If the topic of circumcision makes you uneasy, don’t worry — I promise this
column will be quick and painless. To be honest, circumcision makes me a bit uneasy too. I was raised the youngest in a family of three girls, and up until very recently, I somehow managed to attend only one brit milah in my whole life. So I’ve never had much reason to reflect upon the Jewish rite of circumcision.
However, after my nephew’s birth and the birth of a close friend’s son, I had the opportunity to attend two britot in one week, breaking my lifelong streak of successfully — although unintentionally — avoiding this religious rite of passage.
Circumcision seems different in nature from most other Jewish rituals that I accept wholeheartedly, such as stepping on a glass at weddings or eating latkes on Chanukah. The act of circumcision is intimate and final, showing such devotion to God, to one’s culture, history or people — regardless of whichever way you choose to interpret it.
After asking around, I realized that a lot of people I know had many qualms about circumcision.
“It’s terrible, it’s just terrible,” one friend said to me.
“If God didn’t want you to have a foreskin, why would he have given you one?” asked another.
“And what’s so different about a brit milah and ritual female circumcision?”
This question got me thinking. Not about the similarities between female genital mutilation — the act of destroying the female sexual organs so a woman will no longer feel sexual pleasure — and the surgical removal of the foreskin, which has no proven effects on a man’s sexual sensation and is performed for an altogether different end. Rather, it got me thinking about why this ancient pact between a man, Abraham, and his God — a pact between God and every Jewish man, really — is, like so many other religious responsibilities and privileges, a male-only affair.
It is written in the Bible (Genesis 17:10): “Every male among you shall be circumcised.”
A little further down (Genesis 17:14), it says: ” …The uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that soul shall be cut off from his people.”
So where does that leave those of us who never had a foreskin to begin with? Are we to be forever “cut off from our people,” or are we simply exempt from this sacrificial prerequisite to being a Jew?
The mysterious role of women in religious life — at times unmistakably essential and at other times obviously secondary — continues to puzzle me.
In the case of the Jewish custom of circumcision, the woman’s role is completely absent. The baby who is circumcised is male, the person who performs the circumcision, the mohel, is male, even the person who holds the baby during the ceremony, the sandek, is a man.
So where does that leave me? Am I supposed to find my own, circumcision-free covenant with God? Or am I left to believe that, being a woman, I am not worthy of this mark of religious identity?
Of course, I am in no way advocating female circumcision. Even male circumcision makes me a bit uneasy. But I do accept it as a part of Jewish life, just not my Jewish life, apparently.
At the recent brit milah of my nephew, I stood close to the mohel, trying to witness and understand this powerful covenant between man and God.
It was difficult to watch, but the blessings and surrounding happiness of the guests that had gathered for the event at my parents’ house was beautiful and spiritual at the same time.
I haven’t quite yet grasped the true meaning of the Jewish rite of circumcision, and maybe I never will. I certainly cannot empathize with being an active part, in any way, of a brit milah (as one person told me afterward, “I don’t think you’re ever going to have one of those”).
But I think I’ve decided that my spiritual connection to God is not severed or cut off, just because, to put it crudely, I don’t have anything to cut off.
My brit milah-filled week also left me with another conclusion: For all the hardships and limitations put upon women, sometimes, it really is easier being a girl. A Jewish girl, that is.
Michal Lev-Ram, born in Israel, is a journalism major at SFSU who can be reached at [email protected].