The gleaming blade inched closer and closer as the din of the crowd dissipated into an uncomfortable silence. My father’s firm hands held me tight but in an unsure and awkward manner. An unknown, bitter taste of fruity schnapps coated my lips and mouth, warming and disorienting me. The pain came quickly as the cold scalpel pierced my flesh, and as the tears welled up, my shrieking cry was drowned out by a loud “Mazel Tov!”
As the mohel treated my wound, my loving clan surrounded my father and me with beaming smiles of approval and kind words. My hysteria slowly abated into rhythmic squeals and heavy breathing.
I was eight days old when this barbaric ritual was performed on what would become my manhood. This horrific but hygienic rite of passage had been passed on throughout the generations of Judaism for millennia.
But I never knew until October 7, 2023, that this brutal tradition served another purpose. It has prepared Jewish males and the women who love them for our savage and gruesome world, one foreskin at a time. Before the awful world could prey on our innocent children with its sinister racism and vicious Jew-hatred, we choose to inflict our own generational trauma on ourselves…a perverse but necessary self-preservation technique allowing our people agency over their life that awaits.
I had been “lucky” as a Jew. Unlike my grandparents, who were tortured and orphaned by the Nazis, my Brit Milah stood as my low water mark…easily the worst day of my life. And so it would remain…until that heinous Shabbat morning six weeks ago.
And every day since October 7, a sense of dread gripping me as I hold my children a little bit tighter, I recoil at the horrific state of our world. Each subsequent day I have felt somehow even worse as the veil of society has been slowly lifted. And as I mourn the tragedy that occurred physically in Israel last month, but also in the hearts and minds of every Jew throughout the diaspora, I commune with generations past, who also shuddered and threw their hands up in disgust as they watched their fellow Jews, shtetl-mates and comrades succumb to the unrelenting murderous mobs of their particular era. I bang my head against the wall in frustration with the overwhelming majority who remain silent at a time like this.
And I know, crazy as it may sound, that in a heartbeat I would call a mohel and subject myself to a second circumcision, at the age of 50…with no schnapps, if I knew doing so would return the 1,200 murdered and 240 kidnapped that day to their families, safe and sound. That pain I can handle.
So here’s to Tradition!
Enjoy your Thanksgiving.
#BringThemHome
IDROS
idontrollonshabbas 