By Theresa Rézeau

Can a new name truly change a person, or does it simply reveal the person they were becoming all along?

Throughout history, names have carried extraordinary significance. They have marked family, identity, belonging and reputation. A name can inspire honour or provoke fear. It can open doors or close them. Some spend a lifetime trying to protect the one they were given. Others long to leave it behind. Yet the deepest transformations have rarely begun with a change of name alone. They have begun with a change of character.

Few paintings capture this more powerfully than Jacob Wrestling with an Angel (1876), by the French painter Léon Bonnat (1833–1922). First exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1876, the work is now associated with the Dahesh Museum of Art, New York.

The scene unfolds in darkness. Jacob is locked in an exhausting struggle with the mysterious figure before him. Neither retreats. Neither yields. The contest lasts through the night until dawn begins to break.

It is only then, after refusing to let go despite exhaustion and injury, that Jacob hears the words that will alter the course of his life forever.

"Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel."

The new name was not a reward for perfection. It was the recognition of transformation.

For much of his life, Jacob had lived according to the meaning of his first name. He deceived his brother. He manipulated circumstances to secure blessings that were never fully his to claim. He relied upon cleverness more than trust, strategy more than surrender. His greatest battles had always been with other people.

On that final night before meeting the brother he had wronged decades earlier, the battle changed. For the first time, Jacob was forced to wrestle not with his family, nor with his circumstances, but with himself.

Most of us know that kind of struggle. There comes a moment when we realise that the greatest obstacle to becoming the person we hope to be is no longer outside us. It is the fear we have carried. It is the pride we have defended. It is the resentment we have nurtured, or the identity we have refused to question. The conflict becomes deeply personal.

We often imagine that change arrives through dramatic external events. A new city. A new career. A new relationship. A new title. A new beginning. Yet history suggests something quieter. People can move across continents while carrying the same fears. They can achieve extraordinary success while remaining prisoners of old insecurities. They can reinvent every visible part of their lives while never confronting the habits that quietly govern them.

A new address cannot heal an old wound. A new occupation cannot erase an old bitterness. Neither can a new name.

That is why Jacob's story remains so enduring. His name changed only after something far more important had already begun to change within him.

Modern society often encourages us to curate identity. We update profiles, redesign personal brands and introduce ourselves with carefully chosen descriptions. We speak of reinvention as though identity were something that could be rewritten overnight. There is nothing wrong with growth, and nothing wrong with beginning again. But genuine transformation asks for more than appearance. It asks for honesty. It asks us to examine the stories we tell about ourselves, the labels we have accepted, the failures we refuse to release, the successes we mistake for worth, the fears we disguise as wisdom. Only then does change become something deeper than performance.

Bonnat's painting captures this truth with remarkable restraint. Jacob is neither triumphant nor defeated. His body is strained. His face reflects determination rather than certainty. The struggle itself becomes the subject. The blessing is almost secondary.

How different that is from the world we inhabit. We celebrate visible victories but overlook the invisible battles that made them possible. We admire confidence without recognising the years of doubt that preceded it. We applaud resilience without seeing the long nights during which it was quietly formed.

The most important transformations rarely announce themselves. They unfold in private conversations, silent prayers, difficult decisions. They unfold in moments when no one else is watching. By the time the world notices, the real work has already been done.

There is another detail that makes Jacob's story remarkable. After the encounter, he does not walk away untouched. He limps. The wound remains even as the blessing is received.

Transformation does not erase every scar. Sometimes the very marks we wish had disappeared become the evidence that we have survived the struggle. They remind us not of our weakness, but of the price of becoming someone different.

We all carry names. Some were given to us at birth. Others were assigned by the world along the way: failure, outsider, divorced, unwanted, unsuccessful. These labels can become prisons if we mistake them for the whole truth of who we are.

But for some, a name carries a heavier weight still. It is the surname of a father whose violence filled the home with fear. It is the name of a mother whose absence left wounds no child should have carried. For others, it is bound forever to a parent's cruelty or abuse, to a betrayal that shattered the very trust a family is meant to protect. And for others still, it is a name marked by different injustices: a false accusation, a public humiliation, a crime they never committed, a reputation destroyed by rumour long before the truth had the chance to speak.

What does it mean to be told that your identity is forever tied to someone else's violence? What does it mean to spend years trying to prove you are not the person the world believes you to be? Must a person carry a name that feels more like a sentence than a gift? Or is there a point at which inheritance no longer determines identity?

These are not easy questions. Some choose to change their names legally. Others keep them while quietly changing what they mean. Some reclaim them with dignity. Others leave them behind simply to survive. Both paths require extraordinary courage, because the deepest struggle is rarely with the letters on a birth certificate. It is with the fear that we are destined to become what we came from, or that we will forever be judged by something that was never ours to carry.

Sometimes the most destructive name is not spoken by our enemies. It is the one we whisper to ourselves when no one else is listening.

At first we reject it. Then we tolerate it. Eventually we answer to it. We make decisions because of it. We abandon opportunities because of it. We believe forgiveness is not for us because of it. We believe love is beyond us because of it. We stop imagining a different future because of it. Until, one day, we no longer remember there was ever another name. We risk leaving this world believing that the lie was our true identity.

Jacob understood something of this. He did not erase his past. He carried it. He walked away with a limp that remained for the rest of his life. The wound did not disappear, but neither did it define him. His future was no longer governed by the man he had been.

That is the hope hidden within every story of redemption. We are shaped by our inheritance. But we are not imprisoned by it. A family name may tell the world where we began. It does not have the final authority to decide who we become.

Genesis tells us that after the struggle, the mysterious figure said to Jacob: "Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed." (Genesis 32:28)

The blessing was not that Jacob received another name. The blessing was that the old name no longer told the whole story.

There is one final question. It is not whether you would ever change your name legally. It is whether you have ever asked the Divine to change it. Not the name written on your passport, but the one written upon your heart. The name shaped by shame, by addiction, by violence, by rejection, by grief, by guilt, by fear—by the words others spoke over you until you began to believe them yourself.

Have you ever placed that name before the Divine and asked, "Is this truly who I am?" And if the Divine answered as with Jacob, would you be willing to wrestle through the night until the old name no longer held authority over your life?

Because every new name carries a cost. Jacob received his blessing. But he also carried a limp. Transformation is never free. It asks us to surrender the identities we have spent years defending so that we may receive the ones we were created to bear.

Imagine standing before the Divine at the end of your life. Every title you earned. Every reputation you defended. Every label you feared. Every name the world ever called you falls silent: the successful one, the failure, the addict, the victim, the criminal, the celebrated, the survivor, the fraud, the innocent. Then, for the first time, you hear the name the Divine has always known you by.

Would you recognise it? Or have you spent so many years answering to another that the voice of the Divine would sound like a stranger?

The greatest tragedy is not that others called us by the wrong name. It is that we believed them. And perhaps the greatest miracle is not receiving a new name. It is finally recognising the one that was waiting for us all along.

If tomorrow the Divine whispered your true name, would you answer? Or would you keep answering to the one the world gave you?

Change my name.

Author's Note

This essay was inspired by standing before Jacob Wrestling with an Angel by Léon Bonnat at Sotheby's in London during the 19th & 20th Century European and British Art sale in July 2026.

Some paintings are admired. Others refuse to let you leave unchanged.

This was one of them.