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December 6, 2007 | 1:54 pm

Holy adult circumcision, Abraham!

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

At your typical bris, the guest of honor arrives on a white pillow. He’s not exactly in fighting condition: 8 days old, spreadeagled, diaperless, still adjusting to non-liquid environments.

He cries throughout the procedure—cries as he’s prayed over, cries as he’s spritzed by the disinfectant, keeps crying as he’s cut by the mohel—and then, bandaged, balmed and resting on his stomach, he suddenly stops crying and goes to sleep.

Dmitry’s is not your typical bris. First off, no tears. Also, no relatives, no diaper, no white pillow. His parents don’t even know he’s here. Dmitry is laid out on a table, hands resting behind his head, shorts at his ankles, talking about life in Soviet Ukraine while Rabbi A. Romi Cohn prepares to slice away his foreskin. With a 1.5-inch needle pricking the base of his penis and a shot of lidocaine diffusing into the vicinity of his dorsal penile nerve, Dmitri, 33, stares up at the ceiling and says to no one in particular, “I’ve wanted to do this for the longest time. To be a Jew, you know, you have to go through with it.”

This snippet is from Heeb. Read on to learn about the anti-circumcision movement in Judaism, and to see what would provoke a grown men to go under the knife. (In Dmitry’s case, it’s a firm belief in Torah and a childhood in the Soviet Union.)

Under Stalin, parents could be arrested, their children placed in foster homes and mohels sentenced to labor camps for trying to arrange one in secret—and to this day most Jewish men born into the former U.S.S.R. don’t get cut. According to Biblical law, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew, but an uncircumcised male stands outside the Hebrew nation’s covenant with God—a covenant sealed when Abraham, at the age of 99, cut off his own foreskin and that of every male member of his household.

“There is no greater commandment in Torah,” says Rabbi A. Romi Cohn, chief mohel for the Jewish outreach program Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe (F.R.E.E.). “Six hundred and thirteen commandments and that is the most important one.”

Joshua also was obedient in this way, making a flint knife and re-circumcising the Israelites before they entered Caanan. In the United States, circumcision was once almost a given for centuries. But in 2004, not even 60 percent of American baby boys went sans foreskin. There have been all kinds of conflicting reports about circumcision’s health value or lack there of.

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This weeks Forward has an article about parents who chose to use mohels to perform their sons circumcisions because they find it less traumatizing, safer, and more spiritually fulfilling. “We felt a mohel would lend a high level of dignity and significance to this very important moment in our lives,” said one parent. Many mohels will perform circumcisions on children of any faith“I feel a calling to be a mohel; I feel a calling to do God’s work on Earth, But I feel a human calling to do a good job for anyone I’m doing a surgery for.”
http://www.forward.com/articles/12351/

Comment by Dana5208 on 12/27/07 at 1:15 pm

And I’m the one who gets trapped by the sp@m filter?

Comment by Ben Plonie on 10/07/08 at 10:16 pm

What Dmitry chose is his business and should not be controversial. I can respect bris, but not one done to an 8 day old. It is done in infancy simply because he cannot put up a struggle.

Jews who do not believe in God or the Covenant or the Chosen People, or who emphatically reject a literal reading of the Torah, should give up this practice. Many, perhaps most, European Jews have.

The real, but unacknowledged, purpose of bris is to make intermarriage difficult. If a nice Jewish girl married a goy, she would be reminded of that fact every time she did foreplay on her husband. If a Jewish dude snuck off the farm, went to he big city, learned a trade, and wanted to settle down with a nice shiksa, he would be found out on his wedding night. And so the Ashkenazim thrived for 1500+ years.

But in every Garden of Eden lurks a snake. Islam adopted circumcision. That was not awkward for many centuries, but has become so in recent decades. Also the English speaking people began cutting their babies around 1880. Most Jews now live surrounded by circumcised gentiles, either in North America or Israel. So the “cattle brand” value of bris is in tatters. Intermarriage and Jewish atheism have exploded.

Comment by consa on 10/29/09 at 4:02 pm

It is not possible to state all the ways you are wrong.

A Jew is not a Jew without a bris, regardless of his mother, regardless of his culture, regardless of his ideology, regardless of his stated wishes; Period. He could wear a big hat and a long coat and long beard with payos and pray three times a day and eat kosher food and observe shabbos and speak truth to power and repair the world and dance and cry but without a bris he is not a Jew. The reverse of course is not true.

That is why Jews continue the practice, Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Italian, Persian, North African. Thanks for your speculative and useless analysis. Jews who do observe the bris will not be married by anyone who cares to remain Jewish, and will thus disappear as Jews pretty quickly.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 10/29/09 at 10:47 pm

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