Circumcision why jewish

We say blessings and we celebrate Shabbat. But when I was pregnant with my first child, my husband and I decided that if we had a boy, we would not want to have a public circumcision, a ritual that is traditional in our Jewish culture. We did not find out the sex of our baby during my pregnancy, but if we had a boy, we discussed having him circumcised medically in a way of our own choosing.

When our daughter was born, we chose to have a naming within the first week of her life. We did not share her name with family or friends until she was welcomed into the community at the naming ceremony.

I am now pregnant with our second child, and should we have a son, a naming ceremony will be held in the same way so the community can gather and be a part of the celebration.

For us, personally, we do not want our child's sex to play a part in the welcoming and naming ceremony. I spent many years training on LGBTQ issues, and it is in my heart that gender is developed by society and children should be free to make their own choices as they continue to grow in the world. I want our children to be celebrated in the same way at birth, no matter their sex or gender.

As a rabbi, I empower people to take ownership of their own Jewish journey. I just started my own religious non-profit called Tackling Torah to help everyday people search for holiness in our everyday lives.

There is a shift in how millennials and young families are choosing to engage with religion so I am meeting them where they are at in order to provide them with a meaningful Jewish life. I help couples plan personalized lifecycle events—like a wedding or birth—and figure out what families can do to include their religion into the ceremony in a way that is comfortable to them. I have had a lot of conversations with families about circumcision. There are a lot of things families consider when they are presented with welcoming a baby boy into their lives.

The text makes it clear that circumcision must occur on the eighth day of life and falls to every Jewish male. No exception. Those who choose not to obey this commandment, continues God, will be cut off from the Jewish people for breaking this sacred agreement.

Without asking a single question. Spoiler Alert: For those who have yet to read the story, Isaac lives. Nor does Abe ask any questions about circumcising himself and committing all future generations to the same act.

The text does not explicitly provide a reason. And the Rabbis were anticipating the inevitable questions future generations would have. The more usual reason given by Jewish thinkers is the obvious one that the sign of the covenant through all the generations has to be in the very organ of generation. But, whatever the origin and the reasons for the practice, faithful Jews have circumcised their male children as the most distinctive sign of their loyalty to God.

Brit Milah. Circumcision, with all its pain, reminds us of our partnership with God and the pain of fixing a broken world. Some scholars hypothesize that in ancient Hebrew, hatan didn't only mean "bridegroom" but "man undergoing circumcision. This double meaning of "someone undergoing circumcision" and "bridegroom" may seem bizarre.

But in Arabic, the same root H-T-N carries both the meaning of circumcision and marriage. Zipporah's statement may attest that ancient Hebrew also used this same root to mean circumcision and marriage. There is physical support for this thesis: the peoples who spoke West Semitic languages roughly correspond to the ancient peoples who practiced circumcision. Speakers of the East Semitic languages did not practice circumcision, and they don't use this root neither for marriage nor for circumcision.

This tidy separation implies that circumcision arose after the West and East Semitic people split, but before the West Semitic peoples split again into the different language communities, including the speakers of Arabic and Hebrew. The way West Semites used H-T-N may hint at how the root took on the meaning of both "wedding" and "circumcision".

West Semitic languages don't use this root for just any marriage related words. Words of the root H-T-N appear in words for "bridegroom" but not bride, for "father of the bride" but not for "father of the bridegroom.

Perhaps, at some ancient time, before Arabic and Hebrew diverged, weddings were events at which the father of the bride circumcised the bridegroom. A study published in applying Bayesian regression models used by geneticists to determine biological family trees to determine the family tree of Semitic languages concluded that West and East Semitic languages split in about BCE, so circumcision probably came about after that date.

The same study also concluded that Arabic split from the rest of the other West Semitic languages at around BCE, so circumcision probably came about before that. Otherwise it is difficult to explain how Arabic and the rest of the West Semitic languages share the root H-T-N in relation to marriage. According to the same research, these West Semitic people from whom proto-Arabic speakers splintered probably lived in modern-day Syria. Since the first archaeological evidence of circumcision is a tomb drawing from ancient Egypt dating to the 24th century BCE, it could have been introduced to the Egyptians by Semitic tribes as they expanded southward.

So it seems that Jews circumcise their sons because their ancient Semitic forebears did, but why did they start circumcising in the first place? Since circumcision was carried out on the sexual organ, and probably at puberty, we can assume they thought it would improve fecundity.

Indeed, fertility is exactly what is promised Abraham by God in return for circumcision. But where would these ancient Semitic people get the idea that cutting their foreskin off would improve fertility? The answer may be from their farming habits. Archaeological evidence shows that the farming of grapevines and olive trees was spreading through the region during this period. These plants require regular pruning to increase yields.