foot to the scrolls, saying something
like, “You are touching the Torah;
may it touch you and inform you
all the days of your life.” Th e young
rabbi has thought hard about phys-
ical acts that provide that kind of
indelible spectacle for witnesses: “I
try for ritual moments.”
One he also likes involves swad-
dling the baby in a tallit that may
have belonged to a beloved family
member. “Th ey are literally wrap-
ping the baby in the tallit of some-
one meaningful,” he said. “It’s a
30-second moment, but it’s that
visual impact.”
Another popular ritual involves
handing the baby a mezuzah, per-
haps the one destined for the baby’s
nursery door. Babies, especially
older ones, will inevitably put it in
their mouths, providing the image
of the baby “kissing” the mezuzah.

“You don’t have to just take
out,” Yanoff noted, referring to the
unassailable rite at the center of
male naming, which is obviously
not possible for girls. “You can also
put things in.”
Or as Rabbi Jill Maderer ob-
served, in an unconscious double
entendre: “Obviously there’s a big
missing piece to the girls’ experi-
ence. But other than that, the
prayers are the same, the experience
is the same.”
For Maderer, who is a rabbi at
Congregation Rodeph Sholom,
egalitarianism was the driving prin-
ciple behind her daughter’s eighth-
day brit bat, which was led by her
sister. “I decided that if I was in a
huge rush for my son, I wanted to
do the same thing for my daugh-
ter,” she explained.

Maderer opted to have the rite
at home, with only immediate
family, for the same reason many
people either keep it simple or wait
awhile: “I wasn’t feeling up to en-
tertaining a large group just a week
after giving birth,” she said.

A more personal ritual also
proved satisfying for Heather
Stecker of Bryn Mawr, whose
second daughter, Leila Morgan,
was named in a private ceremony
conducted by Yanoff . Whereas
her fi rst daughter, Belle Rose, had
been named during a Saturday ser-
vice, for Leila’s naming the Steckers
gathered about 20 people in a small
room at Adath Israel, wrapping the
baby in a tallit that had belonged to
her grandfather.

In addition to discussing their
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM naming choices, Stecker and her
husband talked about praying for
their babies’ arrivals — an allusion
to the fertility challenges they had
overcome. “It was very moving and
very intimate,” Stecker explained,
“and not something you can do in
a sanctuary with 100 people. We
wanted the focus to be on our fam-
ily, not on whoever was being Bar
Mitzvahed that day.”
For Ilana Ehrlich, a Philadel-
phia lawyer, egalitarianism was so
important that — hewing to the
tradition for male children — she
and her husband, Adam, declined
to share their daughters’ names
before their synagogue rituals,
which occurred within days of the
respective births. “As a mother of
girls, in some ways that’s the clos-
est you’re going to get to a bris,”
explained Ehrlich. Also, given
their preferred timing, the syna-
gogue service was “a very simple
way to do a naming.”
While the Shabbat service can
strike some parents as a less-per-
sonal setting, for families like the
Ehrlichs — who are involved with
Minyan Tikvah in Center City —
it may be the most haimish way to
celebrate. “We wanted to give ev-
eryone in our community a chance
to know at the same time what we
were naming, and why,” Ehrlich
said. Th e Ehrlichs named their sec-
ond daughter at Ilana Ehrlich’s
parents’ shul, Germantown Jewish
Centre, “so I got to celebrate it with
people who watched me grow up,
which was a lovely way to welcome
a child into a community,” Ehrlich
said. Th e Ehrlichs made the deliber-
ate choice to give their children one
set of names for English and He-
brew use. I had always wondered
about the logic of our myriad un-
used monikers; nobody has used
my own Hebrew name, Sara Tzvia,
since my Bat Mitzvah in 1989. So
the idea that little Gabriela Yael
and Noa Reva Ehrlich would feel
a meaningful connection to the
names they hear in shul seemed
profoundly refreshing.

I discovered that in choosing
Hebrew names, Jewish parents
are increasingly venturing beyond
classics like Yitzhak and Chaya to
modern choices like Netanya and
Ayelet — and even to Yiddish bor-
rowings. But meaning remains im-
portant. According to every parent
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APRIL 9, 2015
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