It’s a sweet irony to be thinking about how the simhat bat ceremony got its name as I help the daughter for whom the name originated as she prepares for the brit of her newborn son. This new little boy’s four-year old sister came home from school the other day, visibly troubled by one of her classmates having told her that boys get a more special party when they are born than girls do. We explained, to her satisfaction, that boys get to have a brit, and girls get to have a simhat bat. We had to chuckle, however, when she proceeded to tell us on the following day that her brother’s simhat bat was happening on Wednesday. So much for our hair-raising ride down the “slippery slope.”
A few years ago I might have been afraid to retell this funny little anecdote, resonant as it is with feminist overtones. I can just hear the critical comments, see the eye rolls and raised eyebrows of those who fear that formalizing an event such as this signals the erosion of Orthodox practice and values. As a passionately Orthodox woman and a psychologist, I neither agree with this, nor am I afraid of these consequences. I’m much more afraid that little girls will absorb, at a very early time in their lives, fundamental and life-shaping erroneous ideas about how Judaism views them that will contribute adversely to how they view themselves. Yes, little boys are the visceral carriers of the covenant from their infancy. Precisely because of this, we need to make sure that little girls understand—from their earliest moments—how important they are, especially as our ability to do so rises easily from the depths of our tradition—as evidenced, for example, by the Sephardic zeved habat ceremony.
Thirty-seven years ago, having given birth to my second daughter, I felt determined to celebrate her arrival in a formal and public way. As she already had a brother and a sister, I was experienced in the differences between the celebrations of the arrivals of girls and boys. We had had a kiddush in honor of the birth of our eldest, a daughter—and I remember there being some difference of opinion between the in-laws about whether we should “do” even that. It struck me at the time that our tradition seemed somewhere between low-key and silent on the subject, but I was too immersed in the newness of it all to think about much more than how much time I had until the next feeding. As I write this, I am aware that it is precisely this immersion in mothering and schedules that defines a woman’s exemption from time-bound mitzvot. But in my own mothering heart, I felt I had done neither ourselves nor our precious daughter justice.
With the birth of our second daughter, I knew I would find a way to mark properly her arrival. I have a vivid mental picture of myself a few days after her birth, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of babyhood, sefarim (books) open on the table beside me, telephone in hand as I consulted with our rabbi about what possibilities I could consider. The party took place in our home, as had her brother’s brit two years before, on the Thursday evening of the day we named her. We invited friends and family by phone, calling our event a “simhat bat,” a term we also put into writing on the programs we distributed. The very simple ceremony consisted of our speeches, birkat habanim (the parents’ blessing) delivered by my father-in-law, and birkat Hatov vehameitiv (the blessing of He who is good and does good), recited as we opened a new bottle of wine. At the time, I found this compromise acceptable and even innovative. Today I find it problematic and perhaps even insulting to recite a blessing of thanksgiving over a valued bottle of wine because one cannot recite that blessing over the birth of a new child. While it was, perhaps, an elegant halakhic solution, as the blessing could then cover both sources of joy, the implication that the new wine is more blessing-worthy than the new child still feels incongruous to me. It highlighted, rather than solved, the issue—but it was a start.
When it came to figuring out what to call this ceremony, the words simhat bat simply popped into my head. The rhyming phrase expressed simply, directly, and perhaps somewhat whimsically what I wanted to say: that the birth of a daughter is, in itself, a true simha, and that there is a particular joy unique to femalehood that is worthy of its own celebration. Marking a girl’s arrival in a formal way was an idea whose time had come. I smile to myself that I had the opportunity to mark the moment at which it, like my own little daughter, could be given a name.