There Is No Virtue In Agonizing Over The Decision To Circumcise

I have to continually remind my Jewish friends and colleagues, of which I have many, that Jews and the Jewish tradition do not own circumcision. Once the practice crawled out of its sacred niche and into the rest of American society, anyone who was touched by it earned an absolute right to comment on it.

In a way, I can see how this fact could be frightening. When you lose the (almost) exclusive claim to a controversial practice, you become vulnerable to influence in how that practice maintains or is carried out.

And yet, I felt the need to preface this post with the foregoing. While we all may own circumcision, it may also be said that we don't all own every argument on the issue. Still, as someone who isn't Jewish, but who is emphatically a non-believer in any faith in the Sam Harris tradition, I felt I had to comment on the comments of Rabbi Asher Lopatin, who sat on a panel following a screening of Eli Ungar-Sargon's film Cut at the Spertus Institute in Chicago recently.

First, I think it would be helpful if readers watched the panel discussion. If you prefer to skip over it, scroll down to my commentary.

The rabbi strains credulity to claim virtue in agonizing over the pain and sacrifice of circumcision where he seems to signal that the decision was foregone.

He states that he circumcised a son even after seeing the movie, a movie that he praises for forcing an examination of the practice where it might otherwise be taken for granted. His implied claim is that the movie has value not for its central points, but for its power to cause the observant Jew to agonize over the decision, provoke Jewish guilt and trigger Jewish ethical tenets. Is he to have us believe that he was unpersuaded by the movie's lessons? Or is he to have us believe that the movie merely forced him to agonize over the circumcision of his second son in a way (or at all) that he didn't with his first son? If the latter, what's the (self-serving) point?

While there may be virtue in making hard decisions, there is no virtue in decisions merely being hard. If there was no possibility of change, better the rabbi own up to it and state clearly, harm or no harm, my son's rights notwithstanding, tradition and connection to the long line of circumcision that ties me to my father, and him to his father are more important than the risk to my son, his rights to a full sexual experience, and any evolved conception of how to treat our children, particularly sons, in their defenseless state.

In a way, the pediatrician/mohel William H. Barrows, even in his folly, was less blameworthy for stating that he circumcises and believes in it, and couldn't care less what anybody thinks about it. He's among the living dead [Ecclesiastis 9:5 *], to put it in Biblical terms. He can be ignored and contained because his message is so blunt and uncritical.

The rabbi on the other hand makes a virtue of considering the harm and doing it anyway. That's a difficult position to accept for a critical thinker, but is very seductive to people who are fence sitters or have their guard down. It is therefore nuanced enough to be dangerous.

* I know there is another Biblical chapter and verse on this, but I'm rather out of practice in my Bible research.

[Slight edit for precision to 6th & 7th paragraphs.]

Comments

[Hugh]

Gentiles too, seem to rejoice in their agonising over it. It enables them to wallow in their pity for the child (but "Sympathy without relief is like mustard without beef.") Part of the survival of the memeplex (See http://www.circumstitions.com/mem.html) is that circumcision doesn't do ENOUGH harm to be demonstrably crazy ENOUGH for most people to throw up their hands and say "Cut part off his dong? Get out of here!" It brings (most sane) people to the edge of that, but doesn't pull enough over the threshold (yet) to make it die out. (It helps that the pain is generally concealed from the parents, and the harm may not manifest itself until puberty.)

[tantalus prime]

This seems to be the angle of every recent news article I've read about the way American society views circumcision. They all seem to contain the following:

"Mr. and Ms. Jones agonized over whether or not to circumcise their son. In the end they chose to circumcise because they wanted him to look like his father (or insert other indefensible reason here)."

There obviously is really no agonizing involved. If you can be swayed by the argument "that is what my parents did, and their parents before them" then your mind is pretty well made up beforehand. Yes, I wish people would just be honest about how they feel. It would save so much time trying to persuade them to change their minds.

[Ron Low]

^^ Jews and the Jewish tradition do not own circumcision. ^^

Naturally. There are at least 50 times as many cut Muslims as there are cut Jews.

^^ If you can be swayed by the argument "that is what my parents did, and their parents before them" then your mind is pretty well made up beforehand. ^^

Such arguments fall in line with and are no better than the ones used to justify female genital mutilation.

[Joe in CA]

So then "agonizing" or the appearance there-of is somehow supposed to legitimize having made the decision to circumcise a child anyway.

Maybe other kinds of child molesters should get off the hook if it could somehow be proven that they agonized before having decided to do their deed.

It makes sense to me, I don't know about the rest of you...