There is no longer much controversy over the right of women to be acknowledged publicly within the Modern Orthodox community. Therefore, a formal ceremony to celebrate a daughter’s birth is natural and necessary, allows her to feel she has a place within the community, and reciprocally encourages the members of the community to celebrate her place among them.
The ceremony for a new baby is a rite of passage that marks a monumental event in one’s life. Despite this, there is no one accepted way to acknowledge the birth of a daughter in the prescribed religious life-cycle ceremonies. In the past, when a daughter was born, the father would usually announce the birth in the synagogue on Shabbat or on any day when the Torah was taken out. Sometimes the birth was acknowledged by a kiddush for the congregation. This type of acknowledgment was usually accompanied by the announcing of the name of the newborn child and the mother’s recitation of the birkat hagomel (blessing on being saved from danger), if the mother was present. Under less favorable circumstances, which were more common, there was no public acknowledgment at all.
During the past twenty years, new traditions have become more common, and new ceremonies acknowledging the birth of a daughter have flourished. These ceremonies are not organized in a uniform way; rather, as an evolving tradition, the form of the ceremony and its content are different from one family to another. Consequently, the name of the ceremony differs: There are those who call it a simhat bat and those who dub it a brita, a Hebrew word coined (mistakenly) to emphasize that the ceremony bespeaks a dedication of the daughter, in parallel to the ceremony of a brit. Then there is zeved habat—the name, based in Sephardic tradition, that we chose for the ceremonies we conducted for our daughters.
Origin of the Term Zeved Habat
The name zeved, gift, comes from the verse in Bereishit (30:20) in which Leah thanks God for the birth of Zevulun, saying: “טוב זבד אלהים זבדני”) “God has endowed me with a good dowry”). In the following verse, the birth of Dina is announced. Ibn Ezra, commenting on this verse, links Leah’s gratitude for the birth of Zevulun to the subsequent birth of Dina in Bereishit 30:21, because they had shared one womb as twins. Thus, the word zeved is a combination of the first two letters of the name Zevulun and the first letter of the name Dina, expressing Leah’s thankfulness for having a girl, Dina.
Zeved habat is a daughter’s first ceremony, informing the beginning of her new place in her family, community, and the Jewish people. Welcoming ceremonies express belonging and symbolize the link between the individual and the community. During the ceremony she is surrounded by family and close friends, symbolizing the spheres of community into which she is being inaugurated. Her family, her friends, and her religious community embrace her.
The zeved habat ceremony is associated with Sephardic communities, and minhag (custom) may vary among them. In the Bukharan community, it is customary to sing the first stanza of D’ror yikrah, because every line of this Sabbath table song finishes with the word bat (daughter).
In general, ceremonies for the birth of daughters, whether called zeved habat or simhat bat, do not have any laws or established minhagim (customs) governing them; as a result, there are as many different forms of celebration as there are formats. The ceremony of zeved habat sometimes includes the giving of the name, and at other times, there is a separate ceremony for giving the name.
How We Celebrated Our Daughters’ Zeved Habat
In our family, we separated the two ceremonies. We organized one ceremony to give a name to our daughter in the synagogue around eight days after her birth. In this ceremony, we blessed our daughter with this Mi sheberakh: “The One who blessed our mothers Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Miriam the Prophetess, Avigail, and Esther the Queen, the daughter of Avihail, bless our pleasant daughter and call her name ______, the daughter of _____ [names of mother and father], with good luck and bountiful blessings, and may they raise her in health, peace, and restfulness. And may her father and mother be privileged to see her reach joyous occasions, and the wedding canopy, and success in the ways of happiness, richness, and honor. And so may it be Thy will that yet in old age they shall be pleasant and verdant and fruitful, and let us say, Amen.”
The ceremony of zeved habat was held later, when it was convenient for all members of the household, and when our home had returned to normal life after the birth. This could be up to a year after the birth of the baby. The reason we were able to be flexible was because of the gap created by the lack of an established ceremony in the tradition, allowing one to fill it in the best way suited to each individual family.
The ceremony that my spouse, Ariel, and I created for our four daughters was based on ceremonies that we had observed others doing and on research from the website of Machon Itim (http://itim.org.il).
For all our ceremonies we used a similar format. We created a booklet of p’sukim (verses) and brakhot (blessings), which we handed out. We opened our ceremony by explaining the meaning of zeved habat. Next, we read p’sukim to welcome our newborn baby girl, to empower her, and to welcome her into our world, expressing our happiness on her joining our family. The change we made from the first ceremony to the next was that at our first daughter’s ceremony, we passed her from hand to hand among family members, as is customary at a brit milah. The family member holding her read a pasuk that we had chosen for him or her to read. At our second daughter’s ceremony, we invited special guests to participate in the reading of the p’sukim. Each person we invited up reflected a special value that we hoped would inspire our child as she grew. When our fourth daughter was born, her oldest sister, then in first grade, was invited up on behalf of her sisters to read the pasuk in which Rivka is blessed: “Our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of ten thousands, and let thy seed possess the gate of those who hate them” (Bereishit 24:60). We hoped that this experience would empower both our oldest and youngest daughters, as well as those in between.
After the p’sukim were read, Ariel and I each gave a speech. Between our speeches we invited the guests to join us in singing a prayer from Hallel, beginning , “How can I repay unto the Lord all His bountiful dealings toward me?” (Ps. 116:12 ff.) We sang two modern Israeli songs, one after the second speech and another before the seudat hodayah (meal of thanksgiving). The first, titled “Shir Leshira” (“A Song for Shira”), is about a parent watching over her/his baby daughter. The second varied between two choices, either “Halevai,” a song of hopefulness for our daughter’s future, or “Todah,” a song of gratitude.
We have also announced our planting of trees in Israel, in keeping with the custom reported in the Talmud (Gittin 57a). The Gemara tells us that when a baby girl was born, a pine tree was planted, and when a baby boy was born, a cedar tree was planted. Before the wedding of the child, the trees were cut down and a wedding canopy (huppah) created out of the branches of both trees.
Subsequently in the ceremony, we would call upon our baby’s grandparents to bless our daughter with birkat kohanim, using the female-gendered verbs in Hebrew. Then everyone would join in the singing of “Hamalakh Hagoel” (“The Redeeming Angel”), inviting all the kids to gather around.
At this point we would partake in the seudat hodaya. At the conclusion of the meal, we sang Birkat Hamazon, with added blessings that we adapted from the blessings added to Birkat Hamazon at a brit milah, to include the baby girl and her mother:
הרחמן הוא יברך את אבי הילדה ואמה, ויזכו לגדלה ולחנכה ולחכמה, לכבוד ולתפארת לכל עמה ויהי ה’ אלוהיה עמה;
הרחמן הוא יברך את הרכה והעדינה, ויהיו ידיה ולבה לאל אמונה, ותזכה לראות פני השכינה, בשובך לציון ברנה;
הרחמן הוא יברך את הקהילה אשר ששו לעשות צדקה בגילה, וישלם פעלם ומשכרתם כפולה, ויתנם למעלה למעלה;
הרחמן הוא יגאלנו גאולת עולמים, בזכות שומרי בריתו הולכי תמים, ויבשר בשורות טובות ונחומים, לעם אחד מפזר ומפרד בין העמים;
הרחמן אשר כונן צעדנו עד הלום, יקדש בנו את שמו אשר בעילום, ויאר אלינו כשמש ויהלום, בריתו תהיה אתנו, החיים והשלום.
In this article, I have reviewed the zeved habat ceremony for a baby girl in the context of the changes in the women’s position in Jewish life and society. As these ceremonies were rare until now—and in some circles still don’t take place—there is no traditional formal content for a zeved habat. Thus, there is space for personal, meaningful, and festive content to be added by each family. The ceremony that we created for our own family was such a personally meaningful occasion.