Celebrating a Ritual as It Comes Under Fire

A few dozen friends and family huddled around Rabbi Mendy Zwiebel and his family last week as he held his 8-day-old son on a pillow and invited loved ones to say prayers while a fellow rabbi organized his tools on a nearby table. The youngest Zwiebel—he was yet to be named—was about to go through one of Judaism’s most sacred rituals, the bris milah, more commonly known as circumcision.

The room grew quiet as Rabbi Gil Leeds of Berkeley approached the infant, first with a small cup of sweet wine, and then with a clamp and scissors. The baby cried and someone at the front of the room shouted assuredly, “Nothing’s happened yet!” Leeds moved in, affixed the clamp and, with a quick snip, off came the foreskin. Seconds later, the crying stopped, a few more prayers were said, mother Chana Zwiebel whisked the child upstairs for a lesson in cleaning the area, and it was celebration time.

The Zwiebels, who run the Chabad Jewish Center at Chico State, were excited to share the celebration of their son’s rite of passage with friends, family and this reporter. For those uninitiated into the Jewish tradition of male circumcision, a small booklet handed out before last Wednesday’s bris gives a succinct description: “The performance of Bris Milah is one of the most sacred rituals in Jewish life. Bris Milah is the tie that forever binds a Jewish boy to his Creator.” It goes on to explain that through circumcision “a boy identifies as a Jew at the source of life, forever linked to the source of all life.”

It should not come as a big surprise, then, that last year, when San Francisco circumcision opponents rallied enough support to get a ban on the November ballot, Jews felt their religious freedoms were under attack.

“It’s a religious right,” Leeds explained during an interview after the ritual. “For the Jewish people, circumcision dates back to our covenant with God.”

Mostly because of San Francisco’s proposed ban, male circumcision made major headlines last year and became a divisive issue in some communities. Opponents argued that the practice was unnecessary and barbaric—they termed it “mutilation” in many instances and even likened it to female circumcision. And they questioned parents’ right to alter their baby boys’ bodies without their children’s consent.

Circumcision, a religious rite for Jews and Muslims, is also widely practiced in hospitals throughout the world. In the United States, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data suggest the procedure hit its peak in 1999, when 62.5 percent of infant boys were circumcised. That number has fallen in recent years, and in 2010 the rate was 54.7 percent. A Time magazine report analyzing this trend points to an American Academy of Pediatrics statement in 1999, reaffirmed in 2005, that there was not enough information to recommend circumcision of newborn boys. This may have affected insurance coverage of the procedure, writes Time reporter Meredith Melnick.

“However, the authors of the CDC report prefaced their findings by noting that recent evidence shows that circumcision greatly reduces the risk of HIV transmission through intercourse,” Melnick writes.

Some physicians, like Chico pediatrician Dr. John Asarian, choose not to perform circumcisions. Asarian, speaking to the CN&R on this topic in 2010, explained that he stopped performing the procedure in 2006 because of a lack of medical reasoning behind it.

“I tell [the parents] it’s more of a social decision than a medical decision, because the evidence is not very clear-cut in the U.S.,” he said then. (He could not be reached for comment for this story.) “There is a small decrease in the number of infections in male babies who are circumcised compared to non-circumcised. You’d have to perform circumcisions on 300 to 400 babies to prevent one infection.”

There are studies that have shown, however, that circumcision might have health benefits later in life. A 2009 Wall Street Journal story pointed to several studies that showed circumcision could help guard against STDs like herpes, human papillomavirus and HIV.

“Circumcised men are 35% less likely to contract human papillomavirus (HPV) and 25% less likely to catch herpes than their uncircumcised counterparts,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Leeds, the mohel—a Jewish person trained to perform circumcisions—who presided over the recent bris milah in Chico, is no stranger to the debate. The leader of UC Berkeley’s Chabad Jewish Center actually was very much in the center of San Francisco’s recent uproar.

As worded, that city’s bill would have made it “unlawful to circumcise, excise, cut, or mutilate the whole or any part of the foreskin.” One important thing to note, however, writes Time reporter Adam Cohen, was that the bill included no religious exemption, no differentiation from a procedure done in a hospital and one during a religious ritual like the bris milah described above. Muslims, whose circumcision ritual is called a khitan, also would have been banned from circumcising their young boys. Parents who chose not to comply could have faced a year in jail.

The referendum came under much attack by religious groups, including Jews, Muslims and Christians—the Abrahamic faiths (circumcision dates back to Abraham)—who argued it violated their First Amendment right to freedom of religion. Ultimately, it never made it to the November ballot because the State Legislature stepped in, and in October Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill preventing laws banning circumcision in California.

“Thankfully it was thrown out,” Leeds said of the referendum. He doesn’t believe the fight is over, however, to protect his religion’s tradition. A national group drafted the “Male Genital Mutilation Bill” and submitted it to Congress on Jan. 23. It would essentially “rewrite the U.S. Female Genital Mutilation Act of 1996 so that boys are also protected from genital mutilation (commonly referred to as circumcision).”

Leeds countered. “The people who are against it call it ‘mutilation,’” he said. “That’s just a buzz word. Circumcision does have medical benefits.”