Baby Naming in Times of Fire and Plague
Baby Naming in Times of Fire and Plague
There's a Jewish tradition to name your kids 8 days after they are born and hold a ceremony welcoming them into the covenant with their history and people. We had a beautiful naming ceremony for our kids the other night, 8 days after their due date, with some good friends and a rabbi as the sun was setting. It was a mix of the traditional with Hebrew prayers and song and then the way we felt like doing it, wrapping the babies in sheep skins and talking about the power of names and the times we're living in. It was sweet and powerful and I feel inspired to share with our greater community. Here's some of the words we spoke to our friends and family:
Our children are being born just as fire season is starting here in the Bay Area. As they were taking their first breaths the skies were filled with smoke from burning forests in multiple directions. We recognize that our children will become conscious in a world that is so much different from the world both of us were raised in. Our names for them partially reflect our desire for our kids to know the importance of the wild, and a reverence for fire and woods and shadows and ethereal forces.
Silas Jacob Altman Woelfle
We are naming our boy child Silas, a name who’s origin comes from the Latin silva (‘forest, wood’) and silvester (wild, not cultivated.) Our children will know the old forests of the West and we hope that they love them the way we love them.
The name Jacob is meaningful both to Alice and Sascha. It was the name of Sascha's maternal grandfather, Jack or Jacob Altman. My grandpa Jacks lived through the Great Depression working as a plumber in New York City. He was an old man retired in the Bronx by the time I was a young adult and he transmitted lots of history of being from a family of Jewish immigrants that has been important to my sense of self.
For Alice the name Jacob is significant as a breed of sheep she raised. Connecting to land and the cycles of life and death and nature through raising sheep is the closest thing to a spiritual practice I’ve had. The lessons my flock of sheep (predominantly of the Jacob breed) taught me, and what I learned about the cycles of seasons and the land I lived on, along with the experience of feeding myself directly from the land (by killing and eating the animals I raised) is fundamental to my identity and helps me connect to my values, and see outside the noise and pace of urban modern life. It was very important for me to honor this part of my identity with a name that referenced sheep.
The name of our son captures the complexity of the relationship between the urban and rural that we hope to pass onto our children.
Lilah Seraphina Altman Woelfle
We have named our daughter Lilah Seraphina, a name we both find very beautiful.
Lilah is a variant of the Hebrew and Arabic word for "night" and Seraphina is derived from the Hebrew word seraphim, meaning "fiery ones". In Jewish scriptures, the seraphim are the highest-ranking angels of God, and they are flowery descriptions of the seraphim with multiple sets of wings. In these times where we can’t ignore the burning fires on the land, we want our daughter to know she was born in times of fire but with a hope that she will rise above and use her unique inner fire to navigate the world she’s being born into.
(The name Seraphina also memorializes Sascha’s friend Sera Bilizikian who shined really bright and left this world way too early by her own hand. She was the original inspiration to write about the myth of Icarus, which inspired the birth of The Icarus Project community. )
Mad love, continuity and transformation. xo s