“In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will," the economist Rüdiger Dornbusch discerned, “and then they happen faster than you thought they could." Financial crises intrigued him.
Jew-hate behaves differently. It takes less time to ignite than you think it will, and burns for longer than you thought it would.
Last week Antwerp police raided the homes of two rabbis. They confiscated ‘deadly’ knives for circumcising Jew-babes. They demanded records and names. The president of the Conference of European Rabbis said the real crime was Jewish ritual, a 3,500-year-old covenant, practised in Antwerp for 800 years.
Compare it with Roman Emperor Hadrian’s ban on circumcision - as a barbaric mutilation of the body. The Jewish population had to be assimilated, and the spread of Judaism stopped. Protests will not help.
That zip-locked bag has travelled well through time. Indictments filed against the Antwerp rabbis accuse them of "intentional assault or bodily harm with premeditation against minors, as well as the illegal practice of medicine".
Jew-hate remains what it was and will be - the ultimate hatred of difference. “A world that has no room for Jews is one that has no room for (cultural) difference. And a world that lacks space for difference lacks space for humanity itself" said UK Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks.
Space for humanity lacks. But no space is lacking in Tanach. From beginning to end the bible retails the ancient rite’s clout, not in practical terms only but in metaphysical terms that defy belief.
How come that Man is born uncircumcised yet fares none the worse for it? The prepuce or that guttery word ‘foreskin’ may not be the handiest male part, or the most seductive. But disabling? Ever encountered a man with normal appetites and functions who frets that he’s handicapped? Of what help or hindrance is it for the organ’s good working order? Does it improve urination or propagation? Is it health-giving? Living without the head cocoon causes untimely death?
It would seem not. Minus the foreskin the circumcised are quite hale and wholesome. Who’d give a rat’s tooth for a man’s intellect which cannot grasp that if it was critical the guy would soon know about it. So here’s a body part that neither eases life nor bedevils it. Here’s a gratuitous appurtenance, a debasement.
What did the Creator want with a futile part of the anatomy? There must be more to it than meets the eye, ramifications above and beyond the organ’s medical and bestial functions. Clearly God would never encase the reproductive organ out of some whim.
To cut to the chase the prepuce was a punishment. That is correct - the first man had been moulded clean-headed from the soil. Expulsion from the Garden of Eden was not the only chastisement for trying the forbidden fruit on the forbidden tree. Man sacrificed physical perfection. And spirituality: the growth of a foreskin sundered the original harmony between Adam and his Maker.
The slick model was therefore a false start. The untidy one signified a work in progress. No two ways about it, our forefather became a second-rater.
Is the orlah, to give it the Hebrew name, really so much to cry about? So what if the uncircumcised lack a cleaner model if it works no better than the one they get by on. What is so terrible?
Indeed that purposeless spare part can set mankind adrift from benefits compared to which a birthright is like a tin pot bargain, as it was to Esau who swapped his for a bowl of lentil soup, cooked by a shrewd twin brother.
Go on - laugh. A bit of skin! Yes, well. Attend to Abraham telling his major-domo Eliezer to take an oath. On what - a sacred screed? On the holy name with eyes tight shut? On a carved idol which Abraham’s quaint father Terach sold? None were good enough. None had more sanctity than a trimmed down organ.
“Put your hand there," said Abraham. “Swear that you, Eliezer, will do what you’re told."This is what the compliant servant did, he grabbed the master’s member by its top.
Bizarre yes, but remember this is Abraham who converted people from grotesque forms of worship; who paid a heavy personal price. At age ninety-nine Abraham sliced off skin to shed an idolistic upbringing.
He was egged on by God. “Uncircumcised you are imperfect. Perform brit-mila and you will go to a holiness elevated above nature." There followed a threat. Abraham may have balked at the challenge. “Refuse to do it," said God, “and I shall return my world to nothingness."
There: it’s impossible to exaggerate the loss from keeping it under wraps. The whole universe collapses to nothing. What a slither of skin can do.
Also what it cannot do as long as it remains: battles cannot be won. Take the army under Joshua at the walls of Jericho. Bivouacked on Foreskin Hill they were not happy campers. Down the lines was heard a gnashing of teeth and a groaning of distress. There’d been, on orders from God, a circumcision en masse. Discarded foreskins, thousands upon unsightly thousands, made a hillock.
The Heavenly Commander in Chief comforted this maimed military. “I have rolled away the disgrace of Egypt upon you," said the Lord. Disgrace! To go around with a piece of skin! Back to Abraham, who’d been loath to do the deed. He consulted three close friends. What’s that - question the Almighty’s instruction? Keep the King of Kings waiting? What he did could hardly be more irreverent. Many would call such behavior downright rude.
What happened to Abraham’s old obedience and devotion? God tells him to get circumcised, and he tells Him to wait.
This was Abraham’s ninth and, by the looks of it, the least of his trials, all of which he had plunged into without hesitation. What was so problematic about a snip and a cut that he had to ask friends before he’d obey the command? Here’s a superman who burnt the mighty Nimrod’s idols in front of the royal throne; who argued with a king who thought nothing of putting a quarter of a million baby boys to death in case they grew up to be Abraham; who allowed Nimrod’s bodyguards to throw him into the furnace of Ur Kasdim; who left home at a word from God and travelled into the great unknown; who endured a famine and trusted his wife, next to whom every woman was ugly, with Pharaoh.
Whatever God told him to do, Abraham had done eight times. One doubts whether any other man would arm himself with mudpies and muster eighteen puny disciples to rout the armies of four great kings.
Abraham, we’d think, had proved himself. But now - a fuss when told to remove some surplus skin? Delay the deed until he mulls over it with friends. How can it be?
It can, if the orlah is indeed the holy divide. If the uncircumcised really live with a fatal handicap, spiritual pigmies compared to the circumcised elite.
The fact is that Abraham had only to do as told to rectify Adam’s false start. What are days of pain when you can put Creator and creation back in touch? It wasn’t like Abraham to ask friends what they thought about a Heavenly command.
He had a good excuse. More than aspiring to be close to God, Abraham feared to lose the common touch. He’d really be on the other side, an Ivri more than in name.
Thus he laid his anxieties at heaven’s door. “Lord, when I was uncircumcised travellers came to me, but after I do it they’ll stop coming."
The plea did not fall on deaf ears. After consulting with his prepus-encumbered camp, he took up a steely blade and, the hand of God steadying his own ninety-nine year hand, cut and trimmed until the orlah fell. The brit mila was sealed.
From that moment the patriarch and his godly camp were marked men.
Sent to Arutz Sheva by the writer. Published in the American Spectator under the title, “The World’s Most Controversial Scrap of Skin." https://spectator.org/the-worlds-most-controversial-scrap-of-skin/