by Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief

September 2, 2009

In Jewcentricity, his new book on Jewish exceptionalism and its pitfalls, Adam Garfinkle describes what he calls the JACs — Jewish American Chauvinists. Those are the kinds of Jews who take outsized, even exaggerated, pride in their coreligionists’ accomplishments. You know, the kind of person who e-mails you the list of Jewish Nobelists or the latest “proof” that Abraham Lincoln was a landsman.

I’d add to his list those who love to share scientific phenomena that validate seemingly obscure mitzvot. Such JACs had a field day this month when the Centers for Disease Control announced it might recommend as a public health measure routine circumcision for all baby boys born in the United States. The CDC points to evidence that circumcision among African males curbs the spread of HIV and other infections.

Whether you’re a JAC or a JILL (that’s what I call a Jew Inclined to Live in Livingston), that sounds like good news. There’s a vocal anti-circumcision movement out there, small but persistent. The “intactivists,” as they’re called, regard circumcision as unnecessary and risky at best, mutilating and emotionally scarring at worst. The anti-circ crowd greeted the CDC news with alarm, and lit up the blogosphere with fresh attacks on circumcision and government meddling.

I am not a JAC and doubt the intactivists will ever seriously threaten the Jews’ ability to hold a bris. So why do I take such pleasure in the opponents’ pain?

Occasionally, some anti-circ activists talk about Jews and circumcision in ways that make my anti-Semitism antennae quiver. But even the generally responsible intactivists put me on the defensive — it’s tough to read criticism of an act so basic to Jewish identity, whether you’re a male or the parent of one.

So a CDC hechsher (and mind you, the CDC has yet to recommend anything, and is not even considering making circumcision mandatory) would be a valuable defense of what is a strange and vulnerable practice. And when I say “vulnerable,” I worry less about the government banning circumcision than I do about Jewish couples deciding not to circumcise their sons.

A few weeks back, the New York Post ran an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir by Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Jewish “what-if” novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Chabon writes about his sons’ britot. The excerpt suggests that the author and his novelist wife, Ayelet Waldman, were uncomfortable with the procedure. They weighed the various arguments for circumcision — tradition, hygiene, disease prevention, “psychological fitness” — and found them all “all debatable at best.”

In the end, they went ahead with it, departing from tradition only in choosing a mohel who administered a local anesthetic. Nevertheless, “that did not really detract from the fundamental brutality of the business,” Chabon writes. “Mutilation [is] the only honest name for this raw act that my wife and I have twice invited men with knives to come into our house and perform, in the presence of all our friends and family, with a nice buffet.”

Let’s face it: Chabon’s right. Circumcision is brutal and raw. For those couples who might be sitting on the fence over this, I don’t think we do them any favors by hiding that fact. Without going into details, let me say that I’ve been to a bris where the operation was a little more complicated and prolonged than usual, and the guests were subjected not to a quick religious ceremony but a rather lengthy episode of Nip/Tuck. It had me questioning the public nature of the rite, and the bizarre juxtaposition of blood and bagels.

But here’s another fact: Circumcision is not that brutal, and not that raw. In most cases, it’s a clip and a snip; the baby cries for a few seconds and soon falls asleep in someone’s arms. It’s not mutilation, in the sense that the organ in question continues to function as nature intended. And it’s not emotionally scarring, otherwise you’d have millions of men walking around with deep neuroses and unresolved anger. (Wait, let me amend that. Let’s just say it’s no more emotionally scarring than growing up in a Jewish home in the first place.)

Most of the brises I’ve been to are short, sweet, and powerful affairs. And the power derives from the strangeness. There is something intensely emotional and primal about this tribal act being carried out in suburbia, this renewal of Jewish belonging even in otherwise assimilated homes, the air of solemnity and literally carnal joy in which a group of Jews welcomes another one of its own. I always weep.

I understand the qualms of couples when it comes to brit mila, and it’s not up to me to say whether they should go through with it, or do it in the hospital, or search for a mohel who delivers anesthetics.

But at the very least, they should talk to Jewish couples who have experienced the elation and holiness of their baby’s bris. The debate shouldn’t belong to those who exaggerate the violence of the rite or its long-term effects, or dismiss the health claims, or discount the power of the traditions that have kept it alive, or the power of the act to sustain the traditions.

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