From 1 Samuel 25:25 we learn: Ki'shmo ken hu--which we will translate liberally to mean "Like her name, so is she".
Noa Mayhem De Lowe….today we give you your birth name, a responsibility that we did not take lightly and approached with much thought. We bestow it upon you with reverence to your family on both sides as well as our hope that 'like your name, so will you be'. Your Hebrew name, Noa, means "movement or motion", and in Japanese, means "my love or affection". Your middle name, given to you in honor of your great-grandmother, Dorothy May, is from the English word meaning "chaos or rowdiness". With these names, we wish for you to be able to approach this world with love and affection, but also with spunk and the willingness to shake things up, fight for justice, and stand up for yourself and your beliefs. We wish for you a softness and a fierceness to your character, the strength to navigate the world in all of it's chaos and to redefine the meaning of mayhem as an active engagement in the world's ever evolving chaos, and our responsibility to work toward creating positive change to make the world better for all generations.
We will call you Noa…
May you navigate this world actively and confidently, always in motion, with a balance of soft love and affection, and fierce spunk and commotion.
We will call you Mayhem…
May you learn from your middle name an openness to redefine and adapt, to find your individuality and embrace it, and to be proud to create positive change in our world of chaos. With this twist in definition, we hope you all always revel in the uniqueness of your family and self, and that you will find ways throughout your life to find the good in what at first glance may not be seen as so.
You are named in memory of your Great Grandmother Dorothy May Peavey, your Papa Tom's mother and Mama's grandmother. It is still unbelievable to us that you will never meet her, as her presence remains so strong in our family and in our lives. Your middle name is a reminder to us of Grandma Dot, both in that it is an eccentric variation of her own middle name, May, but also in terms of our chosen interpretation of the word 'mayhem'. Although she did not think so of herself, Dot was a revolutionary of her time. She raised four children within five years of each other, left a marriage that was not right for her, and lived with her female partner for 30 plus years. She left the east coast and everything she knew to pursue an alternative life, during the back-to-land movement in southern Missouri. Always living close by, she was a loving and dedicated grandmother to Mama and Auntie LaLa, and she would have loved to have met you. She was strong and tough, and was certainly willing to wreak havoc when necessary, to live her life honestly but without the need to protest or politicize. She was who she was, with no apologies, during a time when this attitude was not popular, especially when expressed by women. She saw a world of chaos, and she made change to create a more honest life for herself, and she did it all with a toughness and gusto, but with joy and affection as well. We wish to bestow upon you her devotion to family, her commitment to pursuing her authentic self, her intellect, her adaptability and her strength of character.
Lastly, your family name, De Lowe, links us to one another and to those who came before us. As we bring you into the covenant of the Jewish people today, so too do we bring you into the proud heritage and trajectory of the De Lowe family name. With your brother Amichai, may you be fierce like a lion, a leader of our people, the joy of our family.
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