Circumcision: ‘Mutilation’ or an ‘act of love’?

Rebecca Wald is “100% Jewish.” She celebrates the high holidays, her children attend Hebrew school, she lights candles on the sabbath and she was married to a “100% Jewish” man under a chuppah at a traditional Jewish wedding.

But unlike most Jews, from the most secular to the ultra-orthodox, she did not circumcise her son. She has never attended — will never attend — a bris, the age-old ceremony where a Jew trained in circumcision (a ‘mohel’) removes the foreskin of an eight-day-old Jewish boy as a sign of his covenant with God.
“All of the babies I saw growing up — whether cousins or the kids I babysat — were circumcised, and it seemed like that was the way things were supposed to be,” said Ms. Wald, who in December launched Beyond the Bris, a website for Jews who question circumcision. “It took having a son, who is intact, for me to really accept how normal [the uncircumcised penis] is.”

The South Florida mom is among a growing and vocal minority of Jewish “intactivists” who are challenging the 4,000-year-old ritual because, they say, the procedure inflicts unnecessary pain without any health gains, causes long-term psychological harm, hinders sexual function and pleasure, and strikes at the core of consent. They say there are Jewish women who silently pray they will not bear a son, and that the question, ‘When’s the bris?’ is too presumptive.
Ms. Wald has not yet told her young son about her decision — she did not want to disclose his age. “Like many Jewish parents of intact sons, we’re not thrilled to publicly discuss the status of our own children’s sex organs,” she said — but said she assumes he will “at some point” learn about it.
“I imagine he’s going to be thankful that we spared him from this mutilation,” said Ms. Wald, adding that had she been born a boy, her “forward-thinking” parents would not have circumcised her.
Beyond the Bris has attracted more than 9,000 visitors from 89 countries in the past eight months, chiming into the burgeoning chorus of like-minded Jewish groups such as Jews Against Circumcision, the Jewish Circumcision Resource Center, the Israeli Association Against Genital Mutilation, and the Israel-based group Kahal.
Intactivist organizations like these have existed for years — one of which was criticized as anti-Semitic for its comic series called Foreskin Man, with characters such as Dr. Mutilator and Monster Mohel. But this latest slew of opponents is unique in that they are led by people whose own religion demands circumcision.
In the Book of Genesis, God told Abraham he would provide him with children, land, and a promise to be his God forever. In return, God said: “Every manchild among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.”
Jews today know circumcision as Mitzvah 612, the second-most important of 613 commandments behind procreation. Even the least observant of Jews — even those who do not keep kosher, obey the sabbath, go to synagogue on Saturdays, or those who marry a gentile — still obey commandment 612. In accordance with Jewish law, they publicly appoint a shaliach, or agent, to perform the surgery.
Some do so because they believe it is integral to the boy’s covenant with God, some do so out of tradition, some do so without question. Some do it because it is a physical marker in a private place that symbolizes their Jewish identity. Still others do so for what they consider health or esthetic benefits.
For Susanna Garfein and her husband, Ross Goldstein, circumcising their son Bram in Baltimore, Md., this summer was first and foremost a matter of faith. It was also a matter of religion, tradition, and health — there are studies, they pointed out, that show circumcision lowers the chances of contracting sexually transmitted diseases and HIV.
“Our practice and our love of Judaism is something we want to pass along to Bram, and this is the first ritual to begin that process,” Ms. Garfein said in a telephone interview with her husband on the line, too.
“It’s not an act of violence,” Mr. Goldstein added, before his wife finished his sentence: “It’s an act of love.”
Fewer and fewer American sand Canadians are joining Bram in being circumcised: Canada’s Public Health Agency says the rate of infant circumcision had dropped to 32% in 2006 from 47% in 1973. In three short years in the United States, hospital circumcision reportedly fell to 32% in 2009 from 56% in 2006, although the Centers for Disease Control said that number was not definitive.
The latter rate does not include Jewish bris ceremonies, which are often done in the home, making it difficult to know whether the number of Jews who circumcise is shrinking. Beyond that, the discussion around circumcision is still mostly taboo within the community.
One thing, though, is clear: The Jewish anti-circumcision movement is growing louder.
Three Jews were on the committee that led the recent (failed) bid to have circumcision banned in San Francisco, CA.
It was a Jewish filmmaker, who moved with his orthodox family to Israel when he was 13 and is now married to an orthodox convert, who created the controversial 2007 film Cut: Slicing Through The Myths of Circumcision. Now that the subject has traction, he was contacted by Abe Haim, a coordinator with intactivist group The Whole Network, to collaborate on a 30-city North American screening tour.
It was a Washington D.C.-based rabbi, who considers himself a secular humanist, who said he has never been busier with alternative ceremonies for newborn boys, which are called a Brit Shalom or ‘covenant of peace’ and which is similar to the baby-naming ceremony for infant girls.
“There is a growing number of people who have a cultural sense of Jewish identity,” Rabbi Binyamin Biber said. “There is also a growing movement to focus on the body as something good and natural, and therefore not in need of alteration.”
And it was a Jewish author, who circumcised her two sons simply because she never thought not to, who last fall published the first fiction book on the controversial question: To circumcise, or not to circumcise?
“I wanted to argue against circumcision in a way that couldn’t be dismissed as overly emotional, incendiary, or anti-Jewish,” author Lisa Braver Moss said, referring to her research of Jewish texts for the book The Measure of His Grief. “It was through railing against circumcision that I found deeper meaning in being Jewish.”
They say neither they nor their sons are any less connected to God — or any less Jewish — than Jews who choose to circumcise.
“If the Jewish identity comes down to whether or not you have a piece of skin on your penis, then that’s a very sad thing for the Jewish people,” Ms. Wald said, pointing out that a child is Jewish if he or she is born to a Jewish mother.
“There are no religious consequences of not being circumcised — the boy could still have a bar mitzvah, for example,” echoed Eli Ungar-Sargon, the Jewish filmmaker whose tour starts in Los Angeles in September, with stops in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver in October. “The consequences are imagined and invented. They’re not actual.”
He said there has been a “cultural shift” since his film launched four years ago, and said the issue “caught fire” with Lloyd Schofield’s attempt to ban circumcision in San Francisco this year — a ban he supports in principle.
“I can’t oppose legislation against this because I think it’s a travesty that so many kids are being harmed on a regular basis with the complicity of the medical establishment,” said Mr. Ungar-Sargon, who is himself circumcised but says he does not blame his parents for partaking in what he calls a form of “social violence.”
Actor Mario Lopez last fall became an accidental champion of the intactivist cause when, on his reality show about becoming a father, he said he would not circumcise his child if he happened to have a boy.
“I don’t think God makes mistakes, and it’s not an optional part,” the intact Catholic star later said on the Wendy Williams show. Plus, he said, he would want his son to “be like” him.
Mr. Goldstein, Bram’s father, scoffed at the suggestion put forth by some intactivists that Jewish fathers selfishly want their son to have the ‘same equipment’ as them, and said neither he nor his wife ever questioned whether or not little Bram would have a bris.
The bris, also known as a brit milah, was on July 4, eight days after Bram’s birth on June 27. They, like many Jews, chose a physician-trained mohel to do the circumcision. Dr. Steven Adashek had come highly recommended in the Baltimore community for his personality and demeanour. It was an added bonus that the doctor used a local anesthetic, they said.
Bram did not cry and the procedure took 40 seconds. But for other babies, whose circumcision is performed by a rabbi mohel, the base of the foreskin is not frozen.
Dr. Adashek has done upward of 5,000 circumcisions, 1,500 of which were performed on Jewish babies at a bris. The rest of the circumcisions were done on Jews and non-Jews alike in the hospital.
“I am often asked whether I circumcised my two boys, and what I say is, ‘I have many chances to scar my children as they age, so I’ll pass on this one and appoint an agent,’ ” he said of his two sons, now 19 and 22.
He explained that a circumcision alone, in the absence of a brit milah ceremony, does not fulfill the religious requirements of Mitzvah 612. That poses a problem for a circumcised man looking to convert or for a circumcised man planning to marry into an orthodox family.
And so mohels like Dr. Adashek perform what is called a hatafat dam brit — a covenant ceremony where a small 30-gauge needle is used to make a mark on the remnants of the old foreskin. Just three months ago, Dr. Adashek performed a hatafat dam brit on a 79-year-old man who is in the process of converting so he can someday join his daughter in the Jewish cemetery, where she was buried after she herself converted.
Ms. Wald, for her part, said the decision of whether or not to circumcise should be left with men themselves. She said it should not be up to the parent to prescribe a procedure that, she believes, would have diminished her son’s sexual sensitivity.
“I want my son to have a fully functioning penis,” she said. “If he ever decides that — for whatever reason — he wants to be circumcised, then that will be his choice.”

Source: National Post