Introducing Ethan Micah Sufrin Simon!

Remarks on the naming of Ethan Micah Sufrin Simon at his Brit Milah

By Claire Sufrin and Michael Simon

Fiedler Hillel at Northwestern University

Evanston, Illinois

July 5, 2014 ~ 7 Tammuz 5774

I. ETHAN/EITAN

Michael:

I said to Claire a couple of nights ago that finding the right name for our son was probably the most difficult and stressful part of having this, our second child.  I’m sure that it took every bit of strength Claire had left just days after giving birth to a human being to keep from rolling her eyes.  Uh-huh, she must have thought:  that’s the difficult and stressful part.

But, in all seriousness, naming our son is tremendously important to us.  A midrash in Tanchuma tells us that a human being is given three names:  one that he is called by his parents, one that he is called by others, and one that he makes for himself.  The greatest of these is the one that he makes for himself.  We await with anticipation and excitement the name that you will make for yourself, and we wish that, like your big brother, even in your early years you will develop friendships filled with love and caring.  But all of that is yet to come.  This is our opportunity to bestow upon you a name that you will use throughout your life.  And it’s a name that we love because it reflects the unfathomably infinite love we have for you.

Your first name, Ethan (in Hebrew, Eitan), is a blending of the ancient and the new, even in our own families -- as far as we know, you’re the first Eitan in at least the past few generations.  That’s the new, and we’re thrilled that you will have a unique and special name.  At the same time, we chose the name Ethan in part because it begins with the Hebrew letter aleph, which is also the first letter of Avraham, and you are named for my mother’s paternal grandfather, Abraham Cohn. 

Abraham Cohn was the patriarch of a large family.  He was married to my great-grandmother Masha (for whom I’m named), and together they raised a family of ten children in Schenectady, NY.  While I’m sorry to admit that I don’t know much about Abraham Cohn – he passed away long before my mother was born – I do know that he owned a large general store and was a baker.  This tells me that he was a person who was connected with the actual lived experience of the people in his community, and that he cared about what mattered in their daily lives. 

Among his ten children were the famous (at least within our own family) “aunties” – my Aunt Bessie, Aunt Annie, Aunt Rosie, and Aunt Minnie – women who showered their great-nieces and nephews with love and affection.  And of course his youngest child was Dorothy, my maternal grandmother.  My earliest memories feature Gram (and Gramps), whose home was just three blocks from my own home growing up.  Gram gave me my first haircut, taught me to appreciate cottage cheese and canned apricots, attempted to teach me to play piano (I did learn the Star-Spangled banner played on one hand – and that’s about it), and instilled in me the values of being kind to others, treating everyone fairly regardless of their background and station in life, and devotion to family and loved ones.

This aleph, sweet Eitan, connects you back four generations to the Abraham who was the patriarch of your great-grandmother’s family, but it also connects you back more than 4000 years to Avraham, the patriarch of the Jewish people and the foundational figure of the three monotheistic faiths.  This Avraham is the one about whom God says, in Genesis 18, “He will be a great and mighty nation and all of the peoples of the Earth will bless themselves through him.  For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do tzedek u’mishpat – righteousness and justice. 

This, too, is the gift of the aleph in your name.

Claire:

Baby, your first name Ethan, Eitan in Hebrew, means strong. In fact, in this morning’s haftorah it appears as an adjective, describing the foundations of the earth, they are “ha-eitanim mosdei aretz” (Micah 6:2). Eitan is also a character who appears several times within the biblical text; scholars believe he served as a cymbal-player in King David’s court.

Psalm 89 is attributed to the biblical Ethan. This psalm praises God as the Creator and Ruler of the World, with a mighty arm and a strong hand. God is principled: the Psalmist, Eitan, describes the foundations of divine throne as tzedek u’mishpat, righteousness and justice. Chessed v’emet, loving kindness and truth, arise before God.

The psalm interweaves these descriptions of God and God’s relationship with the world with a second theme, God’s love of the Israelites in particular: the covenant God has with them and the promises God has made to David, their king. God’s gifts to David and the Israelites are an expression of God’s strength, of God’s mercy, and of God’s justice. But of course, God expects the Israelites to uphold the covenant by following the laws, ordinances, statutes and commandments it contains.

The psalm ends on a plaintive note: the Israelites have violated their end of the covenant and the psalmist appeals to God to accept their repentance, to forgive them, and strengthen them again. And the final verse praises God, baruch adonai leolam, amen v’amen.

In a nutshell of 53 verses, Psalm 89 expresses the key ideas of biblical theology, what our ancestors knew to be true of God. This theology is the foundation on which the Jewish tradition is built.

We don’t know very much about the biblical Eitan; he plays almost no role in the biblical story. But he leaves us his Psalm, a poem expressing the worldview that drives the narratives of the Torah and the prophets. He knows the big ideas and puts them into beautiful words.

May you, Ethan Micah, also be able to see the big picture, may you have a clear worldview.  Perhaps the greatest challenge of a person’s life is to live up to the values he or she holds dear; may you like Eitan use whatever talents you have to face this challenge honestly and openly.

II. Micah/Micha

Claire:

Your middle name, Micah/Micha honors the memory of three men named Moshe: Moishe Wrobel, Moishe Sufrin, and Rabbi Moshe Sachs.

A day or so before Daddy and I got married, I spent some time with Sabi and Savti, my parents, your grandparents, in their hotel room. Sabi was quiet, and I asked him what he was thinking about. Was he ok? “Yes,” he said. “Just a little overwhelmed. You have to remember—inside, I’m really just a little boy from Bukowsko.”

Bukowsko is the small town in Poland where my father’s parents were born. My Bubbe Anita (Hanna) immigrated to America with her sister in the 1930s and settled in Chicago, near two half-siblings. But Harold—then Tzvi Hersh—was still in Bukowsko when the Nazis arrived. He escaped from a Nazi work camp just outside his town and survived the remainder of the war as a refugee in Switzerland. The rest of their families perished in the Holocaust.

Throughout my Zaide’s journey and then in Chicago after the war, he was with two other men: his brother Moishe Sufrin and their cousin Moishe Wrobel. And although later the three of them would never, ever agree on who did what at what point, there is no question in my mind that their escape was possible only because they were together. Without Moishe Sufrin and without Moishe Wrobel, we might very well not be here.

In America, one Moishe became Maurice and the other became Morris; growing up, I knew them as Uncle Morrie and Cousin Morrie. As a young girl sitting at the Shabbat table with them, I was drawn to their accents and their tendency to slip into Yiddish; I can in particular still hear Morrie Wrobel chanting Kiddush in my mind’s ear, to a tune he surely learned as a child. But I was also scared of them: they had a certain toughness, a gruffness really. In conversation, their voices had only two settings: loud and louder. But even as I shied away, I knew that they loved me in a way they would never put into words and that I did not quite understand.

My father and our cousin Joey Wrobel were best friends growing up—they called themselves the Toodley Tooth Men—and together with their siblings Neal and Claire, their very existence shows that these survivors were hopeful enough to bet on the future and plant a seed in the soil of America.

As I learned why it was that these men had accents and learned what I could of the terror and the sadness and the anger that lay beneath all that toughness and gruffness, I understood that together with my siblings—your Tia Hanna, Mr. Nat, and Uncle Zach—and my cousins Alan and Stu Sufrin and Shawn Wrobel—I am part of the generation that proved their survival was worth it. We are rooted, deeply, in the ground of American freedoms and also Jewish traditions.

You, sweet baby, together with your brother Jacob and your cousins Leo Sufrin and Logan Wrobel, are the blossoms on the trees these survivors planted.

In August 2001, Moishe Wrobel traveled with me, your Sabi, Great-uncle Neal, Uncle Zach, Cousins Shawn and Joey and a few others back to Bukowsko.

The town was rundown and rural but I was surprised to realize ways in which it was also lovely—a quiet place surrounded by lush green fields. Not quite idyllic but simply real. In the post office, Morrie started chatting with a local man, who appeared to be about his age, in Polish. They talked for at least half an hour. When they finished, the rest of us turned to Morrie: what did he say? What did you talk about?

The one thing Morrie reported was that this man remembered Morrie’s grandmother’s bowling alley. To have this man corroborate his memories pleased Morrie greatly. For me, though, the point was: there was a bowling alley! In Bukowsko! As we talked more, it became clear that it was not exactly the same game that we play when we go bowling. But it was recreation; it was fun. It was a concrete reminder that pre-war Jewish life in Poland included pleasures and joys; it did not happen in black-and-white but in rich and vibrant colors.

In naming you for Moishe Wrobel and Moishe Sufrin, we recognize their courage, their fortitude, and their great good luck. We recognize also that there was a bowling alley in Bukowsko. Even as we celebrate America as an incredible land of freedoms, even as we identify as liberal and occasionally progressive Jews, we acknowledge the richness of life in Bukowsko, of everything that was lost.

The mem for Moshe is also connected to Rabbi Moshe Sachs, with whom your daddy lived in Jerusalem from 2001 – 2003.  As Moshe’s grandson Mishael Zion recently put it, Moshe was a kind of Jewish Forrest Gump, a guy you may never have heard of but who was connected to nearly every major event and figure in the Jewish world from World War II through the early 21^st century.  This part of your name connects you with the Zion family, your daddy’s unofficial (but still very real) cousins in Israel.  And, last but not least, Moshe Sachs was nicknamed “Buddy”, which is the name we’ve been calling you since you were born and that we also call your brother– and we reserve the right to continue doing so.  As Jacob noted, we now have two buddies in this family – one big (Jacob) and one little (Ethan).  May you both always be buddies to each other, to us, and to the world.

Michael:

I’d like to think that the prophet Micha was also a buddy, though given his sharp critique of the ruling class that we read in his Biblical book, he might not have had too many friends. 

Still, your mommy and I chose the name Micha because he was a prophet whose stern call for justice was grounded in a foundation of love and peace.  When considering your middle name, we wanted to complement the strength of Ethan/Eitan with the humility of Micha. In perhaps the best-known verses from the book of Micha, which also happened to be the concluding lines of today’s Haftarah, Micha says:

Higid lecha adam ma-tov

u-ma Adonai doreysh mimcha

Ki im asot mishpat v’ahavat chesed v’hatzneyah lechet im elohim.

He has told you, O man, what is good

And what God requires of you:

Only to do justice, and to love loving-kindness,

And to walk humbly with your God.

We know, all too well, little Ethan Micah, that life is complex, and challenging, and difficult.  It is anything but simple.  And yet, there are simple precepts that can serve as beacons in our lives, lighting our path through the darkness and uncertainty.  We wish, for you, little one, that you will pursue what is good – that you will do justice, that you will love chesed, and that you will move through this world with humility and a sense of gratitude for being created by the Creator of all life.

There’s one more message in the name Micha that we’d like to convey, because, little one, as I’ve already noted, the world is not all light and goodness.  You will need the strength of Eitan and the compassion of Micha.  This week, as we celebrated the unbelievable joy of your birth, we shared with the rest of the Jewish people and the world the wrenching pain of losing three young Jewish boys murdered heinously by Palestinian terrorists.  And then, a day later, we heard the horrific news that a young Palestinian boy was killed in a revenge attack by Jews.  

Your namesake, the prophet Micha, echoes Isaiah in chapter 4, declaring: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, nor shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid.”

Little Ethan Micah, Eitan Micha, we have unbridled joy and immense hope that you will play your own part, however you choose and are able, in bringing compassion and peace to the world, in bringing healing to our fractured universe. 

Shabbat shalom and welcome to our family, the Jewish people, and the world.