My home life has a myriad of rituals. You name it, we try it. We say blessings and we celebrate Shabbat. But when I was pregnant with my first child, my husband and I decided that if we had a boy, we would not want to have a public circumcision, a ritual that is traditional in our Jewish culture.
We did not find out the sex of our baby during my pregnancy, but if we had a boy, we discussed having him circumcised medically in a way of our own choosing. When our daughter was born, we chose to have a naming within the first week of her life. We did not share her name with family or friends until she was welcomed into the community at the naming ceremony.
I am now pregnant with our second child, and should we have a son, a naming ceremony will be held in the same way so the community can gather and be a part of the celebration. For us, personally, we do not want our child's sex to play a part in the welcoming and naming ceremony. I spent many years training on LGBTQ issues, and it is in my heart that gender is developed by society and children should be free to make their own choices as they continue to grow in the world.
I want our children to be celebrated in the same way at birth, no matter their sex or gender. As a rabbi, I empower people to take ownership of their own Jewish journey. I just started my own religious non-profit called Tackling Torah to help everyday people search for holiness in our everyday lives.
There is a shift in how millennials and young families are choosing to engage with religion so I am meeting them where they are at in order to provide them with a meaningful Jewish life. I help couples plan personalized lifecycle events—like a wedding or birth—and figure out what families can do to include their religion into the ceremony in a way that is comfortable to them.
This strange and highly ambiguous story — whose feet exactly? But whatever its original meaning, Zipporah's actions seem to have placated God, and the family continues on its way. The fourth mention of circumcision appears in Exodus 12, in the context of God's instructions about celebrating Passover: Even a "servant that is bought for money" may participate in the Seder ceremony, but only if he is circumcised.
Then, in Leviticus 12, God lists commandments for Moses to pass on to the Israelites as they sojourn in the desert. One order, essentially repeating what he had already told Abraham to do, is to circumcise their sons on their eighth day. The sixth mention is in the Book of Joshua. After David slays Goliath, he becomes too popular for the liking of King Saul, who devises a plot to eliminate the upstart.
He has his henchmen tell David that if he brings foreskins of Philistines, the king will marry his daughter Michal to him. Saul thought it a suicide mission, but David returns with foreskins and goes on to become king. Summing up the history of circumcision in the Bible: Circumcision was commanded by God to Abraham, and was carried out throughout the age of the Patriarchs and the sojourn in Egypt.
For some reason, it was discontinued while the Jews wandered the desert, though God had commanded otherwise. Then upon entering the Promised Land, circumcision was reinstated by Joshua, from which point it has been carried out to this very day.
But "source criticism" — the theory that the Bible was not written by Moses but by different people over the ages , then later edited by yet more people — leads to the theory that the circumcision stories were not written in the order in which they appear. Some "early" stories were evidently rewritten "later", without much regard for historical veracity. The covenant between God and Abraham, the circumcision of Isaac, the rape of Dinah, the Passover exhortation to circumcise servants too and the divine command to conduct circumcision in the desert are believed to have been written during the Babylonian Exile and in the early Second Temple period from about the 6th century BCE to the 4th century BCE.
And the oldest tale is the circumcision conducted by Zipporah, which was written in the middle of the First Temple period. So, the biblical narrative as we know it, was apparently formed by stitching together these various sources and stories during the early Second Temple period. What are the implications of this theory for the origins of circumcision?
None, note you, indicate that the ceremony was performed on infants. But if circumcision had been a central tenet of the pre-exilic Israelite religion, surely mention would have appeared more often?
The answer to this curious lack of interest in circumcision on the part of First Temple-era scribes is probably that circumcision was not unique to the Judeans at that period. Conclusion: In First Temple times, circumcision was not perceived as a unique marker of Judean identity. There was no reason for it to be featured with any prominence. Today, Orthodox and Conservative Jews still require circumcision or hatafat dam brit [extracting a drop of blood], its ritual reenactment.
The Reform movement has accepted converts without milah or mikveh since , a decision based in part on the absence of biblical law and also upon minority positions in the Talmud that argued circumcision was not the sine qua non for conversion. While the Reform and Reconstructionist movements do not require milah or mikveh, an increasing number of rabbis affiliated with both do make it a condition for their conversion candidates, so check with your rabbi. Given the historical and religious significance of brit milah, the idea that an uncircumcised man can be a Jew seems like a logical impossibility.
However, the case has been made that, like the uncircumcised Russian Jews who embraced their birthright after immigrating to the United States or Israel, uncircumcised converts may be seen as Jews in need of circumcision—but Jews nonetheless.
For much of this century, nearly all American baby boys underwent circumcision as a health measure, a fact that made adult circumcision unnecessary for most male converts. However, medical circumcision is not the same as brit milah. The removal of the foreskin is only one part of the ritual, which must be performed with the intention of entering a boy or man into the covenant of Israel.
Thus, Jewish law requires that circumcised converts undergo a ritual reenactment called hatafat dam brit. The ritual requires that a single drop of blood be taken from the site of the circumcision—more precisely, from the corona of skin that surrounds the head or glans of the penis. The person performing the hatafat dam brit applies an alcohol swab to the area and then pricks the skin either with a hypodermic needle or a sterile lancet.
The blood is collected on a gauze pad, which may then be shown to three witnesses. The ritual is generally scheduled days or even hours before mikveh. The convert does not need to fully disrobe. At the conversion ceremony, a proselyte would participate in the following procedures, and your son will no longer be considered an uncircumcised Jew. However, you may have other concerns. Consider this information to help you understand the process better:. In the Torah, God gave His people three types of laws.
These are moral, civil, and ceremonial laws about how to become a Jew. The Torah has commandments. By keeping the commandments, a Jew would receive special blessings and protections from being in a covenantal relationship with God.
Since circumcision is a sign of Jewish conversion, it is mandatory for conversion. According to the halakha traditions, rabbis can make exceptions to the circumcision conversion ceremony so that you can be an uncircumcised Jew.
One such exception is a medical exemption. Converts may have a life-threatening medical emergency if they undergo circumcision. An example would be an uncircumcised Jew who is a hemophiliac. This individual may have extensive blood loss during the surgery. A Jewish mother may forgo circumcising her sons. Some rabbis allow this exemption when a Jewish mother has lost two of her sons to fatalities during the conversion process close to birth.
Of course, some Jews lack the proper anatomy to undergo circumcision, such as with conditions involving congenital disabilities and gender. You can enjoy the experience of your newborn son embarking on the journey as a son of the covenant with the services of a mohel. Krinsky is a board-trained, Yale-certified physician. He takes practical steps to make your baby as comfortable as possible during the Hebrew naming ceremony.
Contact our clinic for your next bris milah. We provide love, understanding, and compassionate care for parents and their babies. Interfaith couples are welcome as well.
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