Covenant

Brit Milah, the Covenant of Circumcision, speaks to us out of our people’s most distant past, the world of burnt offerings and ritual slaughter.  What eternal truth is revealed by this ancient gesture?

            The penis is not the only organ that may be circumcised.  When God first appoints Moses as spokesman, Moses protests that he is "of uncircumcised lips."  Deuteronomy speaks of a “foreskin” covering the heart.  The prophet Jeremiah despairs that the ears of his people are “uncircumcised.”  In every case, to circumcise means to remove a covering or blockage which prevents the possibility of exchange, of communication.

            The ritual of brit milah understands sexuality as first and foremost a kind of communication, of “intercourse.” Like words of speech, sexual communication may bring two souls intimately close.  Or may fail miserably.

            In sexual union, two souls are exposed to each other, in love or in bitterness, in ecstasy or indifference. Judaism describes the sexual encounter of tenderness and vulnerability as the “holy of holies.”  But sex without love “uncovers the nakedness” and leaves a deep and lasting wound.

            For this reason, Judaism regards sexuality as the most sacred and the most dangerous form of human communication. 

Brit milah points also to another kind of communication, the transmission of life’s most basic information.  In sexual intercourse, two microscopic vessels can meet, egg and seed, bearing minute scrolls containing the instructions for the creation of a human being.  The weaving together of the scrolls carried by seed and egg is the biological miracle proclaimed by the ritual cutting of milah. 

            The transmission of the information written on the scrolls of our DNA is a Jewish imperative analogous to the responsibility to transmit words of Torah.  In both sets of scrolls, we receive the essence of our ancestors, and by transmitting them we make them immortal. 

We remember Abraham as the first to discover the reality of the unseen God, within his own soul and the souls of his friends and neighbors. The three monotheistic religions all revere him for bringing this insight, this word, to the world. 

But Abraham sought also to pass on the words that he felt burning in his chromosomes.  When we Jews, Abraham’s seed, circumcise our sons, we renew once more brito shel Avraham Avinu, the covenant of Abraham, our father.