Anyway you cut it, the pandemic is impacting Jewish ritual circumcision
My latest article appears in Religion News Service.
Courtesy: Rabbi Avraham Rappaport
“Pandemic forces Jews to be flexible on ritual circumcisions” just went live in the wire Religion News Service (RNS).
As is often the case, certain lines remained on the cutting room floor, and I’m grateful to my editors for reining in the parts that were humorous only in my head. Luckily, though, with no editor here but the author, I can share my original headline—“Anyway you cut it, the pandemic is impacting Jewish ritual circumcision.”
The lede, as submitted, began:
Foreskin and two-and-a-half months ago, businesses slowed, if not altogether halted, the world over due to the coronavirus pandemic. But it’s been the experience of Avraham Rappaport, a mohel or ritual circumciser, that more families have had skin in the game in that span.
Rappaport, who runs a Columbia, Md. financial services company and is an Orthodox rabbi, typically performs five to seven circumcisions weekly when it’s not an emergency requiring social distancing. Since mid-March, that number of circumcisions—called a bris or brit, Hebrew for “covenant”—has soared to 10 to 15 weekly.
If you’d like to read the final piece, appropriately toned down and—wait for it—trimmed where necessary, you can do so via this link.
(Thanks all for bearing with me as I got this newsletter off the ground and redesigned my site. This is an example of the kind of gratis content in this newsletter. If you have subscribed to the full version, continue to expect to receive those longer, original essays too. I think there will be one on the “I.M. Pei Synagogue” out this coming weekend.)