Genesis 17: Every female among you shall be circumcised
Genesis 17
9 And Elohin said to Emrahama, “And as for you, you will keep My covenant—you, and your fruit of the womb after you throughout their generations.
10 This is My covenant, which you shall keep, between Me and you and your fruit of the womb after you: every female among you shall be circumcised.
11 And you shall circumcise the flesh of your tickler; it will be a token of the covenant between Me and you.
12 And a daughter that is eight days old will be circumcised, every female throughout your generations, that is born in the house, or bought with money from any foreigner that is not of your fruit of the womb.
13 Those born in your house, and those bought with your money, shall be circumcised; and My covenant will be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.
14 And the uncircumcised female who does not circumcise the flesh of her tickler, that soul will be cut off from her people; she has broken My covenant.”
[…]
23 And Emrahama took Tishmaelah her daughter, and all that were born in her house, and all that were bought with her money, every female among the women of Emrahama’s house, and circumcised the flesh of their ticklers that same day, as Elohin had instructed her.
בראשית י”ז
ט וַתֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִין אֶל־אֵמְרָהָמָה וְאַתְּ אֶת־בְּרִיתִי תִשְׁמֹרִי־אַתְּ וְפְּרִי בִּטְנֵךְ אַחֲרָיִךְ לְדֹרֹתָן:
י זֹאת בְּרִיתִי אֲשֶׁר תִּשְׁמֹרְנָה בֵּינִי וּבֵינֵיכֶן וּבֵין פְּרִי־בִּטְנֵךְ אַחֲרָיִךְ הִמּוֹלִי לָכֶן כָּל־זֹכְרָה:
יא וּנְמַלְתֶּן אֵת בְּשָׂר עָרְלַתְכֶן וְהָיָה לְאוֹת בְּרִית בֵּינִי וּבֵינֵיכֶן:
יב וּבָת־שְׁמֹנַת יָמִים תִמּוֹל לָכֶן כָּל־זֹכְרָה לְדֹרֹתֵיכֶן יְלִידַת בָּיִת וּמִקְנַת־כֶּסֶף מִכֹּל בַּת־נֵכָר אֲשֶׁר לֹא מִפְּרִי־בִּטְנֵךְ הִיא:
יג הִמּוֹל תִמּוֹלִי יְלִידַת בֵּיתֵךְ וּמִקְנַת כַּסְפֶּךְ וְהָיְתָה בְרִיתִי בִּבְשַׂרְכֶן לִבְרִית עוֹלָם:
יד וְעָרֵלָה זֹכְרָה אֲשֶׁר לֹא־תִמּוֹל אֶת־עָרְלָתָה וְנִכְרְתָה הַנֶּפֶשׁ הַהִוא מֵעַמֶּיהָ אֶת־בְּרִיתִי הֵפַרָה:
[...]
כג וַתִּקַּח אֵמְרָהָמָה אֶת־תִשְׁמָעֵאלָה בִּתָּה וְאֵת כָּל־יְלִידֹת בֵיתָה וְאֵת כָּל־מִקְנַת כַּסְפָּה כָּל־זֹכְרָה בְּנְשֵׁי בֵּית אֵמְרָהָמָה וַתָּמָל אֶת־בְּשַׂר עָרְלָתָן בְּעֶצֶם הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבְּרָה אִתָּה אֱלֹהִין:
*
“Help! What will we do?” I ask Yael when we get to Genesis 17. That’s where, in Torato, describes God covenanting with Abraham after the birth of Ishmael. In making this covenant, God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, his wife’s name from Sarai to Sarah. He received the extra “ha” with Jehovah’s promise that he will be av hamon goyim, “the father of many nations.” He promises Abraham children from Sarah, too many to count, but Abraham in turn is obligated from now on to circumcise every male descendant of his, when they are eight days old. He is also obligated to circumcise all his male servants, and at age 99, he accepts the terms and he, and all the males of his household undergo circumcision.
But now we are in Toratah, Abraham no longer exists and the head of the household is the Matriarch Emrama, who at the chapter’s beginning becomes Emrahama. She receives the extra “ha” with Tehovah’s promise that she will be em hamon goyot, “the mother of many nations.” Sar, her spouse, the future father of all these nations, gets a new name, from Sar (“authority figure,” or, “ruler”) to Sahar. With the extra “ha” his name’s meaning changes to “the moon.” Usually it’s women who are thought of as tied to the moon. Since their cyclical changes are like those of the moon. The barren Sahar is going to become a great father and the tie to the moon anchors him in the sphere of fertility.
When Sahar gets in touch with his feminine side, Emrahama, in turn, is demanded of by Elohin, we fear, to circumcise her foreskin. “My covenant will be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant,” (17: 13) Elohin says, and we try to understand just what the hell She is talking about.
In our following meetings, Yael and I tried to crack the meaning of this female circumcision through the process of elimination: We raise different possibilities, and try to imagine, feel and understand them. The process is very fraught and we find ourselves agitated again and again, and along the way, learn a thing or two about female anatomy.
The first option is the female circumcision that still takes place today in some parts of our world, in which the woman’s clitoris is cut in order to diminish her sexual pleasure. This we unequivocally reject, since it isn’t analogous to male circumcision, which doesn’t diminish male sexual pleasure. The next possibility to is to cut some other female sexual organ, without diminishing her sexual pleasure, and I suggest the labia majora. Maybe Elohin commands cutting, or scratching, the labia majora in order to signify some kind of belonging and loyalty to Her, like a tribute, or sacrifice. Or maybe as a substitute for sexual intimacy, for coupling with divinity herself. A kind of deflowering with Her.
Yael isn’t crazy about the idea, of course. The unnecessary wounding is repulsive and chilling, and through her response I finally begin to see traditional circumcision, cutting the male foreskin, from the outside, and get chills myself. But we choose not to change the story and not to escape the challenge that the gender-bending forces upon us.
In our first conversation as I joined Yael’s project of Toratah we spoke a lot about how while the project does gender-bend and offer an alternative version to Torato, it won’t change the content of the stories, the laws, the descriptions of the characters. We are interested in exploring the effect of the gender-shift on these narratives, laws, on masculinity and femininity and on theology. We have no choice but to try and find some way of understanding the covenant that Elohin demands “in your flesh.”
The next option is cutting the hymen. “There’s great advantages to this idea,” I’m getting excited. “From eight days on, the terror of losing virginity is gone!” I think about the meaning of virginity as we were taught in the religious girls’ schools I was educated in. About the fear that our hymens would be burst somehow while riding a bike, using tampons, or just getting too wild. We knew that unlike in the old days we wouldn’t be taken out and executed if on our wedding nights there wouldn’t for some reason, be blood on the sheets. But we internalized the judgmental equivalence of virginity with morality and being a good girl.
I remember a horrifying Talmudic passage that I learned many years ago that so upset me, in Bavli Tractate Yevamot 57b, dealing with marriage with a girl under the age of three. The rabbis thought that the hymen membrane, if torn before the age of three, grows back, but after the age of three and a day, it’s torn for good. And so they forbade marrying a girl below the age of three and allowed marriage only from a girl aged three years and a day, since then her penetration is valid. The passage goes on to deal with all sorts of halakhic implications regarding a three year old bride. A theoretical, nearly mathematical discussion. Without pausing for a moment to scream, “wait, there is no such thing as a three year old bride, there’s a toddler being raped!” Pedophilia, under the auspices of the halakha.
The halakhic status of a virgin, as opposed to that of a woman who has had sex, rests on the faith in the existence of a virginal membrane that seals the vagina and at first penetration, is torn and bleeds. A faith which is inexact and cost the lives of many women and wrecked the lives of many more. The hymen is a membrane at the vaginal opening which is sometimes there, and sometimes not. When it’s there, sometimes the first penetration leads to bleeding, and at other times it doesn’t.
I like the idea of understanding circumcision as piercing this membrane, to the extent it’s there, with an 8 day old baby girl, and forget about it from there on. But Yael demurs. After all, in the Biblical chapter at hand, circumcision is also demanded of women who have already given birth, like Emrahama, who has given birth to Tishmaela. So it can’t be talking about piercing the hymen.
We’re at a dead end. We’re out of ideas and we decide to learn even more about female vaginal anatomy and start looking at helpful websites. To our surprise, we experience a revelation – it turns our women have a foreskin too. Yael and I are already in our fifties and we had no idea.
We learn that above the clitoris there’s a fold of skin, of different sizes in different women (for some it’s minimal, for others, entirely covers the clitoris) and it’s called “the clitoral hood.” This fold of skin develops as part of the labia minora and it’s homologous to the male foreskin. Damaging it doesn’t necessarily diminish sexual pleasure because the clitoris stays intact and there are some women who choose to remove it for various reasons, or even decorate it with a piercing.
Because a circumcision like this isn’t really relevant to our lives and isn’t threatening we make due with it. We aren’t exactly thrilled with the result, but glad we learned something new about ourselves, and about all the women in the world.
But still, the resentment remains. And I can’t escape the questions flooding me about circumcision as a whole: Why does Elohin want us to cut ourselves, something of ourselves, in order to enter into a covenant with Her? I think about an article I wrote some years ago, after I became aware of the criticisms of feminist theologians on the centrality of sacrifice in human relations with the divine. I called it “The End of Self-Sacrificing Religiosity,[1]” and I wrote that the religious dynamic of having to sacrifice something of our humanity in order to draw near to divinity and be fitting and wanted by it, that this dynamic brings moral catastrophes in the end in human beings’ relations with one another.
The element of sacrifice is based on a hierarchical conception of the relations between divinity and humanity and understanding divinity as superior to humanity and of a totally different order. Imperfect humanity draws near the perfect divinity by breaking and repairing its problematic aspects. Humanity is required to diminish its humanity in order to draw near the transcendent divinity. Actually, so immense is the dichotomy between the divine and human worlds that there’s no way for the two of them to be present equally at the same time. There’s always a kind of competition between them. And when humanity becomes empowered it commits the great sin of hubris. People are called upon to always be obedient and submissive. To know their place.
The catastrophe is that parallel to the hierarchy between divinity and humanity is the hierarchy within humanity, between those deemed to be like divinity and closer to it, who have a spiritual world and possibilities, i.e., men, and those deemed to be more material, and bound up in all that’s far from divinity, and distancing from it. (Yes, blood, women’s bleedings, that we’ll be dealing with in Leviticus/Va-Tikra.) Part of the sacrificing that humanity sanctified as the way to get close to the sacred entailed not only the sacrifices they took upon themselves but also their sacrificing other people’s lives, or elements of other people’s lives. From sacrificing children to Moloch and to the sacrificing of agunot [1] and mamzerim [2] in our days on the altar of halakha.
The musical “Hamilton,” by Lin-Manuel Miranda, ends with a song by Aaron Burr, in which he finally comes to the realization that is for me the key to the whole theological story, that there’s room for this one and for that one too:
I was too young and blind to see
I should’ve known
The world was wide enough
For Hamilton and me.
And I try to imagine a divinity that doesn’t demand sacrifice of parts of our humanity but calls for celebrating our natural creation and empowering our humanity as the way to come near. Who is this divinity, that relations with Her are no longer based on incompatibility between us, an essential difference, parallel existence in different orders? A divinity that interactions with Her deal with finding the points of similarity between us, and mutual support, in place of displays of brokenness and contraction? And what will happen to the relations between us human beings, and inside ourselves if this will be our divinity and our contact with Her?
What would happen if Emrahama would have understood the divine demand for a covenant in the flesh as one more test that the divinity is putting her through, assuming that the right answer would be “No!”
[1] הקץ לדתיות הקורבנית!, תמר ביאלה, דעות 40, כסלו תשס"ט, דצמבר 2008.
[2] Literally, “chained women,” or grass widows; in traditional halacha only men can initiate divorce. This results at times in women languishing without divorce, either through the man’s refusal to divorce, or through his disappearance.
[3] Literally, “bastards,” offspring born of illicit unions, and specifically to women who were previously married and did not obtain a halakhic divorce. The status of bastardy stays with the child’s descendants for generations and has many halakhic ramifications.