Rabbis explain Jewish Feng-Shui

Liat, an Israeli mum wrote in to the Moriya website (don’t bother to go there unless you can read Hebrew) and ask:

"When my daughter was born, we called her Roni but I was never comfortable with the name. Afterward I had a dream that it was not good to call her Roni. What should I do?"

The rabbi’s succinct reply: "Change it."

Israelis (Jews) are like Chinese. They believe that some names aren’t suitable feng-shui-wise.

For example, Ariel (I suppose you know him) was named after an archangel, which makes the divine entity pretty pissed off with someone having the damn nerve to use his or her moniker. Thus it’s bad luck to name one’s child Ariel.

But wait, there’s more. Ariel’s son, Omri was named after a lousy evil Israeli king. The two names Ariel and Omri have been deemed by a group of Israeli rabbis as bad feng-shui and now placed on a list of names that are off-limits to good Jewish parents, when naming their offspring. The list includes names associated with Gaza which their holinesses thought would be too controversial – so play safe, avoid those names.

Then they also very much advised against names that pissed them off, namely (pun not intended) those that sounded non-Jewish, like Donna, Barr, Shirly, Roni, Danielle, and I heard, George, Dick, Donald, Karl, Lewis, and Tony too ;-)

Oh, before I forget the rabbis don’t want anyone good Jewish kid possessing a name which has a suffix or prefix ‘el’, because ‘el’ means God in Hebrew. So El Toro, Elaine, Daniel, Martel, etc are taboo.

But Jewish parents, don’t rush out and start changing names yet, because the rabbis cautioned against changing names in a helter-skelter fashion for this too can traumatise a child – in other words, bad feng-shui again.

However, if you have an iffy name, no worries, cause everything has a solution. For example, Susie can be slightly altered to Shoshi (which means Rose).

BTW, the Israeli Interior Ministry has banned 3 names – God, Hitler and Bin Laden. Hmmm, putting these 3 together don’t seem right. Incidentally, what about Osama, Adolf, Arafat, Saddam and Ahmadinejad?

But I think KTemoc is OK ;-)