I must in the first place disclaim any concurrence in the doctrine that to us, in our legislative capacity, religion is a matter of indifference. I am deeply impressed with the conviction that it is our paramount duty to promote the interests of religion and it influence on the human mind. I am impressed by a conviction that the spirit and precepts of Christianity ought to influence our deliberations; nay, more, that if our legislation be at variance with the precepts and spirit of Christianity we cannot expect the blessing of God upon them. I may, indeed, say with truth that whether my decision on this question [of the Jews’ civil rights] be right or wrong, it is influenced much less by a consideration of political expediency than by a deep sense of religious obligation.

Between the tenets of the Jew and of the Christian there is, in my opinion, a vital difference. The religion of the Christian and the religion of the Jew are opposed in essentials. Between them there is complete antagonism. I do not consider that the concurrence of the Jew with the Christian in recognizing the historical truths and divine origin of the moral precepts of the Old Testament can avail to reconcile the differences in respect to those doctrines which constitute the vital principle and foundation of Christianity. If, as a legislature, we had the authority to determine religious error and a commission to punish religious error, it might be our painful duty to punish the Jews. But we have no such commission. If the Jews did commit an inexpiable crime nearly two thousand years ago, we have had no authority given to us–even if we could determine who were the descendants of the persons guilty of that crime–to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, not unto the third or fourth, but unto the three hundredth or four hundredth generation. That awful power is not ours. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”

In other words, if we were a religious Christian government, not merely a secular government guided by Christian principles, we would, perhaps, be in a position to make the Jews pay for their sins–in particular the sin of killing Christ, but, more generally, the sin of being Christianity’s antithesis. We are, however, not that kind of government and so (this summarizes Peel’s argument as far as I have gotten) we really have no choice; if we are going to be consistent, but to grant the Jews their civil rights.

What I find disturbing in these words is the, to me at least, clear implication that there is a part of Peel that would not mind having “the painful duty” of punishing the Jews, though, to be fair, I don’t know where the logic of the rest of the speech leads Peel and so it is possible that these two passages are part of a rhetorical strategy that does not necessarily reflect the actual position that he takes. Nonetheless, Peel’s implication that a theocratic government would, indeed, be justified in discriminating against, if not outright punishing the Jews is one that I hear echoes of in the US-is-a-Christian-nation rhetoric of some of our Christian politicians; and perhaps I will trace that echo in another post when I have the time. For now, though, while I am not suggesting that any of those politicians are out to get the Jews or even that any of them actively desire a theocracy, I will not deny the fact that their rhetoric makes me wary.

Holding literally to the claims of any particular myth…is a great error in that it mistakes myth’s values for science’s facts and results in the worst sort of religiosity. Such literalism requires a faith that splits rather than unifies our consciousness. Thinking particular myths to be valuable in themselves undermines the genuine power of all myth to reveal value in the world: it transforms myths into obstacles to meaning rather than conveyors of it. Frozen in time, myth’s doctrines come to describe a world removed from and irrelevant to our timely one; its followers, consequently, become strangers to modernity and its real progress. Those of such blind faith are forced to sacrifice intellect, emotion and the honesty of both to satisfy their creeds. And this kind of literalism is revealed as fundamentally idolatrous, the opposite of genuine faith.

Secondly … and here I’m trying to put into words something that I think is felt on a subconscious and instinctual level (with additional caveats that I cannot speak for every Jew everywhere) … with all the blood that has been spilt to maintain Judaism over the centuries, there is a feeling that one, as an individual, does not actually have the right to just dispense with something so fundamental as this. For more secular Jews, to not circumcise is to say that not only do you not care if your kids aren’t Jewish, but to actually push them away from it. You might be a scofflaw in a hundred different ways, but to not circumcise would be to renounce your citizenship. It’s the step too far. And to take that step is to spit on the memory of every Jew who died for being Jewish.

Even as I write this, I imagine you laughing at how ridiculous it sounds. Do other Jewish people on this thread think I’m exaggerating? Like I said, I’m trying to put something into words that is more felt than thought, and it’s entirely possible that I’m overstating the matter. But in my experience, it’s something in the neighborhood of what I wrote above.

It reminded me of something I wrote in my first Fragments of Evolving Manhood post, called A Full-Throated Protest Against Existence and the World. (I should add I have not edited this excerpt to take into account Grace Annam’s gentle admonition to remember that “there are women who have the experience of having had a penis.”)

Even now, having rejected circumcision in my own family, it’s hard to dismiss the ritual merely as the patriarchal marking that, at its roots, it is. Because whatever else that ritual might be, the history of the oppression of the Jews has made it also a sign of defiance, a bodily affirmation of Jewish (male) identity and Jewish (male) worth in the face of enormous persecution.

I put the word male in parentheses in the last sentence because, while circumcision marks only men and is therefore problematic from the point of view of gender equality within the Jewish tradition, I do not want to deny the courage that it took for Jewish mothers to continue to allow their sons to be circumcised, or for Jewish women to continue to value circumcision as a religious ritual, a physical mark and as a metaphor for the relationship between the Jews and their god at times when forcing a man to pull down his pants was one way that anti-semites would identify appropriate targets for their hatred and violence. In Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, for example, Yaffa Eliach tells a story that, whether it is completely true or only an embellished version of the truth, illustrates precisely what I mean. In the midst of a “children’s Aktion,” a massacre of Jewish children, the tale goes, a Jewish woman demanded of a Nazi soldier, “Give me [your] pocket knife!”

She bent down and picked up something…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. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us by thy commandments and hast commanded us to perform the circumcision.”

She 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. (152)

I am that boy; that boy was me. Had I been alive during the time of the Nazis, they would have tried to kill me precisely for being “wholesome and kosher.” Yet while the violence that mother did to her son absolutely pales in comparison to the violence the Nazi intended to do to him, the story nonetheless omits the boy’s pain, glosses over the blood that must have stained the pillow, the mother’s hands and the German’s knife. It is that blood which haunts me, for my circumcision is my connection to that mother’s courage, to the courage of the men who circumcised and were circumcised at a time when a cut penis could have gotten them killed.

It was not an easy thing for me to arrive at the point where, as a Jewish man, I could choose not to have my son circumcised and also not feel like I was betraying my community at a much, much deeper level than any rejection of circumcision’s religious significance might represent for me. This is something I might choose to write more about at a later time, but for now I will say that it had to do with letting go of a certain kind of culturally inculcated anger and fear, with deciding that doing violence to my son’s body–to the body of any Jewish infant born with a penis–in order to mark that body over and against the violence that has been done to Jews throughout our history was, in some sense, only a continuation of that violence.

Nonetheless, I have tremendous respect for the feelings of people who continue to see brit milah–we might as well call the ceremony by its proper name–as a way of saying not only to the circumcised child, but to the historically hostile world in which that child will grow up, “You are here, in this world, as a Jew; we are here in this world, as Jews, and we are not going anywhere.“

But the depiction of women is also problematic:

The routine circumcision of infant boys, medical and otherwise, is a problem. Somehow I can’t see a comic like this being the way to address it.

One woman, who at first allowed the little girl she was walking with to accept a piece of candy, actually sent the girl back to return it. She placed the chocolate gingerly in the open hand of the woman who’d given it to her and skipped back in the direction from which she came. The Salvation Army volunteer watched the girl go, lifting her eyes out beyond the window frame, where the woman accompanying the girl must have been standing, and then turned to her fellow volunteers with a look of shocked non-comprehension on her face. She shrugged her shoulders and, on cue, as I have watched them do several times, the three of them burst out laughing, revealing a sense of humor about their task that it is hard not to respect, as it is hard not to respect what I hope is the sincerity and commitment they have shown by choosing to spend this first really cold Saturday morning of the season standing outside and being rejected over and over and over again.

The truth is, though, that I would be one of the people rejecting those women, not because I don’t know that The Salvation Army does some very good and necessary work, and not because I am, in the language of the season, a Scrooge, but because I will not give money—and, frankly, I don’t think anyone who claims to be in favor of diversity and tolerance should give money either—to an organization which holds as the seventh of its eleven articles of faith the belief that I, and anyone like me, because we do not have “faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and regeneration by the Holy Spirit,” are not worthy of salvation—assuming, for the moment, that we would want the kind of salvation The Salvation Army believes in.

Granted, at least as far as I know, the Salvation Army no longer injects religion explicitly into its interactions with the people it helps; but the fact that they help poor people, veterans, addicts and the elderly, that they are involved in anti-trafficking work and more, does not erase the fact that this good work is motivated and informed by a religious ideology that has, as one of its unstated goals, the extinction of the religious identity and practice in which I was raised, not to mention all the other non-Christian religious identities and practices that exist in the world today.

I recognize that no one is forcing me to give The Salvation Army my money, and I am sure there are people reading this who are thinking, “Fine! Don’t give, but please keep your opinion to yourself.” The thing is, though, that The Salvation Army does not keep its opinion to itself. It is an unapologetically evangelical Christian organization that looks forward to the day when all people accept Jesus Christ as their savior and Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Wicca, Zoroastrianism, animism and shamanism, not to mention atheism, are mere words connoting systems of belief from which all life has been drained. More to the point, because I think everyone ought to ask themselves whether they want to support the ideology of an organization to which they are planning to give their money, I think people need to understand that when they put money in The Salvation Army’s red pail, they are supporting not only the charity work that the organization does, but the religious values to which the organization subscribes.

Christianity, of course, is not the only religion that thinks its truth is the only truth; most religions, in fact, do. So I am not here trying to suggest that Christianity, or at least the kind of Christianity promoted by The Salvation Army, is any worse than any other religion; it’s just that The Salvation Army is very visible at this time of year. Were there a Muslim, or Jewish–or Hindu of Buddhist or any other–charity that held similar articles of faith and whose volunteers were similarly ubiquitous, I would be saying the same kinds of things about that group; and I want to emphasize that I am talking about a group and its professed organizational values, not individuals and the faith they they hold. The Salvation Army is a Christian organization that wants us to give it our money so it can do its Christian charity work, part of which has nothing to do with charity and everything to do with bringing about a world in which Christianity is the only surviving religion. For the reasons I have given here, I will not turn a blind eye to the latter in order to support the former, no matter how worthwhile the former may be.

One of the things I found most interesting about Vasefi’s article is the difference between what her research reveals about women who’ve been accused of murdering their husbands and what the available research says.

In the case of wives who kill their husbands, the available research indicates that two-thirds of cases are motivated by a desire for revenge for the husband being unfaithful.

The survey that Moazzami and Ashouri conducted across 15 provinces of Iran showed that in 58 percent of cases, the women had been unable to get a divorce because their husbands or families would not agree to it, or had children and would have had no means of supporting themselves if they had separated from their spouses.

My own research indicates that many women who resort to violence are themselves victims of abuse, and have been unable to find justice through the legal system.

She points out that many of the women who murder their husbands fit the same profile: they are poor, relatively uneducated, often forced into marriage at an early age to men who are much older than they are, circumstances which combine to make much more difficult for them to get help through the legal system or to find other ways out of their situation. Murder is, for them, “a last act of desperation.”

Akram Mahdavi, one of the women Vasefi interviewed, is in Rajayi Shahr prison under a suspended death sentence for hiring a man to kill her husband, whom her father had forced her to marry–she was 20 and her husband was 75. Her motive? That she’d discovered her husband was sexually abusing her daughter and her attempts at securing a divorce had failed. Yet it’s not that there aren’t people in Iran trying to call attention to the plight of such women. Women’s rights activists have been calling on the government to set up shelters for battered women for years, but the government has always refused, “citing Islamic laws that state it is wrong for a woman to leave home without her husband’s permission.” I confess that reasoning leaves me almost speechless, as it still does all these many years later when I remember the cop who asked me, when I was sixteen and calling for help because my mother’s boyfriend had forced her into her bedroom and locked the door behind them because she’d finally asked him to leave and he didn’t want to,“Are you sure your mother’s in their against her will, son?”

I don’t want to erase the differences between what happened to my mother and what happened to Akram Mahdavi, nor do I want to trivialize the significance of the fact that, in Iran, the reasoning that makes it so difficult for battered women, or women like Mahdavi, who was trying to protect her daughter from abuse, to find justice is couched in an absolutist religious rhetoric–though it’s not as if religion has not been used here in the States to justify treating women, not to mention people of color, as second class citizens–but I find right now the similarities more compelling than the differences. In each case, the woman’s autonomy is understood to be circumscribed by the authority of the man who possesses her sexually. In Islam, the husband must give her permission to leave the sphere of his authority (and, therefore, of his protection) without him¹; in the case of the cop on the phone, his assumption was that I might have mistaken some kind of sexual play, in which my mother was enjoying the force her boyfriend was using to keep her in the room, for a situation in which the boyfriend was unwilling to let my mother go outside the sphere of his authority and in which he might turn–was already turning–violent because she did not obey him. That the authority is legal in the case of Islam and, for want of a better word, cultural in the case of my mother and her boyfriend, does not change the fact that the nature of the authority, a man’s right to rule his women, is the same.

1. One of the oddest experiences I’ve had being married to a Muslim woman who occasionally travels to Iran has been the requirement, imposed by the Iranian government, that I write her a letter giving her my official permission to travel without me.

A man of God immersed himself in meditation. When he emerged from the vision that was granted him, a smiling companion welcomed him back, “What beautiful gift have you brought us from the garden in which you were walking?”

The holy man replied, “I walked until I reached the rosebush, where I gathered up the skirts of my robe to hold the roses I wanted to present to my friends, but the scent of the petals so intoxicated me that I let everything fall from my hands.”

Learn love, O morning bird, from the moth’s
giving itself in silence to the fire.
Pretenders seek enlightenment in vain,
waiting to follow those who won’t return.
And You, who transcend all we can imagine,
whose existence we can neither guess at
nor claim to know as fact, of whose glory
all the world’s words—spoken or written—fall
immeasurably short, the end is here,
and we stand as we did when it all began,
tongue-tied lovers, awe-struck at Your beauty.

He was talking to some Palestinian women sitting in the front and then–I don’t remember exactly who said what–identified some Jewish people sitting in the same row, more or less, but across the aisle. He asked them to wave at each other, which they did, and made the predictable joke about the peace process starting right there as part of the Maz Jobrani show. There followed some other patter and then he said, addressing himself to someone else in the audience, saying something like, “See, now, we need to start with a wave. Can’t go too far too soon; there’s just too much distrust.” Then he turned to the Palestinians and said, “Please, now, don’t go throwing anything at them; I don’t know what you brought with you, but don’t throw it. Not tonight.” And then he turned to the Jews and said, “And don’t you go taking her seat; it’s her seat. Okay?”

The audience exploded with laughter. It was not his funniest joke of the evening, but it was in some ways his most pointedly political, and he carried it off so lightly, so well, I was clapping as much in admiration as I was in laughter. It made me wonder what he would have done with us had we been sitting close enough: a Jewish American man, a Muslim Iranian woman and our son. It also reminded me, for some reason, of one of my favorite poems by the 12th century Iranian poet Saadi. Here it is in my tranlsation:

Everyone thinks his own thinking is perfect and that his child is the most beautiful.

I watched a Muslim and a Jew debate
and shook with laughter at their childishness.
The Muslim swore, “If what I’ve done is wrong,
may God cause me to die a Jew.” The Jew
swore as well, “If what I’ve said is false,
I swear by the holy Torah that I will die
a Muslim, like you.” If tomorrow the earth
fell suddenly void of all wisdom
no one would admit that it was gone.

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. Oddly, though, she does not try to make me feel guilty about denying my Jewish heritage or about marrying a non-Jewish woman. Instead, she says, “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 to. 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, or about him that his is smaller? 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.