Eine unnötige, aufgeschwatzte Zirkumzision und die schier unendliche Kette der Folgen:
Seven years later, soon after our arrival in the United States, my father fell under the influence of some “Chabadniks,” Hasidic followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who were going door to door telling Soviet Jews in Brooklyn and Queens that they had to circumcise their boys.
The reduction of sexual excitement remained a theme in Jewish commentary on circumcision, but it also took on a strange self-effacing aspect. Some Jewish scholars thought that uncircumcised men would prove too irresistible for Jewish women, and that men without a foreskin would not be led into constant temptation. “It is hard for a woman with whom an uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him,” Maimonides wrote
Alex Moshkin, a comparative-literature professor at Koç University, in Istanbul, moved to Israel from Stavropol, in southern Russia. “Many fathers themselves did not do the procedure,” Moshkin told me. “They kind of pushed their kids to do it. The older people were, like, ‘I don’t think I need this.’ ”
Shortly thereafter, I read a BBC article about Alex Hardy, a British man who had committed suicide in 2017 after being circumcised in Canada as a young adult. He did not share his travails with anyone after his operation, but in a long farewell note to his mother he wrote that “these ever-present stimulated sensations from clothing friction are torture within themselves; they have not subsided/normalised from years of exposure. . . . Imagine what would happen to an eyeball if the eyelid was amputated?” That analogy perfectly articulated my own experience.
When it came to her own son, she opted for the brit-shalom naming ceremony (a version of which, sometimes called the brit bat, is also performed for girls). When her son asked her why he wasn’t circumcised, she told him, “You are a Jew in your head and your heart, not your penis.”
For Senderovich, “the uncircumcised Jewish penis is not a problem that needs to be fixed.”
What am I left with in the end? I hope I will continue to get better, though I doubt I will ever be completely right again. I may have to slather my genital with ointments for the rest of my life. There are new associated complications from the various medications, and the treatment of my post-traumatic stress will continue. Even with excellent insurance, I have spent many thousands of dollars for medical care and will continue to spend more.
While discussing the topic with my friends, I came across four instances of pain and disfigurement as a result of late circumcisions or of surgeries to correct botched childhood circumcisions. In the Philippines. In Canada. In Portland. In a neighboring village.
