Yesterday, Palm Beach International Airport officially became President Donald J. Trump International Airport. New signs are now up on the highway, and the familiar airport code of PBI will soon become DJT. The name of one of the most famous people in the world is now written in enormous letters across a major gateway into South Florida.

Depending on your politics, you may have celebrated the change or opposed it. Personally, I was mostly wondering whether JetBlue would change the name on my son’s itinerary when he flies home from camp in the Catskills in a few weeks.

Politics aside, quite a few presidents have earned themselves these naming rights, and  there is something undeniably powerful about seeing your name placed on an international airport.

But the rest of us will most likely never have an airport named in our honor. We will not see our initials printed on boarding passes or have buildings and stadiums bearing our names.

Yet the desire behind it is deeply human. We all want to know that we mattered. We want our name, our life, and our contribution to society to continue even after we are no longer here. We want to know that we left our mark.

Remarkably, this week’s first Torah portion closes with an almost identical story of a powerful man changing the name of a city to carry his own name.

At the very end of Parshas Matos, the Torah tells us about a descendant of Menashe named Novach. He conquered the city of Kenath and its surrounding villages on the east side of the Jordan River. “And he called the city Novach, after his own name.” (Num. 32:42)

Thousands of years before anyone placed three giant initials on an airport, Novach had the same idea. He conquered a city and wanted his name written across........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)