CHAPTER TWO - Birth Ceremonies and Life Beginnings

A: BACKGROUND

10. PASSOVER FOR THE CEREMONY? THOSE WHO OPPOSE IT AND THOSE WHO (SURPRISINGLY) RETAIN IT

In recent years we hear of parents who have decided against the Brit ceremony for their son. In America and in Israel, there are groups of families organized in institutionalized societies who have come out against the Brit ceremony. Their problem is not actually the Brit so much as the milah - the physical mark of circumcision. It is perceived by some as barbarian, as cruelly inhuman, as an assault on the rights of a baby. It is described as unhealthy, as breaking down the body's natural defenses against disease, as something which will inhibit sexual enjoyment at a later stage in life. It is seen as an attack on the body's privacy, on the body's natural beauty and perfection - and on the autonomy of the individual. Entire medical papers have been written defending or attacking the medical implications of circumcision. We cannot enter into these subjects here.

However, it can be suggested that in one important respect those who attack the idea of the Brit milah are correct. It is indeed an attack on the idea that the individual has complete autonomy within life. The irony is that the attack is on the milah; it should really be on the Brit. The Brit - in the sense already mentioned of Covenant with G-d - absolutely suggests that there are limits on individual autonomy and that there are higher values and obligations connected to the group that each of us has. That is what Covenant is all about.

In this context it is worth reflecting for a moment on the vestigial power of the ceremony, even for those who are far away from the tradition and estranged from any traditional Jewish concept of G-d. We can suggest that the power derives, at least partly, from the deep knowledge that the meaning of the Brit is something to do with membership in "the Jewish group." Even for many of those who have no real understanding of the meaning of Covenant and who tend to focus on the circumcision itself rather than the spiritual meaning of the ceremony, there often seems to be some kind of subconscious understanding that participation in this ceremony represents some kind of a bottom line of collective identity. All sorts of other connections with the Jewish collective can be severed, but this is a sine qua non for membership in the tribe.

This perception may stem from some kind of deep underground knowledge that this is what people have died for; that this tradition has been seen as one that must be kept even in the most difficult circumstances.

• At the time of the Maccabees in the second century B.C.E., we are told that there were Jews who tried to hide or reverse their circumcision in order to be accepted by the Greek culture and its representatives. However, this was one of the things that provoked the rebellion celebrated for thousands of years at Chanukah.
• At the time of the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century C.E., our sources tell us that the ban on circumcision was one of the acts that provoked the Jewish rebellion.
• Some of the Judaizing conversos ("Marranos" - Anusim, or crypto-Jews) in Spain tried to keep the tradition and, nearer to our own times, we even hear of attempts to keep the commandment in the impossible conditions of the concentration camps and the death camps. (See the example in "Hasidic tales of the Holocaust," mentioned in the bibliography.)

These vestigial memories of suffering and martyrdom are perhaps the reason why so many parents who are alienated from so many aspects of the Jewish tradition choose to circumcise their sons. It is perhaps also the reason that so many Jews find it difficult to deal with the aforementioned groups that decide to forego circumcision. It is, we suggest, a baseline.

Another reason for the almost universal observation of the Brit ceremony might also be related to the symbolic power of ritual presented in the opening chapter, where we discussed ritual working on a symbolic level to infiltrate people's rational defenses in the deepest way. Possibly, the more unfamiliar, the more surprising, the less everyday the ritual, the more power it has to hold us in its spell. Perhaps, according to this logic, it is precisely the very "otherness" of the ceremony, with its connotations of the tearing of the flesh and the blood wound that cause so many in these days to call barbarian, is what makes so many unwilling to go against it: the power of ritual.

If the Brit is about membership, about belonging, however, it is by no means agreed what one belongs to after the circumcision ceremony.

• For some it is about Covenant with G-d, for others it is about national belonging.
• For yet others, it is a cultural act that marks you as a part of a cultural group.
• But for all, we suggest, it is indeed to do with belonging to something larger than oneself.