At the bris for yet another grandson this week I was gifted not only a new member of our family, but something else: a rare and fleeting glimpse of eternity, an acute sense of being part of a generational chain stretching back four thousand years.
This covenant, this partnership with God and the Jewish people, taking place on a street in Brooklyn in scorching summer heat—with global forces of hate and fear directed at us once again, I found myself beaming with pride to be part of this miraculous people. Knowing that I have contributed to its numbers and, in some small way, to its flourishing stands among my most important achievements.
My son Isaac—whose first child’s bris took place just days after October 7—had given him two names, one for a warrior and the other for a prophet. He explained then that these two things felt necessary for his son, born at such a dark and uncertain time. The names had been chosen consciously, but, as Jewish tradition teaches, also through a measure of prophetic awareness granted to every parent in the naming of a child—a name which contains hope for a good and happy life and also a depiction of his or her essential qualities.
Today he explained his newborn son’s Hebrew name: Shalom.
Two sons, two moments, two namings—and between them, a kind of arc. The first name was forged in vigilance and a hunger for clarity, a child armored for a world that had just bared its fangs. This one, offered in aspiration, is for a child named not for what we must withstand but for what we still dare to hope for. If the warrior and the prophet were what survival required, Shalom is what survival is for.
Shalom.
Not simply a cessation of war, as most people think of it, but something rooted in the Hebrew shalem—wholeness. The paradox of oneness within infinite diversity.
This, Isaac said, is what is called for in this moment, what he knew his son would purvey throughout a long and, God-willing, happy life. If only for a moment, a feeling of shalem was palpable to me in ways both intellectual and visceral.
It is only human to see darkness and experience doubt much more readily than we see and experience their opposites. But I saw the opposite that day, in small, specific things: in the unhesitating way the room quieted for the blessings, in my son’s demeanor, proud with humble reverence as the name was said aloud, in the old men who’d lived through unspeakable horrors and the brightness of unimaginable joys, nodding in recognition of the gift of continuity.
Love was no abstraction in that room. It was a baby passed hand to hand, from generation to generation, and the way family and friends looked on with no small measure of astonishment at the miracle of it all.
Moments like these are touchstones, indelible markers of the fullness of love—of its beauty and its capacity to lift us beyond the rote, beyond a certain place at a certain time. They are not to be packed away and forgotten as so-called normal life inevitably intrudes, but nurtured and cultivated for later use. I’ve chosen to write about this so that the details of the moment can be remembered, cherished.
This, I think, is belonging. And belonging is always to play a part in something larger than oneself.
Most of us have been acculturated to believe that what our senses register is the sum of reality. But standing in that space, on that street on a scorching hot day, seeing that beautiful child, it was not difficult to feel the layers beneath the surface of an ordinary Tuesday—the four thousand years pressing up through the pavement.
May all the blessings for good come to pass for our new grandson, for our friends and family, and for you, dear reader: for health, for purpose, for love—and above all, for wholeness.
Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author.
