GENESIS 17, or, "Foreskin's Lament"

God tells Abram - for what, the zillionth time? - that he'll make a great nation of him, that his children will outnumber the stars, etc. Only this time, God tacks on one, tiny condition...

So. In case you didn't get the memo, God likes Abram a lot and wants him to be the father of many nations, of kings, of generations stretching on into the far future. God even gives Abram Canaan to sweeten the deal. To celebrate, God gives Abram a new name - "Abraham". "Abram" means exalted father, while "Abraham" means "father of many". Sarai is also renamed "Sarah", which means, well, nothing really. God just likes the sound of it better.

God promises to give Abraham a son through Sarah, that this son will be made into a great nation. Abraham wants God to bless the son he already had by his maidservant Hagar, and God says that yes, Ishmael will be blessed and his descendants too will makes a great nation of themselves (Today we call this great nation Islam). But God says that even though Ishmael will be blessed, it is Isaac, the son of Sarah with whom he, God, shall keep his covenant.

God promises all this great stuff to Abraham, but he says that there needs to be something Abraham and his descendants will do to keep their part of the bargain. God tells Abraham that to be apart of the covenant, every one of his male descendants will need to be circumcised - "My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant".

So Abraham, at age 99, is circumcised, and then Ishmael, and then every male in the household. It couldn't have been pretty.



Shalom Auslander in his new book, "Foreskin's Lament", discusses what I think has to be a pretty common dilemma to modern day Jews and Christians. Here in Genesis 17, circumcision becomes a foundational tenant of all Abrahamic religion, yet today the practice of circumcision is being seriously questioned. Have we been mutilizing ourselves for millennia for nothing? Circumcising your child is a black and white testament of your faith in a time where the certainty of people's faith is more gray than ever.

Shalom Auslander, a writer deeply conflicted about his thoughts on God, talked about this difficult decision in an interview he gave on NPR's Fresh Air. This is my own transcription:

Terry Gross: You know, your memoir is called "Foreskin's Lament, and part of what your memoir is about is deciding whether or not you wanted to circumcise your son, and of course, circumcision is like part of what signifies you as Jewish. It's like the most basic of ceremonies for male babies... Must've been a really hard decision for you to make.

Shalom Auslander: It was incredibly difficult and it was at that point or afterward when I realized that that's really what the book was about. I had spent most of the time writing stories that took place in the past, and I was furious... I was enraged that when a nurse turned to me and said, "This is a boy", it turned my life upside-down. I wasn't sitting there saying, "I can't wait to get him a little Ranger's uniform", or, "It's going to be so much fun playing football with him", or, "Isn't it going to be great having a little boy". Instead, what my mind became incredibly occupied with was, "Do I mutilate this kid or don't I?" And I was furious that because a maniac 6000 years ago did this, and somebody wrote a story about it, here I was and the joy of becoming a father was utterly overwhelmed by this process, this decision. And I didn't get to enjoy the prospect of being a father. It was this craziness from the past coming out and stealing something that should have been purely joyous.

TG: So, would you tell our listeners whether or not you decided to circumcise your son?

SA: I think it's very funny that talking about my sons willy ruins the book. So, his name is Pax, and if you're listening to this in 20 years, apologies ahead of time. The birth was difficult. We didn't decide, we went into labor - isn't that great how I say "we went into labor" like I had to do all the work? - we went into labor not knowing what we were going to do. And our son kind of had a very difficult time getting into this world. And, without going into too many details, I was afraid that God might make it very easy for him to leave. And, it was right after that, right after he was born and everything was sort of okay, after a very harrowing few hours, that a doctor came in and asked us if we were going to circumcise, and we looked at each other and my wife shrugged and I shrugged and I thought, 'I'm not messing around with this guy right now'. There's this tiny little boy hooked up to a bunch of tubes and I said "Yeah, we will". And I also mention in the book how the next day, they came and they took his little sealed cart that he was in and rolled him down the hall and did it and I couldn't watch, I walked out and heard him screaming and I say in the book that the moment my son became a Jew was the moment I felt least like one.

God on You Tube: More Shalom!