Jewish Identity--It's Going to Hurt

On May 22, 2007, Judy Perez wrote a story for the Chicago Tribune about young Jewish parents choosing to forgo the commandment of circumcising their sons.

By Jewish law their child is supposed to have his ceremonial circumcision performed on his 8th day of life, a procedure demanding the precision of a certified moehl, a Jew who has been trained according to Jewish law. Many less than religious Jews ask their physicians to circumcise the child at the hospital.

Moslems are also accept this rite.

My understanding is that if a Jewish boy is not circumcised according to tradition he is still a Jew, but hasn't fulfilled the commandment of having had a brit milah, meaning he has not accepted the covenant.

A boy who hasn't had a brit hasn't been properly initiated as a Jew. He's not really of the Jewish People. He's not entered the covenant as commanded by the Old Mighty (my zaideh's particular reference to the Higher Power running our programs here on Earth).

Why would this bother a blogger like me?

It's an identity issue. Did you know that there is a diagnosis , 313.82 Identity Problem, that includes group loyalty as an identity issue? I see it more often in practice as it applies to career choice, friendship patterns, and sometimes sexual orientation. Should I still be practicing another 10 years, something tells me this is going to pop up.

Parents make the decision to forgo what they hear is a painful surgical procedure. Yet not every child cries, and those who do cry stop crying almost immediately thereafter, and no one I've ever, ever talked to remembers this pain.

And, of course, these parents are making a huge assumption that the child will never, ever want to have the same sense of Jewish identity that his cousins, or perhaps even older brother has. They're assuming the child would prefer to identify with men who are technically not Jewish, not that this is bad, but it's not an ethnically cultural identity. This happens even when the father is Jewish. Very strange indeed.

And I thought cultural identity, ethnic diversity was supposed to be a good thing!

I can tell you as a therapy doc that when a person begins to search for roots, when a person begins to ask the questions, Who Am I? Who Am I Really? certain things will come to light, things like, Well, you weren't circumcised, so you're technically missing something very important if you think, actually that you're a Jew. Uh, sorry, sweetie.

Of course the Nazi's would have had no problem with that. To them an uncircumcised Jew would be a Jew, obviously. They didn't look. They wouldn't have care if your seventh cousin once removed was a Jew. They'd have killed you anyway.

So what happens when a Jewish child learns that his parents spared him the pain of circumcision (a pre-verbal memory, by the way, unlikely to be integrated in the cerebral cortex, virtually impossible to recall, and Yes I know you're going to counter that with the question, But what about body memories? So, No, I don't have an answer to that except to say that I personally don't remember having had a diaper change. Yet I'm quite sure that I did wear them for a time as a child).

I'll tell you what happens when a child who has never been circumcised decides that he would like to become a Jew, one initiated into the Jewish People as his fathers before him.

He has to have a real brit milah, a bris, a ritual circumcision, this time with the scalpel, the rabbi, the whole works, and at whatever age, perhaps he's 13, perhaps he's 30,

IT'S GONNA' HURT A WHOLE LOT MORE THAN IF HE'D HAD It AT 8 DAYS OLD.

AND HE'S GONNA' BE ANGRY, MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT.

And to the Chicago filmmaker Eli Ungar-Sargon, who is promoting this insanity about forgoing the cut, skipping circumcision, with his documentary, Cut, all I can say is,

You really should know better, Mr. Ungar-Sargon. You should take it back, the whole thing. Tell everyone you didn't mean it. You're sorry. You have a lot on your head telling people to forgo this particular precept of Judaism. Take it back, please. Just take it back.

Such givah (rhymes with guy-duh, means conceit) such shtus (rhymes with moose, means stupidity) seriously, to think you have the right to take away a person's identity like that.

therapydoc

Therapy Doc Being a Person on the Blog- Or Intimacy, Shmintimacy

So Mimi said:

Cut loose, (translate: get personal), Be yourself, or be someone else, be me. Or be someone else, you're anonymous on the web.

That’s what she thinks. I’ve already identified myself. And I couldn’t be her because she admits to being cranky and feeling like expletive all the time, which is fine, but one crank in the ‘hood is enough, so I’ll be me, relatively sunny. Still friends, right, Mi?

But she continues, Get naked.

Seriously. This isn't how I get. You may as well know.

Cut loose? Impossible. I’ve been a therapist so long that it is a HUGE piece of my personality.

And it can get me into trouble.

Here's what happened when one of my machetainistas first started to get to know me, about 6 months into the relationship. A machetainista is the mother of a son or daughter's spouse. The Yiddish is creeping into my vocabulary slowly, notice friends, as I get more intimate with you.

I had thought we were having this normal back and forth kind of a conversation. She must have complained about something, and maybe I even made a suggestion, broke the cardinal rule, nobody wants any advice unless they're paying for it.

But maybe all I did was comment, not give advice, maybe said, "Hmm."

In return, what do I get?

STOP WITH THE THERAPIZING. I DON'T NEED A THERAPIST.

And I hadn't even begun, barely opened my mouth.

So this is why I don't talk much. Have to shut up both in therapy, where the patient's got the floor, and can't talk OUTSIDE of therapy, either.

(This all feels so narcissistic, seriously, writing like this, but fine a little more being personal.)

Anyway, it is hard for me to look at any subject, great or small, that is emotional, psychological, or social (even physical, if it has to do with emotion) and not see from my particular lens, too. I'm always working on seeing through yours, but I can't hide my education for very long, and not to brag, but there's a lot of education there.

And in a conversation with friends or relatives, even a therapist has to comment eventually, and it might just be a bio-psychological-social kind of comment. Maybe intellectual even. I can't pretend not to see what I see.

But that can be a problem socially. You can take the therapist out of the office but you can't take the office out of the therapist. The therapist is the office.

Picture a doctor in a coat room. The doc sees a guy who's about to pass out. This guy's going pale, breaking into a sweat, and the doc says to him, Hey would you mind passing me that coat on your left?

See, we're always ON, professionals. Your freaking worst nightmare is having me for a friend. I forget the me that isn't the office. It's very hard to share, not having done that for years, now. So I'm so out of practice.

This is complicated by my understanding that being intellectual, i.e., rationalizing, is a psychological defense. It's one of the more highly evolved defenses, but a defense nevertheless. Read into that whatever you want.

I see it like unless I can think of a good joke, I'm screwed. Sarelle supplies me with the best ones, one day she'll grow up and get a blog, and I can link you to them, and my father emails me a bunch of good ones from his friend Sammy, but I can never tell them right, jokes.

So no promises on the intimacy thing. The narcissism's killing me, that this feels incredibly narcissistic, but I'll work on it, Mi, the cutting loose here thing. It's not easy for a writer who's learned to be omniscient everywhere else.

Did you hear the one about the two octogenarians? One had recently married, the other said, How'd it go? The first one said, . . .

Yeah, I forgot the punchline, see?

therapydoc