Circumcision: What's a Nonpracticing Jew to Do?

I hate most pork. Roast it, glaze it, do what you will, pig rarely sings to me like a dead chicken does. But pass me a strip of bacon and I’ll promise you the world. Seventeen years of Hebrew day school can only accomplish so much.

Welcome to modern day Jewry; not so much a state of being as it is a state of mind. Or as the ultra orthodox like to call it, “Jewish goyim,” Yiddish slang for crappy Jew. Or Noam Chomsky in English.

Being the secular sort myself, picking and choosing what defines my Jewishness on any given day has never been much of a problem. In fact I’ve grown quite comfortable in my own hypocrisy, perfectly content with the casual neurosis and ill-defined guilt passed on by my mother, to guide me through life. But there is one exception of this inherited sophism—a Diasporic point of no return, if you will—that even I know not to mess with: that of an eight-day-old penis.

If there remains one solitary trait defining Judaism today, it is without a doubt a circumcised dick. But rationalizing the old snippety snip isn’t as easy as it once was. Back in the day, all Abraham needed was blind faith and a shank. This 2008, however, is an entirely different story. Not only is there the obligatory breakfast buffet of bagels and lox to contend with, but what to do with all those pesky open-minded, anti-circumcision liberals protesting this age-old tradition, the very people I usually relate to, being the lefty, feminist, “sexpert” that I am?

Such being the case, I was curious to see how others like myself intellectualized a life bereft of Jewish tradition and Saturdays spent in shul with an act exclusive to Jewish law.

As it turns out, not very well.

Enter the Jewish Circumcision Resource Center (JCRC), a group so shocked by modern day circumcision you’d think they would have collapsed from some sort of circulatory malfunction by now.

A subdivision of the larger, nondenominational Circumcision Resource Center, the JCRC is one of many online groups currently propagating the dangers and medical futility of circumcising male newborns, and “facilitating [the] healing” process for the estimated 1.2 million Americans still “diminished” every year. At the heart of their argument is the American Academy of Pediatrics dubious policy on circumcision, which states that despite scientific evidence demonstrating potential medical benefits of circumcision, “these data [remain insufficient] to recommend routine neonatal circumcision.”

Rounding out the JCRC’s case are an additional nineteen journal articles further testifying to the awesomeness of the prepuce, with arguments including—but not limited to—a better sex life and the tendency to masturbate a little bit less compared with their crew-necked brethren. Not exactly code red but sufficient for a group going up against the word of God.

All this doesn’t exactly bode well for my fictional future son. By JCRC’s estimates, it’s only a matter of time before he winds up blogging his way through the pain, an activity surprisingly popular amongst the circumcised and suffering. Take, for example, the lucky bastard who posted that circumcision was “the single most traumatic event of my life” on the Circumcision Resource Center’s website. Or the forty-seven-year-old man from Atlanta who blogged about being ignored, explaining that, “When we men discuss our feelings about circumcision, no one listens, not even doctors. I'm one of the millions of men who doesn’t like being circumcised. I wish I had been able to scream at the doctors, ‘Hands off, it’s mine!’”

Though, admittedly, my first inclination is to write this off as insane, there is some legitimacy to the circumcision come crisis argument. In Understanding Circumcision: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to a Multi-Dimensional Problem, editors George C. Denniston, Frederick Mansfield Hodges, and Marilyn Fayre Milos concur that “trauma can occur at any point in the life cycle from infancy to childhood” and that “many children have described their circumcision experience in the language of violence, torture, mutilation and sexual assault” resulting “in the development of long term PTSD in many cases.”