).

    Perhaps some day G-d will have mercy on us and offer us return from the exile.

    • 2022.07.26 at 1550

      Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply, and please accept my apologies for my delayed response. Assimilation is indeed a silent killer, or at least, a silent evil; you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. And if you do neither, you can never find your way back in order to go forward. May your exile, and all exiles, end “bimheirah v’yameinu” — “speedily, and in our days.”

      • teshuvah
        2022.08.29 at 1510

        um no … the only ones exiled are Yisrael … the nations are mostly doing just fine in their homelands (70 nations becoming 190+ is due to people’s predilection for violence, greed, and other bad traits the yetzer ha’ra causes us to seek) and please make teshuvah to true Torah.

  2. Dovid
    2023.09.15 at 1913

    Why are you so angry?

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