I was glad to receive your letter the other day. It has been many months since you left and I welcomed the opportunity that reading your words gave me to hear again the sound of your voice. You ask how, after having lived most of my life as a Jew, I found it in myself to embrace as fully and with as much certainty as I have the light that is Christ. Indeed, it is a good story, worth telling. Perhaps you, or those with whom you share it, will find it instructive.

At first, it was strictly business, the way it always is with the Jews. I was in Mainz to keep an eye on Ekbert, the bishop of Mainz, to whom I'd been foolish enough to lend money without sufficient collateral. I went regularly to his sermons, standing at the edge of the crowd, pretending to be interested, but really I just wanted to let him know I was there, that it would not be easy for him to get out of paying me back. Slowly, though, I'm not sure exactly when or precisely why, his words started to mean something to me, and it was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes, a darkness cleared. Of course the binding of Isaac prefigured the crucifixion! And of course Isaiah's prophecy about the virgin was really a foretelling of the virgin birth! How could I not have understood this before? Soon I was not only attending Ekbert's sermons; I was also getting private instruction from him, though I had to use the pretense of going to collect my money so I could see him without arousing the Jews' suspicions. Because they are a devious people, they trust no one, not even each other, and so I made sure to take from Ekbert just enough money to put my neighbors at ease. Of course I gave every bit of it back once my conversion was complete.

Still, even though I am now Hermann, the abbot of this monastery at Scheda, even though the man I was, Judah ben David ha-Levi, is as foreign to me as if he'd never been born, even now, sometimes I hear in my dreams the words of the monk to whom I first confided my desire to accept Christ, before I asked Ekbert to be my teacher - "Get out! Get out, you heathen! You blind Jewish dog! Get out!" Just as they did when I first heard them, the words paralyze me, and I am overcome with fear that I remain beneath these monastic robes nothing more than a Jew, forever blind and, for that blindness, forever damned. Only prayer and the knowledge that Christ's love is all-forgiving help me then. May you never know such doubts.

Yours in Christ,

Hermann
 

•
 

Hermann - yes, he really did exist¹ - did not write this letter, but I am guessing that he wrote or wanted to write one just like it, and so I have imagined for him an interlocutor to whom he could express his frustrations and fears not only without fearing reprisal, but also, and more importantly, with the hope that in speaking to this person he would be able to find some affirmation of what he understood to be true about himself. In this sense, Sex and Character was Otto Weininger's letter to the world, but while the letter I've invented for my version of Hermann succeeds in the sense that he is honest about his doubts and the pain they cause him, Weininger's certainty left him blind.
 

•
 

"The pilpul,"-this is Sander Gilman-"is the quintessentially Jewish mode of argument. It is the basis for all Talmudic discourse. Suspending time and space, it confronts the opinions of all authority, seeking the moment of resolution hidden within seemingly contradictory positions." The pilpul proceeds "based on analogy and approximation and not on the syllogism, the basis of classical logic."² So, for example, in Tractate Bava Metzia, when the rabbis take up the question of what kinds of found objects the finder is obliged to return and what kinds he or she may keep, everyone agrees that if the found object has some identifying mark on it, such that the object's owner has a reasonable expectation of identifying and retrieving it, the finder cannot keep the object without first making a concerted and public effort to locate the owner. If, on the other hand, the found object has no identifying mark, then the finder can keep it without making that effort because we assume that the owner, since he has no expectation of identifying what he has lost, has given up hope of retrieving it. 

In other words, if someone finds "scattered fruit" without any identifying mark, he or she is allowed to keep it. Rabbi Yitzhak wants to know, however, precisely how much fruit spread over precisely how much area qualifies as "scattered." The rabbis then take a moment to define the context in which the fruit is found, deciding that they are not talking about a situation in which the fruit fell by accident or where there is some indication - even if there is no mark on the fruit-that the owner will return later to retrieve what he dropped. Rather, they are dealing with a situation in which grain kernels have been left behind on the threshing room floor, and since the effort required to collect the kernels would be greater than what the owner would gain by collecting them, we can assume the owner will not come back to do so. Anyone who finds the grain, therefore, is entitled to keep it. On the other hand, though, if the grain is spread over a small enough area such that the owner might consider the effort it would take to retrieve the grain worthwhile, then we have to assume that he or she will return for the grain, and so the person who finds it cannot keep it without first attempting to return it.

But another question still remains unanswered. The rabbis want to know the owner's primary motive for abandoning part of his crop. Is it the fact that it will take too much effort to collect the scattered grain? Or is it because the value of the grain once it has been gathered will be too small? So Rabbi Yirmeyah poses the question of whether the same principles would apply to half the amount of grain scattered over half the area. The effort to gather the grain is smaller, but the value of the grain is less. Do we assume the owner would come back for the grain or not? So then the rabbis ask about twice the amount of grain spread out over twice the area, where the effort to gather the grain would be greater, but the value would be greater as well. The discussion then becomes even more complicated when the rabbis start to consider that different kinds of fruit are not only of different sizes, but they have different values. Sesame seeds, for example, are very small and exceptionally hard to pick up, but they were also, in Talmudic times, extremely valuable. Given that fact, someone might indeed be willing to expend the effort of gathering the seeds up, even a relatively small amount scattered over a relatively large area. So is the quantity and square footage that define "scattered" for sesame seeds different from, say, the measurements that define "scattered" for figs?

And so on and so on and so on, until the rabbis pronounce teiku, which means they have concluded that the questions raised by Rabbi Yirmeyah must remain undecided.

And that's it. They just leave it there. The text records no uneasiness that they have not been able to resolve this question, no frustration at Rabbi Yirmeyah for posing an unsolvable problem. They seem to be content that the problem has been articulated, and they move on to the next issue, which is a good deal more complex and has to do with what it means to say that someone who has lost an object has given up hope of finding it - and remember that we are talking here about objects that have no identifying mark. The rabbis want to know the precise moment at which this loss of hope takes effect, freeing the finder of any obligation to locate the owner. Is it from the moment the loss occurs, whether or not the owner is aware of the loss? Or is it from the moment the owner becomes aware that he has lost something? The question may seem silly, but there is an important underlying principle at stake: Is it possible, or even desirable, to consider as having already occurred events that have not yet taken place, but that will without a doubt occur in the future? Here's another variation of the same question: How does one distinguish legally between something that happens of its own accord (a storm, say, that knocks a tree from your yard onto your neighbor's property and damages your neighbor's roof) and something that happens because of human action (the same tree damages the same roof, but this time it's because you were cutting the tree down and it fell in the wrong direction)?³
 

•
 

The Jew takes nothing seriously. So imagine you're a man walking down the road at the time of The Malleus Maleficarum. Not far ahead something that looks like the largest worm you've ever seen is trying to crawl across the road. When you get closer, you realize it's a penis, probably just escaped from the cage it was kept in by the witch that stole it. Which portion of the law should apply? Is finding the penis the same thing as finding, say, a lost sheep? (Or in this case perhaps a horse, since the witches, you'll remember, feed their stolen penises barley and oats?) Or is it like finding a piece of food that fell from the bag of the person who bought it? Or suppose instead of one penis, you happen across an entire cage's worth scattered along the road? Does it matter precisely how scattered they are? Do we assume that a man who has lost his penis will be able to identify it and so, by definition, cannot be said to have given up hope of finding it? Or is it all moot because the penises were stolen? And since we're talking here about penises that have become unattached to the men whose bodies they used to adorn, we know, I mean, we really know, they had to have been stolen. Must you announce what you've found? How, assuming someone comes to claim what you've found, will you identify its rightful owner? Under what circumstances, if any, can you keep a penis you have found for yourself? Why on earth would you want to?

Well, if you were an eighteenth or nineteenth century man of medicine or science, you'd want one in your specimen collection, specifically a Black one, because the study of comparative anatomy pretty much demanded that you have one. Founded by Johan Friedrich Blumenbach, this new scientific field treated the body as a text even more revealing of the differences between and among groups of people than their languages or culturally determined behaviors, especially when the differences in question were racial. "Every peculiarity of the body has" - this is the nineteenth century anatomist Edward Drinker Cope, quoted by David M. Friedman in his book, A Mind Of Its Own - "...some corresponding significance in the mind, and the causes of the former are the remoter causes of the latter," a principle understood in practice to mean that larger physical or physiological features conferred superiority on the race that possessed them. With one exception. The larger penises that Black men were understood to have - the myth actually dates at least as far back as the ancient Romans - conferred on them not sexual superiority but the bestiality that white people believed defined Black inferiority.⁴

Even in the early years of the twentieth century, the idea was widespread that the genitals of Black men precluded any possibility of equality with whites. In "The Negro as a Distinct Ethnic Factor in Civilization," published in 1903, Dr. William Lee Howard developed this idea at some length, arguing that because "all intellectual development [in Black men] cease[d] with the advent of puberty," and because Black men possessed "enormously developed" genitals that compelled them to devote their entire lives "to the worship of Priapus," resulting in the corresponding enlargement of the sexual centers of their brains, the only way Blacks could be elevated by education - the phrasing that was common at the time - was if that education managed somehow to "reduce the large size of the African's penis."⁵
The full significance of this digression into the intellectual history of racism will become clear later. For now, what I want you to hold in your thoughts as you read is the fact that throughout history people have believed that what they think they know about the nature of a man's penis somehow bespeaks the true essence of his character.
 

•
 

I loved to study Talmud when I was in yeshiva. Not only was the intellectual gamesmanship fun for its own sake, but I was, I believed, involved in the highest pursuit to which a Jewish man could devote his life, learning Torah, for such learning was decidedly not for its own sake; it was commanded by God; it was, by definition, a path towards God; and it is true: learning, being learned, has been a core value of Jewish masculinity for thousands of years. It's why, in the shtetls, families were honored if their daughters married a yeshiva boy, and why they were willing to support those boys in their studies even if it meant the boys did not bring a single dime of income into the household; and it is why the "gentle, studious sweet man" that is the standard image we have of men who become rabbis, and whom our culture encourages us to imagine as sexless or at least sexually unattractive, are represented within rabbinic texts, including the Talmud, "as the paramount desiring male subject and object of female desire."⁶

In Weininger's time, of course, the Christians didn't agree, and it was with the Christians that Weininger had thrown in his lot. Here, then, is Weininger on women's intellect and reasoning ability:
 

The logical axioms are the foundation of all formation of mental conceptions, and women are devoid of these...nor do they fence off all other possibilities from their conception by using the principle of contradictories. This want of definiteness in the ideas of women is the source of that "sensitiveness" which gives the widest scope to vague associations and allows the most radically different things to be grouped together. And even women with the best and least limited memories never free themselves from this kind of association by feelings. For instance, if they "feel reminded" by a word of some definite colour [sic], or by a human being of some definite thing to eat - forms of association common with women - they rest content with the subjective association, and do not try to find out the source of the comparison, and if there is any relation in it to actual fact.⁷

The impulse to lie is stronger in woman, because, unlike that of man, her memory is not continuous, whilst her life is discrete, unconnected, discontinuous, swayed by the sensations and perceptions of the moment instead of dominating them. Unlike man, her experiences float past without being referred, so to speak, to a definite, permanent centre; she does not feel herself, past and present, to be one and the same throughout all her life.⁸

3.
A question for Jewish men: What would you do if God, the God-with-a-capital-g of the Hebrew Bible, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the omnipotent and omniscient Holy One Blessed Be He, asked you to marry Him? Seriously. What would you do? I know this is a question that's hard to think. Not only does God have no substance, right? I mean, what precisely would you be marrying if you married God? But even to imagine as a brief glimmer of possibility that He would descend into your life in such a familiar way is a kind of pride that feels tantamount to blasphemy. After all, if He did speak to you - about anything, much less marriage - it would mean you were in some way on a par with the great men to whom God did speak, and you certainly are not going to make such a claim about yourself. But isn't there something else going on here? Something that's a little harder to admit? After all, God is male. No? True, we're not supposed to think of Him as having a body, much less a penis, but He is male, and it's not just that we use the masculine pronoun when we refer to him. The fact is He embodies all of the qualities, good and bad, that we associate with adult masculinity. He is immeasurably strong and correspondingly invulnerable; He uses that strength to nurture and protect those He favors and to punish those he does not; He is jealous and possessive, demanding absolute loyalty and obedience from those whose love he commands - and let us not forget that He does in fact command that love - and then He tests that love, and He tests it and He tests it and He tests it; and you could argue that a female deity might behave in the same way, and perhaps there have been female deities that have behaved in precisely the same way, but try thinking about the god I am talking about here as female - not some abstract idea of an all encompassing deity, but the god who is called God in the Torah - try referring to that god as she and you'll see what I mean: it just doesn't fit. So you might as well admit it, part of why my question about God's marriage proposal is so disturbing is that the marriage, assuming you said yes - and what else would you say? - would be a homosexual one.
 

•
 

Genesis 17:1-14; 23-27: When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, "I am El Shaddai. Walk in my ways and be blameless. I will establish my covenant between me and you and I will make you exceedingly numerous."

Abram threw himself on his face; and God spoke to him further, "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the father of a multitude of nations. And you shall no longer be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I make you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fertile, and make nations of you; and kings shall come forth from you. I will maintain my covenant between me and you, and your offspring to come, as an everlasting covenant throughout the ages, to be God to you and your offspring to come. I assign the land you sojourn in to you and your offspring to come, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding. I will be your God."

God further said to Abraham, "As for you, you and your offspring to come throughout the ages shall keep my covenant. Such shall be the covenant between me and you and your offspring to follow which you shall keep: every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and that shall be the sign of the covenant between me and you. And throughout the generations, every male among you shall be circumcised at the age of eight days. As for the homeborn slave and the one bought from the outsider who is not of your offspring, they must be circumcised, homeborn and purchased alike. Thus shall my covenant be marked in your flesh as an everlasting pact. And if any male who is uncircumcised fails to circumcise the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his kin; he has broken my covenant."

First, just to drive the point home, the three promises God makes to Abraham - I will make you exceedingly fertile; I will maintain my covenant...as an everlasting covenant; I assign the land you sojourn in to you and your offspring to come - correspond precisely to the three social obligations David Gilmore identifies in Manhood In The Making as the core of heterosexual manhood: to produce offspring, to provide security for dependents and to supply those dependents with the material conditions necessary for their survival.⁹ God's promises, in other words, are the traditional promises a man makes to a woman when he proposes marriage, and what God asks of Abraham, that he mark himself and all he owns, and that he demand this of his descendants for all time, can be read as a larger version of the ownership of his wife that a husband could traditionally claim - in this country, even as recently as the eighteenth century - and of the function she assumed, assuming she gave birth to boys, as the vehicle through which his name would be perpetuated. 

Look again at the passage in which God outlines what he will do for Abraham if Abraham accepts the covenant, but imagine Abraham as a woman. It's hard not to hear in God's words at least the echoes of a marriage proposal.
 

I will make you exceedingly fertile, and make nations of you; and kings shall come forth from you. I will maintain my covenant between me and you, and your offspring to come, as an everlasting covenant throughout the ages [and] I assign the land you sojourn in to you and your offspring to come, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding. 

What does Abraham do? He throws himself on his face and he laughs, and he asks himself Can a child be born to a man a hundred years old, or can Sarah bear a child at ninety? Is he being coy? Not the falling-down-on-his-face part, because he is after all in conversation with God, but rather his laughter, and his question, which is not so different from the question-"Oh, come on, why would you possibly want to marry me?" - that a woman might ask who felt herself unworthy of the proposal being made to her, or who wanted to be sure that the man making the proposal was truly sincere. Remember, though, he asks this question of himself, in his heart, according to the Hebrew. Abraham does not confront God with these doubts, though God of course already knows what Abraham is thinking. Instead, Abraham reminds God that he already has a son, Ishmael, who also needs to be provided for - the way a single mother might - and so God promises to make Ishmael fertile and exceedingly numerous as well, but that it will be through Isaac, the son to whom God predicts Sarah will give birth, that the covenant is to be maintained.

It is a stretch to think about God's covenant with Abraham in these terms - I feel this even as I write these words - not least because it means that the circumcision God demands of Abraham to seal this covenant is a kind of wedding ring and that my own bris, therefore, was a kind of marriage ceremony, forcibly joining me to a god I neither knew nor knew I wanted, a god I might very well have walked away from much earlier than I did if I'd been given the chance to make a choice. But that's for later. Right now what I want you to see is that, strange as this reading of God's covenant with Abraham might seem, it is consistent with the way the covenant is portrayed by the prophets. Ezekiel, for example, heterosexualizes the covenant quite explicitly:
 

When I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you: "Live in spite of your blood" [and] I let you grow like the plants of the field...until your breasts became firm and your hair sprouted. You were still naked and bare when I passed by you [again] and saw that your time for love had arrived. So I spread my robe over you and covered your nakedness, and I entered into a covenant with you by oath [and] you became mine. I bathed you in water, and washed the blood off you, and anointed you with oil. I clothed you with embroidered garments, and gave you sandals of dolphin leather to wear, and wound fine linen about your head, and dressed you in silks. I decked you out in finery and put bracelets on your arms and a chain around your neck. I put a ring in your nose, and earrings in your ears, and a splendid crown on your head....Your food was choice flour, honey, and oil. You grew more and more beautiful, and became fit for royalty. Your beauty won you fame among the nations, for it was perfected through the splendor which I set upon you.... (16:6-14)

You lavished your favors on every passerby; they were his. You even took some of your clothes and made yourself tapestried platforms and fornicated on them....You took your beautiful things, made of gold and silver that I had given you, and you made yourself phallic images and fornicated with them. You took your embroidered cloths to cover them; and you set My oil and My incense before them. The food that I had given you - the choice flour, the oil, and the honey, which I had provided for you to eat - you set it before them for a pleasing odor....After all your wickedness...you built yourself an eminence and made yourself a mound in every square. You built your mound at every crossroad; and you sullied your beauty and spread your legs to every passerby, and you multiplied your harlotries. You played the whore with your neighbors, the lustful Egyptians-you multiplied your harlotries to anger me....Yet you were not like a prostitute, for you spurned fees; [you were like] the adulterous wife who welcomes strangers instead of her husband. Gifts are made to all prostitutes, but you made gifts to all your lovers, and bribed them to come to you from every quarter for your harlotries. You were the opposite of other women: you solicited instead of being solicited; you paid fees instead of being paid fees. Thus you were just the opposite. (15-19; 23-26; 31-34)

So he punishes her. He has to. His honor - and, at least within his value system, hers too - depends on it.

Because of your brazen effrontery, offering your nakedness to your lovers for harlotry...I will assuredly assemble all the lovers to whom you gave your favors, along with everybody you accepted and everybody you rejected. I will assemble them against you from every quarter, and I will expose your nakedness to them, and they shall see all your nakedness. I will inflict upon you the punishment of women who commit adultery and murder, and I will direct bloody and impassioned fury against you. I will deliver you into their hands, and they shall tear down your eminence and level your mounds; and they shall strip you of your clothing and take away your dazzling jewels, leaving you naked and bare. Then they shall assemble a mob against you to pelt you with stones and pierce you with their swords. They shall put your houses to the flames and execute punishment upon you...this I will put a stop to your harlotry, and you shall pay no more fees. When I have satisfied My fury upon you and My rage has departed from you, then I will be tranquil; I will be angry no more. (36-42)

The Torah, however, is not a TV crime series, and the passages I have quoted describe not actual events but metaphoric ones, and it is the metaphor I want you to pay attention to: God fucks Israel - it's what "I spread my robe over you" is a euphemism for; it's the same expression the text uses to tell us that Boaz fucked Ruth (Ruth 3:3-9)10-and God, through Ezekiel, presents that act of penetration as being synonymous with the covenant, which Israel betrays, and then God treats that betrayal as an act of adultery. In other words, whether you believe that the text of Ezekiel is divinely given prophecy or artistically inspired poetry, it is fair to say that the ancient Israelites understood their covenant with God - and, if you believe in God, that God understood it as well - as a kind of marriage, with God as the husband and Israel as the wife. 

Do you see the irony here? Who is it that God actually fucks, metaphorically speaking? With whom does God have this covenant that He so jealously and zealously and sexually defends when his beloved starts to consort with other lovers? It's not the women of Israel, but the men, those who have been circumcised, on whose bodies the covenant is written and with whom, exclusively, God entered into the covenant in the first place. So when God says through Ezekiel that Israel was "the opposite of other women...[paying] fees instead of being paid fees," what He was really saying was that Israel's sin was to act like a man, like the man he collectively is - because it is, after all, men who most commonly pay prostitutes - and so the problem was not only Israel's promiscuity but that he had forgotten his place in the order of things and ceased to behave like the woman Abraham agreed to be when he first accepted God's proposal.

I know this thinking borders on, if it has not already reached, the blasphemous, but the fact is, as Howard Eilberg-Schwartz points out in God's Phallus, that circumcision, the mark of the covenant, is consistently understood in Jewish tradition through the lens of femininity and feminine beauty, making Jewish men desirable to God in the way that those characteristics make women desirable to men. This vision of the Jewish male body as female - or, more precisely, as requiring feminization in order to be attractive to God - is echoed in the sages' understanding of the role played by all of God's commandments in men's lives, not just circumcision:
 

A parable: a king of flesh and blood said to his wife, "Deck yourself out with all your jewelry so that you look desirable to me." This also the Holy One said to Israel, "My children be decked by my commandments so you look desirable to me: Hence Scripture says, You are beautiful, My darling (Song of Songs 6:4).11

The Midrash (Genesis Rabbah 11:6) provides its own answer:

A pagan philosopher asked Rabbi Oshaia: "If circumcision is so beloved of God, why was the mark of circumcision not given to Adam at his creation?" Rabbi Oshaia replied: "Observe that every thing that was created during the six days of creation needs finishing: mustard needs sweetening, wheat needs grinding, and even man needs finishing.¹²

Rabbi Levi said: This [imperfection that the foreskin represents] may be illustrated by a noble lady whom the king commanded, "Walk before me." She walked before him and her face became ashen, for she thought, perhaps some defect may have been found in me? Said the king to her, "You have no defect except that the nail of your little finger is slightly too long; pare it and the defect will be gone" So said God to Abraham, "You have no blemish except this foreskin. Remove it and the defect will be gone...."¹³

In an essay called "The Bible's Sleeping Beauty and Her Great-Granddaughters," for example, Arthur Waskow suggests that "removing the tough outer casing of [a boy's] genitals makes [that boy] - at least symbolically - more vulnerable, more open, more 'womanly.' By shedding even a little blood from his [penis], he imitates women's menstrual bleeding," turning his body, Waskow continues, into a kind of totem against the "mastery...and activism" (read: desire to control and competitive aggression) with which men might otherwise "swallow up and destroy the world."¹⁴ And here is Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin making a similar point, but without explicit reference to the menstrual metaphor that Waskow seems to think is so important:

Circumcision teaches us that there are limits to everything. Men especially need to hear this. We do not single-handedly control everything. The world is not completely ours. A piece of us belongs to God. After all, when God revealed the Divine Self to Abram, God's Name is revealed as El Shaddai [which] can be translated as the God Who said, 'Dai! Enough! There are limits to what you can do in your life!

This is a very important God for men to meet. 

And what shall we do with the argument that circumcision diminishes sexual pleasure and traumatizes young men? Sexual potency, while wonderful, isn't everything. The physician and moral theorist Leon Kass reminds us that Judaism sees virility and potency as less important than decency, righteousness, and holiness.¹⁵

•
 

"Whatsamatta, kike?! You're Jewish dick ain't big enough? Hit me ya' fucking Hebrew pussy!"

There were four of them and one of me, and the one screaming in my face was swinging a chain he would have loved to hit me with, but I was neither stupid nor angry enough to take on all of them at once. I had a hunch they wouldn't lay a hand on me unless they could say that I had provoked them, so I stood with my back flat against the brick wall of the elementary school down the block from where I lived and concentrated on keeping my hands loose and open at my sides.

"We're building an oven in my basement," the leader's smile was the kind you see on the movie villain's face as he prepares to leave the hero to die a slow and painful death. He folded the chain into the pocket of his coat, "When it's finished, remember, we know where you live." They walked away, and despite the fact that what I really wanted to do was run as fast as I could, I forced myself to walk as well. When I got home, I told my mother what had happened. "Again?" she asked me. "Eventually, you know, you're going to have to fight."

"But Ma, there were four of them. What was I supposed to do?"

"Sometimes," she said, "you have to be a man and stand up for yourself, and if that means getting hurt, then hurt is what you have to get."

Maybe Jewish dicks are never big enough.
 

•
 

Antiochus Epiphanes, the emperor whose defeat we celebrate during the eight days of Chanukah, outlawed circumcision on pain of death, for the boys who'd been cut as well as their parents. During the Middle Ages, whole communities of Jews chose to die rather than deny through forced conversion the "divine covenant" of which circumcision is the physical sign, and it took real courage and true faith to continue to circumcise Jewish boys during the Nazi Holocaust. In Hasidic Tales Of The Holocaust, Yaffa Eliach relates a story told at the time in which, during a "children's Aktion," a massacre of Jewish children, a woman demands that a Nazi soldier give her his pen knife.
 

She bent down and picked up...a bundle of rags on the ground near the sawdust. She unwrapped the bundle. Amidst the rags on a snow-white pillow was a newborn babe, asleep. With a steady hand she opened the pocket knife and circumcised the baby. In a clear, intense voice she recited the blessing of the circumcision[,] straightened her back, looked up to the heavens, and said, "God of the Universe, you have given me a healthy child. I am returning to you a wholesome, kosher Jew." She walked over to the German, gave him back his blood-stained knife, and handed him her baby on his snow-white pillow.¹⁶

•
 

Another joke: A man needs to have his watched fixed in a small Jewish town he's visiting in pre-World War II Poland. He walks down the main street and finds a shop with a window full of timepieces. Inside, there's an old Jewish man bent over a book, lost in his studies.

The man with the watch approaches the storekeeper, "Can you help me, please? I need to have my watch fixed."

"I'm sorry," the old man answers, "I can't." He goes back to studying.

"What do you mean you can't?" the man with the watch ask, at first only surprised, but then a little angry as he begins to suspect some not-so-subtle discrimination. "Are you saying you don't want my business?"

The old man glances up and says with a tired sigh, "Look, I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do."

"There's nothing you can do?!" The guy with the watch walks up to the desk and places his hand across the page the old man is reading, "My watch is broken. I want you to fix it, now!"

The old man sits up straight this time and, looking the guy with the watch straight in the eye, says, "Look, it's not that I don't want your business. You seem like a nice guy and I'd help you if I could. I'd even fix your watch for free. I just can't do it. That's all. I'm sorry."

"You're sorry!" The guy with the watch is now livid. "What kind of a watch shop is this?"

Without looking up, the old man says, "It's not a watch shop."

"It's not? Then what the hell are all those timepieces doing in the window?"

"Mister," the old man answers, "If you were a mohel, what would you put in the window?"
 

•
 

The house was full of people. I could see in the room beyond the room where I mingled with the other guests the feast that had been laid out for after the cutting. People were chatting, joking, shaking hands with old friends, and making new acquaintances, but when the mohel arrived, the atmosphere became immediately serious. He shook hands with the boy's father and with those other men who would participate in the ceremony. The women left the room and the room grew quiet. 

The boy, bundled tightly in a blanket, was brought in and placed in the hands of the man who had been chosen for the honor of holding the child while the preliminary prayers were recited. Then, the boy was given to the sandek, the man who would hold the infant in his lap when the cutting was actually done. My view was blocked as the older men crowded around so they could see, but I knew when the cut came because that little boy howled a full-throated protest against existence and the world. His scream filled my ears, the room, the entire house with his pain. The men smiled and laughed as if they didn't hear the child's voice. Above his wailing, they shouted mazel tov! - congratulations! - and shook hands with each other and with those who had participated in the ceremony. Some of them even began to sing. The boy's screaming did not stop as I was taken to meet his father, who smiled at me proudly, gripping my hand, and as his still shrieking son was carried from the room, steered me into the dining area where people were beginning to eat. "There's plenty of everything," he said, "Enjoy yourself!"

I screamed like that. I know I did. Even as I write this, my stomach tightens; my legs close to protect my groin; my hands close into fists, and the muscles of my throat contract, holding down the howl that wants to rise from the pit of my gut. My body remembers. Or at least I want to think that it does. I don't remember how old I was when I first understood that I'd been circumcised, but I know I was very young, and I remember someone telling me that my foreskin had served no useful purpose anyway and that the operation had not hurt very much. As I grew older, I came to believe that the ritual had unwrapped my body like a gift, returning it to what should have been the condition of my birth, and so I imagined my circumcision ceremony saturated with self-conscious majesty. I saw my boy's body wrapped warmly and securely in a blanket, peacefully at ease in the lap of my Uncle Max. I was smiling, drunk on the wine-soaked cloth I'd been given to suck on to dull the small pain I would feel. Prayers were uttered over my flesh, and after the cutting was done, my entrance into the community of Jewish men was celebrated with food and drink. I pictured myself being passed lovingly among the guests, cuddled and coddled as they talked about the man I would grow up to be - but Enjoy yourself!? This was not the peaceful ceremony I'd imagined, and as the boy's father left me to fend for myself among the other guests, moving off not to check on his son, whose crying was still audible from the room on the second floor where they'd taken him, but to greet a group of guests that had just arrived and to embrace friends and relatives, I felt mocked and betrayed. The celebration before me seemed the epitome of cynicism and hypocrisy, a sanctification and celebration not of a child's newly established connection to the god he will know as his when he is old enough to know, but of pain, meaningless and gratuitous pain.
 

•
 

"You don't know who you are anymore!" We've just finished eating lunch and my grandmother is sitting across from me at her dining room table. "All your traveling, your reading, exploring other cultures," she purses her lips and looks down. Then she tilts her head ever so slightly to the right and nods a couple of times, a gesture that usually means she's looking for a nicer way to say what she really wants to say. After a few seconds, she raises her face to me but can barely meet my eyes. "You've forgotten where you come from," she says at last, her voice more sad than accusing.

I know what this is about - I told her last week that my wife and I have decided not to have our son circumcised - but I ask anyway. She knows I know, and I hear in her voice when she answers how much she resents my making her say it, "You're only asking for trouble, you know. When he gets older he's going to want to know why he's not like you; he's going to think you don't want him to be like you; and what are you going to tell him when he asks you? Have you thought about that? What are you going to tell him?"
 

•
 

My two-and-a-half-year-old son, who's been sitting without his diaper on the carpet in the living room, gets up and sits down next to me on the couch. "Dad," he says, "my dool is soft."

"Well, it's supposed to be soft," I tell him.

"No, it's soft," he says, his intonation making clear that I didn't understand him the first time.

"You don't like it when it's soft?" I ask, waiting to see what he does with the opening I've given him.
"No," he answers without missing a beat, "I want it to be big...like yours."

"Don't worry," I say, "when you get bigger, your dool  will get bigger too. Right now, it's the just right size for -"

Before I can finish my sentence - "for your body" - my son looks up at me, his eyes widening and his mouth curling into a smile. "Dad," he says, "come see my tools!" - my son is a budding handyman - "I need to fix the refrigerator!" And as if the previous conversation had not taken place, he grabs my hand and leads me off to his room, where we retrieve his plastic hammer and screwdriver so he can make sure the refrigerator continues to keep our food cold.

As we're walking, I laugh at myself, for I of course saw in my son's desire for a penis as a big as mine a small moment of crisis, a foreshadowing of all the ways in which he will try to measure up to me and find himself wanting. Yet who knows what he really meant by what he said? And even assuming he meant exactly what he said, who knows what significance, precisely, he attaches to the notion of big or what he thinks it says about me that my penis is bigger than his? I remember how the other day when were watching television, my son made a point of laying on his side in as close an approximation to my posture as he could achieve and how he insisted that I notice him, "Dad! Look! I'm sitting just like you are!" Or how he takes his laptop-like alphabet-teaching-computer-game and sets it up so he can sit like I sit at my computer and type. More and more he wants to be like me, to do the things I do, and so it could be that his comment about his penis had nothing to do with any of the phallic anxiety I could not help but hear in his words. Maybe he was just acknowledging that while he can sit or type like I do, he cannot bring his body into congruence with mine. 

My grandmother's question and accusation comes back to me - What will you tell him when he asks why he's not circumcised and you are? He's going to think you didn't want him to be like you! - and I wonder not so much what I will tell him, but whether I will ever be able to know precisely what he means by asking.

Notes
1 Adapted from Ibid. 29-31.
2 Ibid. 90.
3 My summary here is taken entirely from Rabbi Israel V. Berman, ed., Tractate Bava Metzia, Part Ii, vol. 2, The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition (New York: Random House, 1990) 3-10.
4 David M. Friedman, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (New York: Penguin Books, 2001) 106-07.
5 Quoted in Ibid. 120-21.
6 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 2.
7 Weininger, Sex and Character 115. Emphasis mine.
8 Ibid. 88.
9 David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) 222-3.
10 Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God's Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994) 111.
11 Quoted in Ibid. 171.
12 Quoted in Jeffrey K. Salkin, Searching for My Brothers: Jewish Men in a Gentile World (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1999) 176.
13 Quoted in Eilberg-Schwartz, God's Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism.
14 Arthur Waskow, "The Bible's Sleeping Beauty and Her Great-Granddaughters," Tikkun, 125.
15 Salkin, Searching for My Brothers: Jewish Men in a Gentile World 177-78.
16 Yaffa Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 1982) 152.