A Cut Above

At your typical bris, the guest of honor arrives on a white pillow. He’s not exactly in fighting condition: 8 days old, spreadeagled, diaperless, still adjusting to non-liquid environments.
He cries throughout the procedure—cries as he’s prayed over, cries as he’s spritzed by the disinfectant, keeps crying as he’s cut by the mohel—and then, bandaged, balmed and resting on his stomach, he suddenly stops crying and goes to sleep.

Dmitry’s is not your typical bris. First off, no tears. Also, no relatives, no diaper, no white pillow. His parents don’t even know he’s here. Dmitry is laid out on a table, hands resting behind his head, shorts at his ankles, talking about life in Soviet Ukraine while Rabbi A. Romi Cohn prepares to slice away his foreskin. With a 1.5-inch needle pricking the base of his penis and a shot of lidocaine diffusing into the vicinity of his dorsal penile nerve, Dmitri, 33, stares up at the ceiling and says to no one in particular, “I’ve wanted to do this for the longest time. To be a Jew, you know, you have to go through with it.”

There are many reasons men may choose to get circumcised as adults—usually because they want a prettier or healthier or cleaner or tastier or classier or, like Dmitri, a more thoroughly Jewish penis. Many American men, however, never need to make the decision because it has already been made for them. Neonatal circumcision is the most common surgical procedure in the United States, which is one of the most widely circumcised nations in the industrialized world. Over half the baby boys born in hospitals today will go home cut.

But that rate is still significantly lower than the 1960s high of nearly 90 percent. This is partly due to trends in immigration (Hispanics in particular are less likely to circumcise), but also the result of aggressive campaigns by the “intactivist” lobby, which has spent decades trying to convince the public to end what it calls male genital mutilation. For every newly released medical study announcing circumcision’s ability to help everything from HIV to urinary tract infections to penile cancer, there are dozens of sites with names like _Noharmm.org_ and _Nocirc.org_ poised to undermine those conclusions.

Even seemingly neutral topics such as smegma, the substance produced when body oil and skin cells accumulate beneath the foreskin, are quickly polarized. This leads to an often bewildering exchange of claims. Consult the pro-circumcision camp and smegma might just be a penile carcinogen. But by the anti-circumcision camp’s reckoning, “the animal kingdom would probably cease to exist” without it.

Adult circumcisions like Dmitry’s—which are much rarer and more complicated—are usually left out of the debate altogether. Dmitry is Jewish, but was born in Ukraine, where generations of Soviet persecution have all but eradicated the religious practice of bris. Under Stalin, parents could be arrested, their children placed in foster homes and mohels sentenced to labor camps for trying to arrange one in secret—and to this day most Jewish men born into the former U.S.S.R. don’t get cut. According to Biblical law, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew, but an uncircumcised male stands outside the Hebrew nation’s covenant with God—a covenant sealed when Abraham, at the age of 99, cut off his own foreskin and that of every male member of his household.

“There is no greater commandment in Torah,” says Rabbi A. Romi Cohn, chief mohel for the Jewish outreach program Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe (F.R.E.E.). “Six hundred and thirteen commandments and that is the most important one.” Cohn, a reserved man with a dignified air who looks a bit like Sean Connery, is perhaps the world’s most prolific mohel. (One of his formers students called him “the master mohel.”) Cohn has performed roughly 10,000 brisses on behalf of F.R.E.E.—all of them without accepting any form of payment. “Some people are born with a good voice and they can be opera singers,” he says. “God gave me a certain skill and I’m using it. There’s not enough money in the world that I should sell this mitzvah.”

Dmitry had been putting off his own mitzvah since he emigrated to the U.S in 1988. Earlier this year, though, his first daughter was born. During her naming ceremony Dmitry, not yet a full-fledged member of the covenant, was not allowed to approach or touch the Torah. The experience stuck with him. “I wanted to feel like a true Jew and at the same time pass that on to my kids,” he says. A few months later he phoned F.R.E.E. to announce that he was ready. His bris was scheduled for the next day. This is a standard measure designed both to keep a patient from having too much time to second-guess himself, and because, in the eyes of the rabbis at F.R.E.E., circumcision is such an important mitzvah that it can not be postponed. (Bris trumps pretty much every other event in Jewish life, from Shabbat to Yom Kippur; Rabbi Cohn has been known to walk out in the middle of business deals to go perform a circumcision.)

I meet Dmitry in the waiting room of Rabbi Cohn’s Brooklyn office. He is wearing a baby blue Lacoste shirt, golf shorts and white trainers. After a final chat with the rabbi, Dmitry is escorted to a small back room lined with Talmudic texts, with just enough space for a surgical table and a single leather chair. He lays down on the table, pulls up his shirt, pulls down his shorts, and has his penis inserted through an opening in a sterile surgical sheet. Propped over his head is a placard that reads “Mazal Tov Bris #13,340.”

It’s decidedly easier to remove an infant’s foreskin than that of a full-grown man. It all boils down to the difference in volume of the organ in question: More flesh goes under the knife. Adult procedures therefore require local if not general anesthesia, 40 to 50 sutures, and a post-operative erection-deterrence period for as long as the stitches stay in place. (Babies, with their incompletely formed blood vessels and typically uneventful sex lives, need none of this.)

Cohn injects Dmitry’s penis with the lidocaine and waits for it to take effect. Then he starts to administer a pinch test to make sure the local anesthetic’s working.

“Dmitry, look down here. Can you feel this?”

Cohn has Dmitry’s foreskin gripped in what look like large tweezers.

“Nope, nothing.”

“Dmitry you have to look.”

“I don’t want to.”

“What you don’t see doesn’t hurt? Look.”

“I plainly do not like to see these types of things,” says Dmitry. “I’m just not big on medical procedures, period.”

According to Rabbi Cohn, the final stroke of a properly conducted bris is so clean and so fast that patients could probably handle it without any painkillers. (The stitches, though: “This is something which would be unbearable.”) Dmitry knows this, yet as the moment of truth approaches we’re both clearly getting nervous. Rabbi Cohn is humming quietly as he gets out his tools.

Cohn applies a clamp to Dmitry’s foreskin. The clamp acts like a sort of flat-edged penis stencil: Everything above its top edge, the Russian bits, will be cut away. The rest of Dmitry, the Jewish part, remains safely hidden below. Dmitry is still staring up at the ceiling. He could be daydreaming.

Cohn and his assistant begin to pray very, very quickly and energetically. He tenses up, becoming sinewy. Dmitry crosses and uncrosses his feet under the surgical blanket.

There is a pause and then the razor goes zipping along the edge of the clamp, letting out a noise as it goes that tools like this must dream of making from the day they’re first forged. Now Dmitry’s foreskin is off, no one has fainted and Dmitry, who is just not big on medical procedures, period, is laying there, hands behind his head, eyes focused on the ceiling. He didn’t feel a thing.

After the cut there are mazel tovs all around while Dmitry gets stitched. Twenty minutes later, he emerges into Rabbi Cohn’s waiting room, fully dressed, walking slightly bow-legged, like he just arrived from a dude ranch. For a minute it seems like everyone’s getting ready to go home. Then a friend of Rabbi Cohn’s looks around the room and realizes that there are now—with eight rabbis plus myself and Dmitry—exactly 10 Jewish men present a minyan that transforms the waiting room into a sort of impromptu synagogue.

A corner cabinet springs open to reveal a Torah, prayer books are distributed and someone pours out 10 shots of whisky. One of the rabbis dons what looks like a white cabana hat and then the little synagogue circles up, grabs bow-legged Dmitry and, arms linked and voices raised, dances the horah around Rabbi Cohn’s desk. “Dmitry!” Rabbi Cohn announces, glowing, delighted, looking less and less like Sean Connery, “from this point on you’re going to be happy, have joy, be successful! There’s nothing between you and God right now.”

What do you think?