CHAPTER TWO - Birth Ceremonies and Life Beginnings

A: BACKGROUND

3. NAMES AND US - INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

Names are a key to identity, both individual and collective. Our name tends to be the first thing that we hear and, more often than not, one of the first words that we learn to say. It is rooted throughout life in our concept of ourselves, our self image, the way we see and think of ourselves. It is a way of expressing our individuality, but it is also a way of affirming ourselves as part of a wider group, whether a family, a tribe or a people.

Ultimately, the name that we are given at birth is only a part of the name that we earn for ourselves throughout our lives. The name of a man and a woman will ultimately include much more than the technical name given at birth. It will come to embody the whole set of associations that the individual will accumulate throughout life.

We will be a People with a "good name" or a "bad name." This is reflected in the midrash which talks of the three names that a person receives during his or her lifetime.

There are three names by which a person is called:
One which his father and mother call him,
And one which people call him,
And one which he earns for himself.
The best of all is the one that he earns for himself.
Midrash Tanchuma.

This midrash was expanded by the poetess Zelda who created out of the midrashic suggestion the very powerful poem ìëì àéù éù ùí - "Every Person Has a Name" - in which she enumerates the parts of a person's life and experience that create the name that she or he carries around with them. However, even allowing for that, the basis of the name is the one assigned at birth. Zelda, following the midrash, herself recognizes that axiom, as she opens her observations with the comment that each person has a name given by G-d and by the father and mother. That is the root of the name: that is the root of identity; other names will develop, to be grafted on to the original center, which is the name provided by the parents. The midrash is surely correct when it states that the best of all names is the name that the person earns for him or herself, but the name that the parents give to their child is, and will remain, the basis of the identity of the child/person.

The issue of a name is, however, more complex than that. The names that we confer on our children are not only identity components for the children. They are, first and foremost, powerful statements as to the identity of parents.