Ten months ago, our second son was born. That meant it was time for one of the toughest negotiations of Israeli family life: picking a name.
My mother is Ashkenazi, born in Queens. In her view, you name a child after every relative who has passed away, and if you can fit four of them into two names, you have done well. My mother-in-law is a secular Israeli, and she considers this practice borderline abusive. “You are hanging the dead on a newborn,” she says. “You are loading a soul with weight it never asked for.”
I did what I always do. I went for the middle ground.
The plan was simple: We would pick a name that could plausibly be passed off to my in-laws as one that just sounded nice, while retaining subtle significance for my own mother. The baby would not bear the name of any dead person, but there would be a connection.
More from The Middle Ground
So, what did we pick?