I forget where or when the circumcision argument began, but I can pinpoint the moment it blazed beyond our control. We were at the Odessa diner with Little MoMo and her short-lived new boyfriend. He -- it’s fair to say -- was asking for it. “So,” he inquired with the smirk people seldom employ when discussing the amputation of an arm or leg, “are you going to chop off his weenie?”
That’s what passes for adult cocktail conversation these days, and, believe me, my banter is a lot less witty when I’m tanked up on plain tomato juice, no ice. After about a minute’s worth of unamusing repartee, my husband Greg and I were at each other’s throats. Things escalated rapidly, as intimate high-stakes fights in front of someone you’ve just met do, and before you could say “snip-snip ha-ha,” I was blinking back tears, aghast that Greg would so blithely mutilate our son. Greg, a third generation Jewish atheist whose great-grandfather was a rabbi, was dismayed to learn he’d married an anti-Semite whose hippie-dippy ideas would break a tradition dating back to Abraham and Isaac, if not further. We made a real scene. It’s amazing we didn’t tip over the table.
The fight continued for two days, until my red, swollen eyes trumped every argument in Greg’s arsenal. I had stood firm and weeping when presented with such pearls as “his penis should look like his father’s penis,” “what if the other kids laugh at him in the locker room,” and “it’s unsanitary.” I did research on the Internet and enlisted the support of Karen, who rallied her uncircumcised Scottish fiancé to email Greg, whom he had never met. CJ is a good egg, as they say. He is so soft-spoken and discreet that you would never guess that he’d email American strangers about his penis. The testimony of a satisfied, uncut Glaswegian notwithstanding, Greg held his ground. “You know how the Nazis identified the Jews, don’t you?” he said. “He has relatives who died in the camps. I want him to be connected to that.”
He almost had me there. At least I stopped thinking of him as the would-be baby butcher. A little more research on the Internet, and I returned to Greg with a Talmudic riddle. “If you can tell me why the Jews circumcise their male children, I’ll do it.”
It was my turn to have him. Greg’s childhood religious instruction weighed in at zilch. I, however, had participated in a Seder in my Episcopal Sunday school. Greg wasn’t bar mitzvahed until his late 20s when he was pulled off a Lower East Side street into a Lubovitcher van. I had attended many bar mitzvahs back in Indiana. They were my first boy-girl parties. “Do you give?” I asked.
“Well, it’s to show, it’s because of, when you become a man…” he stammered.
“No, it’s a covenant with God,” I told him. “Who you don’t believe in. We can take him to the Holocaust Museum. He will know about his relatives who died in the camps.” The non-atheist Jews’ covenant with God sealed the deal my red, swollen eyes had brokered.
© 2002, Ayun Halliday
from The Big Rumpus: A Mother’s Tale From the Trenches, Seal Press, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, 2002