I’d like to point out that during the reign of Roman Emperor Hadrian a law was passed that banned circumcision under penalty of death. The Jews of the time still continued the practice.
This is NOT a practice that will end simply by saying “it’s no longer legal”. Under Judaism, circumcising infant boys is not something negotiable. It’s not “adjustable”. Sure, pass any law you want but how do you intend to enforce it, and how steep the penalty?
A baby boy that isn’t circumcised on time is ritually cut off from the community. They can not participate in Sabbath services. They can not participate in the High Holidays.
They’re still Jewish, but unable to participate in the Jewish community.
Adult converts, of course, aren’t doing the above until they are converted, at which point they have to be circumcised if they’re men.
The one and only exception to circumcision is if it threatens the life of the boy - there’s an ancient exception that seems to be connected to hemophilia, for example (if a mother has had two prior boys die from circumcision subsequent sons are excused from the requirement). “Because the goyim don’t like the practice” is not seen as sufficient reason to skip it.
Which Jewish community? As I pointed out above, one of the issues that’s being largely ignored here is the small but growing resistance to circumcision within Judaism itself. Even in Israel.
Blalron:
Parents have the authority to decide what is in the best interests of their minor children, it is not the same situation as forcing something on a complete stranger.
Novelty Bobble:
Circumcision is no less valid if done later, and lack of circumcision does not make a Jew not Jewish. However, that situation (not for a convert, who is not yet Jewish at the time, that’s a totally different situation) is not considered ideal. The Torah commandment is for baby boys to be circumcised on their eighth day of life if physically feasible, and any fulfillment of the commandment at a later date is considered less than ideal.
Kimstu:
“Global Judaism”? I guarantee you that no Orthodox groups are mulling any such thing, and certainly not changing the 8th day mandate (pun not intended) which is about as explicit as a law in the Torah gets. In reading the linked article, I don’t see any indication that any organized Jewish group is mulling such a thing either. Furthermore…
…the article says no such thing. It says there is speculation - which it freely admits is no more than speculation - that periah was a Greek-era addition. It says there is no evidence that Biblical-era circumcision included periah, but conversely. there is also evidence for any Jewish circumcision ceremony that does not include all elements of a modern Jewish circumcision (i.e., the physical act itself, not such aspects as the blessings and the prayers recited during the ceremony), and tradition as far back as recorded includes it.
I agree with this wholeheartedly, and as distasteful as many find the practice, I would defend the right of any Muslim who believes that the Quran demands FGM for the girl’s spiritual benefit to do so.
I didn’t say they were. But many other Jews all over the world are.
If by “organized Jewish groups” you mean “official or quasi-official leaderships of denominations of Judaism” rather than “Jewish organizations against circumcision”, then AFAIK you’re right.
I don’t understand this sentence(s). Did you mean “there is also no evidence”?
Where do you draw the line on this issue? Does religious freedom also require exemptions from, say, laws against child abuse/neglect and manslaughter? Most drastically, if a parent believes that they are obligated for religious reasons to kill their child, should that be allowed in the name of religious freedom?
I’m not arguing that infant male circumcision is in any way equivalent to murder, or even to most forms of female genital cutting. But I do think that if a religious-freedom argument is applied to defend parental rights to practice both infant male circumcision and FGM, it becomes difficult to know exactly what religious practices on children can be excluded under that argument.
As I think I mentioned elsewhere, I once had a kitten circumcised, and it saved his life. He was unable to pee until the surgery was performed.
(I fostered many kittens, and that’s the only one we had circumcised.)
If we are trading second hand anecdotes, I read a letter written to Dan Savage by a guy who said the tighter skin post-circumcision enhanced his pleasure.
There are actually a lot of men who have had it done, I wonder if anyone has surveyed them. Some had it done for medical reasons, and most of the others to convert to Judaism or Islam, so maybe they would be motivated to say it’s good. But it’s research that could be done.
The rabbis today interpret that as being about hemophilia. I have a friend who is an Orthodox Jew, and his eldest son has hemophilia. It was diagnosed shortly after his circumcision. :eek: When his wife became pregnant with a second child, their rabbi told them to have the newborn tested for hemophilia, and if the boy tested positive, he should not be circumcised. I learned the second son did not have hemophilia when I received an invitation to the bris.
I’m pretty sure no circumcised male tugs on his junk with one hand while rubbing lotion around with the other, either.
I have no idea where this idea came from that circumcised men need to use lotion to masturbate. My husband has never had to use lotion. His parts work just fine.
Kimstu:
Thank you, yes. The article says there is no evidence that Jewish practice before certain details were recorded in the Mishnah/Talmud had those same details in Biblical times. I meant to say that there is similarly no evidence that they had different details in Biblical times. All recorded information about Jewish circumcision ritual indicates inclusion those details.
That’s a tough question, and I won’t pretend I haven’t struggled with it. But I think that the answer would have to be what we allow parents to do for their child for secular reasons. If we allow parents to authorize surgery for their child because it improves their physical health, then they should be allowed to authorize surgery for their child if they believe it will improve their spiritual health. The state (at least in the US, given the First Amendment) has no right to step in and say otherwise.
I heard about an elderly man who came to the ER with some medical condition that led to him needing to be catheterized, and he was circumcised by the ER doctor before they inserted it. :eek: His DIL was the one who told me about it! That was a bit of TMI, but neither of us had ever heard of this having to be done for this reason. He did recover, BTW.
As for the man who wrote to Dan Savage, everyone’s experience is going to be different whether they’re “cut” or not.
Well, numerous other sources such as this one at Jewish Virtual Library claim that there is evidence for believing that periah or removal of the entire foreskin was introduced into ritual circumcision in Hellenistic times:
But AFAIK, there is absolutely no secular medical code or secular law or physical health reason that validates the surgical removal of parts of the normally functioning genitalia of a minor girl. No accredited doctor in the US would be allowed to perform such a procedure and no law permits a girl’s parents to try to procure such an operation. If there is no identifiable pathological condition justifying the surgery, there is no legal or constitutional right to choose to have it performed on a minor child.
So ISTM that by your analogy, there would be absolutely no First Amendment justification for permitting a minor girl’s parents to authorize the surgical removal of parts of her normally functioning genitalia for what they believe to be a “spiritual health reason”. Claiming that all girls’ girl-parts, even physically normal and healthy ones, need to be mutilated because a deity commands it is not equivalent to identifying a specific medical pathology that demonstrably requires such surgery.
Penises are ugly things, they can use all the help they can get. What’s a little nip n tuck ever hurt anybody? :o
That’s not an assertion that holds any weight other than as your own *personal *view.
Even if your individual, purely subjective, opinion were true for you, to put it forward as a reason for carrying out circumcision on a helpless infant is…to be blunt…barbaric. I can think of no other word for it.
Respond to this. I think that the outer ear is ugly. I will therefore surgically trim the outer ears of my newborn baby to make them look like Elf-ears
What do you think of that choice?
You’re talking about a tiny percentage of Jewish people in that group. It’s like saying that because three people in Dubuque, Iowa got their noses pierced there is now a massive craze in Dubuque for nose-piercing when in reality almost everyone in Dubuque thinks the practice weird, gross, and deviant.
There has always been a small number of Jews opposed to or failing to practice circumcision. That doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of them (into the very high nineties percentage-wise) are really, really attached to the practice.
Just a note, because this always comes up when I start posting like this: I myself am opposed to infant circumcision without medical need. I’m merely trying to correct the notion that some seem to have that the Jewish people at large would cooperate with either abolishing circumcision or moving it to later in life for the boys/men in the community. Several thousand years of history indicate that that would likely be among the last of their traditions they’d give up.
Mine was just an attempt to be light-hearted. It was just a joke. I don’t support routine circumcision. That being said, your comparison of it to ear severing is not apt. The physical health risks that ear-severing would involve are much more significant than those risks involved with circumcision, which is just snipping a small bit of skin. While it doesn’t improve health outlooks really at all, it also doesn’t worsen those outlooks either. That is untrue with your ear-cutting example.
ETA: what exactly do you mean by “outer ear”? To me, ‘outer ear’ means the part of the ear outside of the head. I thought that was what you meant as well until i re-read the sentence about elf-ears.
1-2% of Jews world-wide *might *be many people in absolute numbers (highest estimates of world Jewish population would put that at around 150,000-300,000 people) but it is NOT “many Jews” percentage-wise. 98% of Jews still are advocates and practitioners of infant male circumcision.
I think it’s a matter of balancing rights vs. social harms. We allow parents to pierce the ears of infants, even though that is completely unnecessary for any medical reason (unlike the rare occasion there is a need for circumcision) because it does little to no harm and banning it would be socially disruptive for certain sub-cultures in our society. Although I would personally like to ban this (because it is unnecessary and done for the parents, not the child) I’m not going to lobby for it because I don’t think the amount of harm done warrants the effort of opposing those folks in favor of it. I’d like to ban unnecessary circumcision of minors, but given how disruptive that would be to Muslims and even more so to Jews and how likely those groups are to oppose such a change I’m not sure the cure wouldn’t be as bad as, or worse, than the disease. Which I why I’d be more inclined to argue for harm reduction - making sure the practice is done hygienically by trained people, openly so any complications can be dealt with rapidly, and so forth - while trying to persuade, over time, less severe forms of the practice and perhaps encouraging people to forgo or postpone it.
It’s common for defenders of infant circumcision to say that the child doesn’t remember the experience, therefore the pain inflicted is not a problem. Turns out that’s not entirely true. They may not have a narrative memory of it, but it seems the trauma is encoded in their brain somewhere. Circumcised babies show a greater pain response to vaccinations 4 and 6 months later.
Effect of neonatal circumcision on pain response during subsequent routine vaccination.
Defenders of routine infant circumcision trivialize the foreskin as being merely a useless flap of skin. But actually, the foreskin is not just ordinary skin. It contains unique tissue found nowhere else on the body.
I didn’t say ear-severing, I said trimming. I’m happy for you to allow me to remove as much soft tissue from the ears during my trimming as you’d allow for a circumcision. OK with that now?
Personally I’d suggest that any medical intervention regarding the genitals is considered of greater significance than that of the soft tissue of the ears. If I gave you a choice of receiving a razor cut and stitches on your outer ear or genitals which would you choose?
How would trimming the ears of new-born children worsen the outlooks for them?
Yes, that’s what I mean. There is cartilage in the outer ears but I’m not going to touch that. I’m just going to trim the soft tissue and lobes until it looks cosmetically pleasing to me.
Happy with that?
I dunno, I read the OP as a long-belated satire of the Hobby Lobby decision.
This thread really cuts into one’s character.