The foreskin and the hindsight

July 13, 2024

When I was 8 days old, my parents invited several dozen people to our home for lox and bagels, whitefish and chopped liver. The big attraction? My foreskin, which was about to be circumcised in front of a small crowd in a Jewish ceremony called brit milah. Had I been more sentient, I'm sure I would forever associate lox with horror. I love lox.

My brother, too, was the guest of honor at a gathering on his eighth day. And my father before him. And his father. One bris begets another. If there's anything I can be certain of, it's that every male in my family had a bris, starting with whatever biblical forefather of ours signed on to the covenant that Abraham made with God.

And every one of those unsuspecting little schmucks shared something else in common: a Jewish mother. And then I came along and poked history in the eye. I married a non-Jew, an act that was becoming pretty common in 1981. Today 71 percent of non-Orthodox American Jews intermarry.

Among other things, this trend leads to fewer sales of lox and whitefish — because if there’s one thing non-Jews don’t get, it’s the bris. It seems barbaric. Not the act of circumcision but the act of circumcision by a man (a mohel) trained in prayer, not medicine, doing the deed in a crowded, unsterile room while people jostle for position, cream cheese oozing out of the sides of their mouths. My wife was not going to let anyone without a medical degree near her firstborn’s foreskin.

And so we arranged to have a physician friend of ours perform the circumcision in our home while a rabbi said the prayers. And yes, there were bagels and plenty of witnesses. Our friend, Dr. Max, was from Haiti, where his training prepared him to practice medicine under the most difficult circumstances, but not, unfortunately in this circumstance, where he was being ogled by the likes of Aunt Mimi, Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Joey, women who had seen a lot in their day but not a black mohel.

Eventually the covenant with God was completed, but not without a few re- adjustments of the medieval instrument and a lot of sighing. It seems Dr. Max was a bit flustered. Maybe my son Zack sensed Dr. Max’s anxiety, because later Aunt Phyllis proclaimed that this was the most screaming she had ever heard at a bris.

Later that evening, hours after the whitefish had been wrapped and put away and the last of the relatives had gone, Zack was still crying, so we drove to Dr. Max’s, where he unwrapped Zack’s diaper to review his work. He shook his head and put a little topical anesthesia on the incision. We went to bed that night wrapped in the certainty that our next son’s foreskin would be dispensed with in a more civilized manner.

Max was born almost three years later and circumcised in the hospital on the second day of his life. The attending physician played the role of mohel while I muttered the prayers. There was not a bagel in sight.

And that’s how the death of Judaism proceeds, one accommodation at a time. I didn’t feel bad about it. I agreed that this made sense. Compromises always make sense.

As I said those prayers in that hospital room, I didn’t think that this might be the last time those words would ever be uttered over a Sollisch foreskin. I couldn’t imagine a future where this little boy or his brother would ever get married and have children. But Zack married Allie, a Catholic, in 2014. And Max will marry Dana, a Catholic, this year. And I’m about 99 percent certain that their sister, Zoey, will marry a non-Jew, too.

Zack’s wedding was mostly a Catholic affair. He did not convert; he is Jewish and proudly identifies that way. But I suspect his son — should he and Allie have one — will be circumcised in silence by a doctor in a sterile room. And the cord that connects my ancestors to God — the one I frayed — will be cut completely.

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My kids will likely celebrate Passover with their children, telling them the story of the exodus and why for eight days we Jews eat unleavened bread. They will hopefully light the candles on Hanukkah and eat the latkes I make exactly as my mother made them before me, but it’s very likely that they won’t know the Hebrew prayers or become a bar or bat mitzvah on their 13th birthdays as their parents did. These future grandchildren of mine will not be Jewish.

Some days this knowledge makes me sad. Most days it doesn’t.

I deeply love the partners my sons have chosen. I couldn’t be happier about their choices. I wouldn’t change a thing about Allie or Dana — and that includes their religious upbringings. This isn’t an essay about my kids’ choices; it’s an essay about mine.

Although I am the most secular of Jews, my Jewish identity runs deep. Like most American Jews, Judaism is my only ethnicity. My family didn’t pass down any of the culture of the countries we lived in before settling in America three generations ago. Without my Jewishness, I would be only an American, vague and sort of soulless, like a strip mall or a tract home in a sprawling suburb.

I love America, but I love it as a Jew — a perennial outsider — loves it. I see it as a miracle, a place where even outsiders can pursue happiness, where the words etched on the base of the Statue of Liberty aren’t just poetry but social contract:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”

And so my grandchildren will be the first generation of Sollisches to be un-hyphenated Americans. They will not be burdened by the weight of Jewish history, of being chosen and persecuted. They will not know anti-Semitism, at least not personally. They may hear Jewish jokes, but they will hear them as an American hears them. They will be insiders, members of the club. I should be happy about that. And most days I am.

Jim Sollisch is a creative director at an ad agency in Cleveland. To comment on this story, email wpmagazine@washpost.com or visit washingtonpost.com/magazine.

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