thefabulist

. . . In Aleppo once
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him—thus.
—Othello, Act V

Mom, nobody wants to hear about shmeckel-snipping!
—Lizzie DuPree


Those lines from Othello were first spoken at London’s Whitehall Palace, in front of King James I, who by this point in the play (late in Act V) was probably napping into his pointy beard and ruffled collar. James was a great patron of the arts, but not a great one for sitting through them; none of the post-Elizabethan monarchs were what you would call intellectual powerhouses. Who knows, maybe the Duke of Buckingham discreetly elbowed him in the ribs for Othello’s dramatic death scene.

Of course, everyone in that room, and on that stage, would have been uncircumcised. (Including the actor playing Othello’s wife Desdemona. I think “uncut with tits” may now be its own separate channel on xtube.) Circumcision was unknown among European Christians. In fact, uncircumcision had been seen as a sign and mark of Christianity, dating back to Saint Paul’s fulmination against it back in the New Testament, in the book of Galatians. Circumcision, some recent converts to this Messianic sect argued, was still necessary as a covenantal act. Paul, the great apostle of baptism as the Christian covenantal sign, rejected that point of view. He railed against those “Judaizers” who wanted to make Christian converts be circumcised, wishing that they would castrate themselves. And he despaired that his converts were being turned from spiritual to physical matters:

"Are you so foolish, that, whereas you began in the Spirit, you would now be made perfect by the flesh?" (Gal 3:3)

"Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all." (Galatians 5:2)

This rejection of circumcision by Christians held good for many hundreds of years. It was never a popular procedure anyway—it’s not like people in the ancient world lined up around the block for it. It was always a distinct (and distinctly weird) practice of the Jews, who were weird anyway, because pork was the cheapest, best, and most available meat of the ancient world, and what freaks would refuse to eat it? So while none of the actors on that stage, good Christians all, would have been circumcised, Othello the character was.

That’s the bit of wordplay in his final soliloquy here: he is supposedly talking about some random Turkish guy he met in Syria once (he probably means Arab, but the two are interchangeable, from Shakespeare’s point of view, much the way Americans use “Mexican” to mean “brown person from anywhere south of Houston.”) But in fact the “circumcised dog” who is about to get all smoted upon is none other than Othello himself. And Othello, of course, is circumcised because he was born a Muslim – a Moor, in Elizabethan parlance. Circumcision was a common practice among Muslims, mentioned in the hadith (sayings of the Prophet and collected customs) though not in the Qur’an. Probably it’s one of those Jewish practices picked up through Islam’s powerful association with Judaism—remember that the direction of Muslim prayer was originally Jerusalem until the Jewish tribes of the Arabian peninsula managed to piss off the Prophet so severely that he decided they could all go fuck themselves, and the camel they rode in on.

So peen-slicing was for Jews and Muslims, but never Christians. What changed? Well, a number of things. Around the turn of the last century, circumcision began to be popular for male infants, for a variety of somewhat bizarre reasons. The germ theory began to take hold of the public mind, and anyplace where bodily fluids (and therefore germs) could accumulate was held to be dirty. Circumcision was also touted as a way to prevent infection from syphilis and various other uritogenital diseases. Finally, circumcision was seen as a way of eliminating promiscuity, “excessive venery,” and masturbation. I’m sure we all know how well that last worked out. I’ve yet to read a study correlating circumcision rates with the rise of the American hand lotion market, but if the whole promotion of circumcision in this country turns out to have been a capitalist-industrialist plot funded by cigar-smoking robber barons of industry at Johnson and Johnson, I for one will be unsurprised.

Circumcision rates in this country are falling off from their peak about fifty years ago; I think the latest stats say it’s about half and half now, for all male babies born in the US. As Americans learn there are better ways to prevent syphilis (and masturbation), I expect those rates will continue to fall. And like any cosmetic adjustment to the human body, those rates will be driven by what people get used to seeing around them. In other words, as more and more little uncircumcised boys romp on the soccer fields of America, more and more anxious suburban parents who just want their kids to look like everyone else’s will choose to forego the procedure. And as those little kids grow up and have their own kids, “looking like Daddy” will mean fewer and fewer circumcisions in American hospitals.

I think that’s just fine.

Let me be clear: as a Jew, I think circumcision is a great thing. I’m all for it, and when my second son is born in the next week or so, he will be inducted into his people through the brit milah, the covenant of circumcision, the ultimate and enduring sign of Jewish identity. But that’s for Jews and people whose religious tradition mandates it; for everyone else, I don’t much see the point. In fact, I would think Jews would be against universal circumcision. After all, there’s not much point to your sign of distinctiveness if everyone else has it, too. Maybe lots of Jews promote universal circumcision because they can remember how that identifying mark has been used against Jews in the past, or maybe they are made as nervous as I am by the “intactivist” movement that paints circumcision as a barbaric, bloodthirsty, and abusive practice. And the subject is recently in the news because of a proposed ban in San Francisco against the practice, which besides making outlaws of Jewish parents, would jail doctors for performing a routine medical procedure.

I’d like to give the majority of those activists the benefit of the doubt. Most likely they are unaware of the historical context of their actions. Ignorance of historical context does not, of course, excuse one: if I call an African-American man “boy,” and explain it away by saying I just mistook his age, that doesn’t lessen the gut-slam of everything my blunder just invoked. If I stick a Confederate battle flag bumper sticker on my car, I don’t get a pass if I say that I just thought it was a pretty design. Awareness of the context of our speech and actions is a sine qua non of adult behavior.

Jews react to circumcision bans as precisely that level of thuggish racism, because in the course of their history Jews have in fact experienced circumcision bans as racism. And it’s a little hard to swallow the whole line about “this isn’t racism, it’s just concern” when Matthew Hess, one of the chief proponents of the SF bill and a leading “intactivist” produces images and cartoons like this. Still not seeing the racism? How about taking a look at Monster Mohel? Yeah, now come talk to Jewish groups about how this movement isn’t anti-Semitic in the least.

Of course, what is being proposed in San Francisco is nothing new. The first ban on the Jewish practice of circumcision was enacted by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, whose objective was to stamp out Jews by stamping out Jewish practice. Laws forbidding circumcision were promulgated in the wake of the Second Jewish war in 135 CE, a particularly bloody and hard-fought revolt Hadrian had just succeeded in (finally) winning. It wasn’t the first time Jews had tried to throw off the Roman yoke either, if the name “Second Jewish War” didn’t give it away. So Hadrian decided to nip this problem (so to speak) in the bud: no more circumcision would equal no more Jews. He also outlawed the teaching of Torah, a prohibition Jews defied just as stubbornly. Rabbi Akiva’s students begged him to stop teaching so publicly, and he pointed them to the riverbank teeming with fishermen. “It is dangerous to be a fish in that water,” he said. “But as dangerous as the water is, he will surely die out of it. It is just so for a Jew and Torah.”

Hadrian also had some other cool and highly effective ideas for humiliating Jews, like renaming their capital city after himself, refusing them the right of residence in it and naming their land after their ancient Biblical enemies the Philistines – hence the new and expanded province of Syria-Palaestina, and the birth of Palestine as a term for Israel/Judea.

The desire to stamp out Jews and the banning of circumcision are historical partners, from Hadrian in the second century to the Nazis in the twentieth. Those who campaign against the practice need to be aware of this vicious historical partnership, and need to know that Jews are going to hear all of those historical resonances as an existential threat, which of course it is. There is no Judaism without circumcision. Judaism is the only religion for which circumcision is the non-negotiable entrance requirement, and so it has been (according to Jewish tradition) since the time of Abraham. There’s just no mechanism for “doing it another way.” Circumcision is and always has been the baseline identifier of the Jewish people, for good and ill. It is the covenant marked in our flesh, the inescapable, undeniable proof of who we are. Which isn’t to say there aren’t some Jews who have abandoned the practice, just like there are some Jews who really enjoy their pepperoni pizza. But it’s surprising; even totally secular Jews who might think nothing of that pizza have qualms when it comes to giving up circumcision for their sons. Many a mohel can tell about awkward phone calls from uncertain, completely assimilated parents who still can’t quite, can’t entirely, forego that badge of Jewish identity for their children, when it comes right down to it. Because when it comes right down to it, they know brit milah for what it is: the dividing line between Jewish and not Jewish, between continuance and death.

In addition to being ignorant of history, you also have to be more than a little ignorant of medicine to oppose circumcision. The medical consensus seems to be more or less neutral on the subject. Circumcision, for inhabitants of the first world with plenty of access to regular bathing and condoms, probably carries little benefit in terms of protection from infections. On the other hand, neither does it do any substantive harm. It’s a bit like having your earlobes snipped off; no real difference to you other than a cosmetic one, but if you don’t have a compelling reason to cut off healthy tissue from your body, why would you? No scientific study has found any evidence of significant difference in developmental and behavioral indices between the circumcised and the uncircumcised male, as confirmed in this British Medical Journal’s study of the matter. There is, however, a huge difference between circumcision performed on an infant a few days old and an adult. The adult procedure is major surgery, with all the attendant risks. So all those proponents of delaying circumcision until the child is old enough to make the decision on his own are doing him no favors, but in fact setting him up for more pain and risk.

There’s an even more ominous angle to the recent surge of anti-circ activism. The term circumcision itself is out of vogue with opponents, who prefer the term “male genital mutilation.” By itself it just seems slightly hysterical, but again, context is key: those who use this term are deliberately invoking female genital mutilation, a practice that resembles male circumcision about as closely as trimming your fingernails resembles amputating your arm. In female genital mutilation (FGM), the clitoris is most commonly completely excised, along with most of the inner labia. What remains of the female sexual organs is then sewn together, creating a tiny hole through which urine and menstrual blood can pass and of course setting the child up for a lifetime of pain, infection, and sexual misery. Cutting off the penis and removing most of the scrotal sac would be the equivalent action. The practice is brutal, revolting, and mandated by no religion other than misogynistic custom.

To draw a verbal equivalency between circumcision and FGM is to participate in that misogyny. It trivializes the real suffering, the excruciating pain, the lifelong irreparable harm, these young women are subjected to. That kind of equation is like telling someone in a developing country you can empathize with their lack of access to clean water because of that horrid week you experienced during your recent kitchen reno when the contractor had shut off your plumbing and was like, totally not returning your calls and you had to camp out at the Sheraton. The only possible response is: bitch, please.

When anti-circ activists gleefully appropriate the images and language of racism and misogyny, they play a dangerous game. On the other hand, they do make it very easy for those of us who are not ignorant of the history of anti-Semitism, of medicine, or of misogyny to see exactly what they are about.

Prayer seems to work least right when you need it most.

I say this as someone who has recently emerged from a lengthy illness, by which I mean I was in bed for nine weeks. It was the sickest I’ve been in my life, and fortunately I was a little too sick to be aware that there was a possibility of not getting better. But it taught me all sorts of things about prayer and the spiritual life—chiefly that neither are really possible when you’re that sick. Maybe that hasn’t been the experience of other people who’ve been seriously ill, but it was for me. I was reduced to what I would best call an animal state, in which physical functioning – can you get through this day – was the only thing my brain could concentrate on. Attempts at prayer were laughable – it was as though a giant blanket sat on top of me, smothering me, and any words that tried to escape and go higher just sank fruitlessly back onto my pillow. Besides, I didn’t have anything to say. I wasn’t resentful of God, wasn’t angry at God; God was just an irrelevancy. You can’t pray on an empty stomach, goes the saying, and it turns out that for me that was true. The needs of my body overpowered the needs of my soul. I don’t think that’s good or bad, here or there; it just is the way it is.

When I began to crawl out of what I came to think of as the tunnel of darkness, when I could move around and walk and function a little, I tried praying. It was exhausting, but I made some half-hearted attempts. For me praying is a physical activity: I stand, I sit, I bend, I rock, I wrap myself in a tallit, I lay tefillin. And even when I had enough strength to do some of that, there was still something holding me back. Literally: I was tethered to a medicine pump that injected me with needed meds through a subcutaneous abdominal needle, and I had this little purse-bag-thingy with the pump in it that I had to carry around all the time, and this long leash of tubing connecting the two of us. I use words like “leash” and “tether” deliberately, because that is what it came to feel like, and I don’t think I’ve ever hated anything like I hated, hate, that pump. I’m off it now—it’s lying in the corner of my bedroom, waiting for the home health agency to pick it up, and every now and again I wince when I see it out of the corner of my eye. Maybe because prayer is so intensely physical for me, or maybe because tefillin are such an integral part of my prayer life now, I don’t know, but for whatever reason, prayer was impossible wearing that fucking thing. When I tried to lay tefillin, it felt like there were two leashes tugging at me—like my master had come for me, had clicked the beloved familiar leather collar on me and was trying to lead me home, but there was this horrible hateful choke-chain around me pulling me in the other direction and I couldn’t get loose, couldn’t strain free, couldn’t get to where I wanted to be. The doggy metaphors aren’t an accident; like I said, animal state and all that. Besides, religion is etymologically a binding: religio is that which ties us down, holds us fast. An eminently quotable Jewish teacher once said that you cannot serve two masters, and while I served my body—while I was its prisoner—I found it impossible to serve God.

And I’m thinking about all this now because this morning, miraculously, I could.

I’m off the pump now, and am for all intents and purposes a well human being. The aftereffects of my illness are minimal, which is the literal mercy of God. I stand and walk and run and laugh and play in the snow with my children and taste the sharpness of food and oh, all the everyday things that were stripped away from me, and I cry writing this because they are so sweet, all of them, and I will never take them for granted again, until the next time I do.

Baruch atah, Adonai, I prayed this morning in the morning blessings, ha-machazir neshamot lifgarim meitim. Blessed are you, Eternal One, who restores souls to dead bodies. The Reform siddur, Mishkan Tefilah, has it somewhat differently: Praised are You in whose hand is every living soul and the breath of humankind. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and it’s a very lovely editing, since Reform Jews are naturally wary of anything that seems to endorse the idea of a physical resurrection. Except that sometimes. . . sometimes you have experienced a resurrection, and you need the words. I’m not some stodgy purist about editing the words of a prayer – that sort of editing has been going on for centuries, and will for many more. But I do worry that in doing so we are too quick to jettison the words of the past, too quick to confine their meaning to our own narrow assumptions, too slow to let the voices of the past speak to us with present meaning. I was a dead body, and now I am not one. I cried when I spoke the words of that blessing. I broke open, brushed by something in those ancient hallowed words that said to me, yes, you were dead, and now, by My mercy, you live. It is as simple as that.

So maybe I had it wrong to begin with, about prayer. The conversation, the covenant, is the root of our faith as Jews. It is no accident that the foundational document of Judaism, after the Torah, is the Talmud, which is nothing but the record of a centuries-long conversation. And in the Torah itself, God is always saying one thing, and then Jews, from Abraham to Jacob to Moses, are always saying, well, and how about this other? It is a dialogue, always. Maybe I had lost sight of that. Prayer had become all about my speaking, my voice, my actions. Maybe it wasn’t that I couldn’t pray, for all those weeks; maybe it’s that my prayer was being answered. Maybe it was the kind of answer you might give a sick child in the night: shhh, lie back, let me take care of you, you don’t need to talk, hush now. Hush now. Lots of times, right as she’s being tucked in, my six-year-old will be seized by a burst of the must-tell-yous: but this happened today, and this, and I didn’t tell you about this, and you don’t know about that, and given the chance she will rattle on for another good forty-five minutes, and I will have to gently press her back onto her pillow and say, I do know. I promise I know. Now lie back. You can tell me tomorrow.

Tell me tomorrow, God said to me. Hush now. So I hushed, because I had no other choice. And my assumption that I had to speak to God RIGHT NOW was as innocent and silly as my six-year-old’s bedtime confessional imperative, as innocent and silly as our own need to make sure God HEARS us, that he UNDERSTANDS us. Is all the kavanah, all the physical intensity of my prayer just so much “look at meeee, God, watch meeee?” Maybe so. Maybe God is like my own glamorous 1970s Mom, who sat by our pool, spellbound audience (as I thought) to my antics, floppy hat on her head, big sunglasses shielding her half-lidded eyes, the latest Danielle Steele open on her lap, an abstracted cigarette in the ashtray in reach of her elegant fingers: mm-hmm, I’m watching, dear, I promise. Oh yes, that was marvelous. Look at you. Like every mother who hears that refrain a thousand times a day.

There’s a poem by Adrienne Rich inserted at the opening of the Shabbat morning prayers, in the Reform siddur. It goes like this:

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.

I thought, before, that I knew the meaning of this not-terribly-complex poem: you make the choice to worship or not to worship, and life happens accordingly. But what if you don’t have a choice? Behold, I set before you this day life and death, says God, the blessing or the curse. But what if the choice isn’t yours to make? What if you can’t make it through the door, what if you don’t? And what I know now that I didn’t know before is that God is on both sides of the door, and always was. I almost didn’t make it through; death was almost the choice that was made for me. And that, I have discovered, would have been okay. Hush now, God would have said. I’m watching. I promise.

The Catholic bishops are mightily concerned that it is "participation in a grave moral evil" for your money to fund abortion, however indirectly. That's why all the convoluted language in the recent health care bill to ensure separate funding for abortion and (as a side benefit) the almost complete elimination of abortion services for middle class women. But don't get me wrong: the bishops and I might be on opposite sides of this issue, but I think their reasoning is inspired. Brilliant, in fact. So brilliant, I propose its broader application.

Tithing is participation in a grave moral evil.

I guess this would only apply if you think institutionalized child rape and virulent homophobia are moral evils; I can see how the bishops would probably disagree with me, since if there's anything they love more than boy-fucking it's gay-bashing. Disagree as they might, I'm sure they wouldn't fault the purity of my reasoning, because if there's anything those bishops love more than boy-fucking and gay-bashing, it's intellectual purity. The clean logic of an argument, that's what appeals to them, and who cares if that knife slices right through the body of a suffering woman or a sobbing little boy? It's the knife of purity, damn it, wielded by the Alteri Christi here to teach you a thing or two about the power of redemptive suffering.

Catholic flisties out there, what do you think? A little snapping-shut of the pocketbook, maybe? Or maybe some redirect of your funds here, to an organization cut off from Catholic funding because of its support for Maine's No on 1?

ETA: And now it has finally and fully reached the pope. Not that it will have much (if any) effect on his papacy; seriously, if "Nazi" doesn't disqualify you, "child abuser" isn't likely to.

(No, not THAT movie.)

I just finished watching a film that's about ten years old, Trembling Before G-d. It's an independent documentary film about the lives and struggles of gay and lesbian Orthodox and Hasidic Jews -- not a large-budget production, which possibly explains why they couldn't afford the extra vowel.

I found myself wondering if the film would be any different if it had been made today and not ten years ago. Have any of the cultural shifts and progress trickled through to the Orthodox and Hasidic communities when it comes to dealing with their gay sons and daughters and nephews and nieces and grandchildren and congregants? As the non-Orthodox Jewish community becomes more accepting, and as society at large becomes more matter-of-fact about gayness, does this have any effect on the Orthodox and Hasidic community, or has that simply strengthened their intransigence? I'd be curious to know more.

Also, there was one part where I had to fast forward in distaste. One of the most interesting individuals the film followed was a middle-aged Orthodox gay man who, in his youth, had gone through all sorts of (painfully literal) contortions in order to "change," to not be gay any longer. He had gone through interminable counseling, humiliating aversive rituals -- all sorts of really damaging stuff. But he seemed, in many ways, the film's most appealing, balanced, and articulate individual. Anyway, they had him fly back to meet with the rabbi that he first came out to as a young man, and who had first counseled him to seek therapy and a "cure." And all the while, he's talking about how kind this rabbi is, how gentle and understanding, how he's got sweet eyes, and when we meet him, you can really see it, too -- here is a gentle and kind older man. So I was appalled at the impulse to stand there with a camera and have the guy say, yeah, you remember that advice you gave me, IT SUCKED. I couldn't watch, and it seemed to me a violation of two very important Jewish principles: a) you never embarrass or publicly humiliate anyone, and b) you are grateful to any teachers you ever had, even if most of what they taught you was wrong and only one tiny kernel of it was true. There's a saying about being grateful to someone who taught you even the smallest letter of the aleph-bet. Even if you later realize that your teacher was wrong, or that you have "moved beyond" your teacher, you find something to be grateful for.

It was a film about intense personal suffering, but part of me rebels at it. It's easy to assume, watching films like this, that gayness is all about suffering, and there's a delicate psychological line there -- if gays suffer so much, a viewer might think, then maybe it means they should be suffering, that suffering is somehow an ontological part of gay existence. It's a bit like if you constructed your whole notion of Judaism from Schindler's List. Making endless films about Jewish suffering leads to the idea that Jewishness is all about suffering, which leads to the whole notion of divinely ordained, punitive Jewish suffering, which leads to, which leads to. So it's a thing: how do you document and bear witness to the oppression of a minority without letting consciousness of oppression dominate an outsider's understanding of minority identity? How do you lead outsiders into the secret treasury of joy that characterizes that experience?

So, I dunno. Any readers out there want to share their perceptions of the intersection of Jewishness and gayness?

So this past Shabbat I got to visit a piece of American Jewish history: Boston’s Havurat Shalom. What was it like? Well, the best way I can describe it is this: ( Mea Shearim meets Woodstock. )