The day after Yom Kippur is known as Gott’s Nomen Tag, Yiddish for the Day of God’s Name. First recorded in a 17th-century book about Ashkenazi synagogue life, this idea may simply refer to a liturgical change that takes place at this time: From Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, we appeal at various crucial points in our prayers to Hamelech (“the King”). But now that the Days of Awe are over, we revert to our usual form of addressing God: El.
For the Baal Shem Tov and subsequent generations of mystics, however, there’s a more profound explanation for why we mark the Day of God’s Name. According to Chabad tradition, the Baal Shem Tov described this day in Yiddish precisely because it hints at God being too expansive and encompassing to be limited to specific Hebrew nomenclature. And although the liturgy now restores the Hebrew El, that name is but one in a stream of epithets describing the expression of divinity in the world, and thus implies a whole complex of meaning.
This stream of epithets, sometimes called the 13 Attributes of Mercy, is revealed by God to Moses in Exodus 34 and may be familiar from holiday services. Beginning Adonai, Adonai, El rachum v’chanun, it invokes God’s beneficence, mercy, and power to forgive. Strikingly, it begins with the four-letter name of God — written Yud Hey Vav Hey but usually pronounced Adonai — not once, but twice.
The Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 17b) explains that this doubling reflects God’s nature before the process of wrongdoing, recognition, and repentance we have just gone through, and again after it. The before state was simply the ineffable Name, thought by some to translate to something like Existence. The after state, by contrast, now bears this string of redemptive descriptors. After repentance and reconciliation, we know God as Existence: a deity of mercy and grace, patient, long-suffering, abundant in kindness and truth.
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Mystically speaking, how do we get from one to the other? Well, actually, through Hamelech, the King. According to one of Jewish mysticism’s central texts, the Zohar, Melech relates directly to Keter (Crown), the originating sefira, or divine emanation. During High Holy Day services, we repeatedly call on God as sovereign, channeling our prayers to reach and activate the origin point of existence.
Keter is the aperture through which the completely inconceivable and uncontainable divine enters into the process of creation, where non-being enters being.
According to the Zohar, and also to Shaarei Orah, a 13th-century kabbalistic masterpiece systematically describing each of the sefirot, it is from Keter that the 13 Attributes of Mercy draw their power, and it is in Keter that we find the divine name Ehyeh (“I Shall Be”). When our prayers reach the level of Keter, we can access a future unlike anything that has been before. Our prayers call forth God’s evolving self.
How, then, does this new paradigm of an evolving and ever more compassionate divine existence enter the world?
Expanding on the idea of Gott’s Nomen Tag, the Hasidim explain that it is these four days, spanning Yom Kippur and Sukkot, that enable the new iteration of God’s evolving self to enter created reality. These four days, each in turn, allow the four letters of God’s supreme Name to be “downloaded” as a new paradigm for existence.
Each of these four letters represents one of the four worlds, or stages of creation, described by Kabbalah: Emanation (atzilut), ideation (briyah), formation (yetzirah), and actualization (assiyah). So these four days of their reiteration form the bridge between the high crowning planes we reached on Yom Kippur and the earthly realm we dwell in and celebrate beginning on Sukkot.
On 11 Tishrei, the day after Yom Kippur, we get a new Yud, as the updated Divine reality program emanates from non-being into being. On 12 Tishrei, the new Hey generates the blueprint of the world as it will be. On 13 Tishrei, a new Vav, channel of formation, extends from the upper realms towards this one. And on 14 Tishrei, as we put the finishing touches on our newly constructed sukkot, the lower Hey, Shekhinah, reaches manifestation.
“The map is not the territory,” as contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber likes to remind us. Similarly, the sukkah is not the whole world. On a microcosmic level, though, it represents it, just as it represents both the Mishkan, the portable desert shrine, and the Holy Temple, known throughout Deuteronomy as “the place for God’s Name to dwell.”
According to our sources, the inception of both the Mishkan and the First Temple took place on the day after Yom Kippur (Rashi on Exodus 35:1; 1 Kings 8 and 2 Chronicles 7). Following the high points of divine access, we need a livable structure in which we can dwell and integrate such powerfully expansive experiences. And so, perhaps, does God, downloaded into a newly evolved and evolving form.
The sukkah is a place for meeting and communion between this material world and the murmurings of spirit. May the God we find there this year be one of ever-greater and more powerful compassion, mercy, patience, kindness and truth. And may we, made in God’s image, manifest these epithets of grace and goodness ever more powerfully, too.
We are ready for a new paradigm. May it come to us and this whole world for good.
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on October 4, 2025. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
