Soviet Jewish author Vasily Grossman writes, “Among a million Russian huts you will never find even two that are exactly the same. Everything that lives is unique. It is unimaginable that two people, or two briar-roses, should be identical… If you attempt to erase the peculiarities and individuality of life by violence, then life itself must suffocate.”

The third of the Ten Commandments warns us not to take G-d’s name in vain: “Lo sisa es shem Hashem Elokecha lashav” (Exodus 20:7). Shav, Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch writes, is related to shaveh, sameness. Why? Rav Hirsch explains:

“Everything that really exists must have something characteristic that differentiates it from all others. Everything real is individual. What is absolutely shaveh – i.e., that which is absolutely like everything else, that which has nothing of its own to show – is shav, does not exist.

“So lashav means ‘to nothing,’ without any purpose, without any result, and shevuas shav is a purposeless, useless oath.”

Rav Hirsch notes that the Hebrew word nidmeh teaches us this same lesson. It, too, “connects the idea of similarity, of being the same, with the idea of nullity, of non-existence.” For nidmeh means both “is similar to” and “it has been destroyed.”

In Hallel, we declare: “Lo hameisim yehalalu Kah v’lo kol yordei dumah – The dead do not praise G-d, nor do those who descend to the silence of death (dumah).” But the root d-m-h, as noted above, can also mean “sameness.” My father, a”h, therefore suggested that we read this verse – al pi derush – as a denunciation of uniformity: “The dead do not praise G-d, nor do those who descend to ‘sameness.’”

We all serve the same Hashem and follow the same Torah, but each of us is born with a unique soul and is supposed to serve Hashem with the unique blend of talents and characteristics with which He blessed us. To be the same – i.e., to mindlessly conform, to smother every trace of one’s individuality – is, in a certain sense, to render oneself non-existent.