Think of how a b’rakhah works. When a Christian says Grace, it’s something like, “Bless this food to our use,” or “For what we are to receive make us truly grateful.” The prayer points to what’s about to be eaten: this food; these gifts. But a traditional b’rakhah is almost blind to the food on the table “Blessed are You…Who brings bread from the earth” – even though without the bread, this statement would be considered a blessing in vain. So: A Jewish blessing takes a phenomenon and, rather than talking about it directly, uses it as an opportunity to talk about the sacred. We may eat the food, but what we see is an example of God’s eternal bread-giving nature.

So, too, with the life-cycle rituals. Think of a wedding. When we look at the chuppah, the blessings invite us to see both a reminder of Eden and a trace of the redemption-to-come. A funeral invokes the idea of God’s ineffably just providence, and recasts our grief as part of a response to the cosmic rupture symbolized by the Destruction of the Temple. And in a Brit Milah the circumcision of this particular baby is a reminder of God’s initial covenant with Abraham (“The blessed Holy One said to Abraham our father, ‘Walk before Me and be perfect”), the Exodus (“I passed over you and saw you weltering in your blood, and said, ‘In your blood may you live'” – understood by the midrash to refer to the bloods of both the first Passover offering and circumcision, and, in its invocation of Elijah, the redemption yet to be.

What I wanted was a baby-naming ceremony that did similar work; that is, that recasts the naming as a microcosm of events in sacred history. And in fact naming in Torah has both covenantal and redemptive significance. The reference to the “garments of triumph” and “robe of victory” in the Isaiah passage naturally suggested wrapping the child in a tallit as a transitional event that might otherwise be lacking.