A colleague of mine who is also a mohel (ritual cirumciser) tells the following joke. Two men who had grown up in the same community meet one day at a coffee shop after having been out of contact for many years. “Did you hear that Rabbi Cohen, the local mohel, died recently?” one man asks the other man. The second man replies, “Rabbi Cohen? Did you know that he did my brit milah (ritual circumcision) when I was eight days old? It was horribly traumatic.” “Really, how could it have been so traumatic? You were only eight days old, after all,” his friend replies. The second man looks at him in disbelief and retorts, “Are you kidding? After my ceremony with Rabbi Cohen, I couldn’t walk for a year!”
Anti-circumcision activists and legislators in America and Europe continue to condemn the practice of circumcision as physical and psychological child abuse and to call for it to be banned by law. The most recent public opposition from doctors in Sweden and Denmark indicates that the condemnation is not abating, and opponents trot out numerous reasons for why denying this religious right to Jews and Muslims is actually compatible with democratic values. Since I have had the recent privilege of attending a number of brit milah ceremonies of babies born in my synagogue and local community, I have been thinking a lot about what drives us so powerfully to perpetuate this ancient practice, and what those seeking to do away with circumcision find so repugnant about it.
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