When one of my own rabbis (gay, female) slipped me the number of a mohel, a professional snipper, I laughed it off: classic Jewish humor!
But no.
Medically speaking, I was already circumcised, along with most of the other babies born in America in the Eighties. But that’s no good for God. I needed a hatafat dam brit: a drawing of blood. To remain uncut, I was told, is to remain spiritually cut off from the Jewish people. That’s the idea of the “covenant.”
While bloodletting has always been a condition of the Orthodox and Conservative wings of Judaism, Reform congregations have been willing to welcome the sexually sheathed and uninjured. Biblical law doesn’t require otherwise. Neither do most of the arguments of the Talmud. But a funny thing happened on the road to gay, female, pork-friendly Judaism: The Reform movement began to ask more people to put some skin in the game. “In an era when the forces of cultural assimilation pose such a daunting challenge to our continued existence as a distinct people,” Rabbi Mark Washofsky explained in an essay in Reform Judaism, the official magazine of the movement, in the fall of 2008 (also the season of my snip), “this admittedly ancient tribal custom bears a message that we do well to hear.”
That’s how I found myself Biblically nude in a kind of spiritual locker room, a shower space in a converted brownstone, waiting on a man with a razor. The surroundings were civilized, more University Club than Russian Bath House. Blue-black tile ran along the floors and climbed the walls. A minty scent hung in the air.
When the mohel arrived, he looked, I’m sorry to say, like Danny Devito in curls. We stood in silence. I opened my towel. Hello, groin. He opened a shaving bag with glinting instruments. Hello, knife. My mohel produced a pen-sized lance, which he wielded ever so gently, like Lady Grantham with a paring knife. He sliced, sliced, squeezed, dripped, and was done. The whole transaction was over in seconds, long before I could scream, or faint, or decide if I liked it.