Baby Names

I stumbled across a gorgeous poem by Rachel Mennies the other day, called “Poem: For Rose,” which speaks to the ritual of Jews naming their babies after the dead. Mennies calls the ritual “practical,” but for me it is a practice—a religious performance, repeated and carried out through time so that, according to the Talmud, the work of God continues to be “drawn down into this world through a person’s name.”

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