Rabbi – The Covenant

The parshah Noah begins with a tragedy, the wrath of God and the destruction of the world by a flood. However, there is hope in the righteousness of Noah and the covenant that is signified by the rainbow. The covenant, or as we Jews refer to it as the Brit, is the promise of God to not destroy the world again by flood as well as a promise for human beings to live righteously.
The famous seven Noahid laws of ethical conduct are the basis of this covenant, and many say the basis for the social contract of western society. However, for us Jews the Brit we base our life on is the covenant between man and God established by Abraham called the Brit Milah or circumcision of a male child.
My wife, Naomi, and I were fortunate to give the world and our faith a son three years ago and now I have been doubly blessed with another child who I can enter into this ancient covenant of Judaism on Sun. Oct. 30 at my synagogue, Beth Judah Temple. Our Torah commands in Genesis 18:2 for Abraham to circumcise his son Isaac on the eighth day of his birth to cement the relationship of Abraham and his child. We do this practice today after almost 4,000 years and it is the glue of our people and the strength of our faith.
The great Jewish Philosopher Spinoza, in his Tractatus Thelologico-Politicus 3:53, writes that circumcision, in and of itself, is sufficient to guarantee survival of the Jewish people. The Bris, as is often called by tradition, places the flesh of our people in the hands of God as an eternal promise that we will never lose sight of our responsibilities to God or to the world.
The Brit Milah is so important to our faith that if the eighth day falls on a Shabbat or even Yom Kippur we set aside prayer and devotion to fulfill this commandment. This commandment has been so central to our faith that those who often wish to destroy the Jewish people focus on circumcision and outlawing it in hopes of Jewish destruction.
The controversy of Jews circumcising their children sadly is not a new conflict but has been going on for over two millennia. As recorded in II Maccabees 6:10, when Antiochus Epiphanes sought to eradicate the people of Israel he prohibited them from practicing circumcision and thus began the great story of Chanukah and the struggle for the right of Jews to practice this ancient ritual. The Hellenists of antiquity accepted assimilation not only with equanimity but with enthusiasm.
Many not only renounced circumcision, as is recorded in the Book of Jubilees 15: 33-34, but sought to obliterate the sign of the covenant by undergoing a painful procedure designed to make them physically indistinguishable from their neighbors. We see this happening today with movements in our country to ban this procedure, and thus the struggle to enter our children into the covenant of Abraham has been fraught with struggle but also great triumph because we link this ritual to faith and eternity and just as our people have survived so has the mitzvah of Brit Milah.
Great is circumcision, for only when a child is circumcised does he enter into the count of generations, as Psalm 22:31 says, “A seed shall serve Him (the service is assumed to be circumcision); he shall be counted by the Lord in the next generation” The Talmud counters “ R. Isaac said: Service is stated in connection with both circumcision and sacrifices: now, just as the service mentioned in connection with sacrifices is a blood rite, so also is that in connection with circumcision. Hence, what is meant by, a seed shall serve Him? When a person loses a single drop of blood [through circumcision], it is as precious to the Lord as sacrifices. Therefore the Holy One, Blessed is He, revealed Himself to Abraham when he circumcised himself, just as He did when sacrifices were offered.”
We become the great sacrifice to God and also to the world as the blood of the bris forever endows the covenant of our Torah as we witness to the world what God revealed when the first humans were created and we made that ethical contract symbolized by the rainbow.
Looking back at the first Brit that was made to humanity with the rainbow in Parshat Noah we see that in there lies a promise between God and man to be eternally linked and we Jews carry this covenant and put it forever on our bodies to link the world with God’s word perpetually endowing our tradition and our faith as eternal.
Sunday I enter my new son, Alex, into this covenant as I did with my son Ari. As he is named before our Jewish community, I pass on to him the great joy of our faith and the responsibility to carry the tradition to his generation just as our great ancestor Abraham did in the desert so many years ago. The link to this chain is passed to him as it was passed to me over 40 years ago by my father and as time goes on I hope he will pass it to his son in the name of our true father who lies in heaven, blessed is His name.
Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz is the spiritual leader of Beth Judah Temple in Wildwood. He welcomes your comments at dvjewish@rof.net