Those with better things to do than squander their leisure hours watching reality TV may not have seen the lovely Tyra Banks plucking wheat from chaff on “America’s Next Top Model.” The formula for this schadenfreude fest is simple: each week a gaggle of stick insects competes for the honor of making pubescent girls loathe their own bodies; and each week Tyra dismisses the insufficiently fabulous.
We at New Voices can hardly do for our readers the service TB provides her fans. But that’s no reason not to rip off a perfectly good idea, and after some rabbinical consultation and a few rounds of Manischewitz, we’ve figured out how: forget America’s next top model. We want to find America’s Next Top Mohel.
So, if you like to snip, if you hoard clamps and scalpels, if you love the smell of Slivowitz in the morning mixed with a heady whiff of Vaseline and the screams of an eight-day-old boy, we encourage your application. If you want to make it on the show though, heed these words of wisdom:
1) The Bible is not an adequate instruction manual.
Last year, Vancouver emergency response workers got a 911 call from Edwin Baxter, who, according to the Associated Press, explained: “Long story short, sir? I was studying my Bible and decided to circumcise my 8-year-old.” Baxter’s scalpel of choice was a hunting knife, and his operating theater was the Canadian family’s bathtub. If Baxter had little surgical panache, he bvhad less defense for the jury—“I felt it was an act of obedience that was spoke from the mouth of the self-existent creator,” he said. We suggest you avoid such Baxterdization of God’s covenant.
2) Throw Your Set in the Air.
If you want to operate, you’re going to have to roll with a crew. In the old days, moheling was purely an Orthodox racket. But Orthodox mohels wouldn’t service the children of mixed marriages, nor the children of converted mothers or gay couples. So, in the 1980’s, the Reform Movement started confirming their own mohels, ending Orthodoxy’s tight clamp on the biz.
The lines between blood, and, well, blood have been drawn ever since. Some, like Rabbi Shalom Denbo, Los Angeles mohel of seven years, claim to hold no grudges–even if the Reforms have undercut the traditional circumcision trade. “I don’t have any animosity,” he says. The master mohel gets along with a web site (“serving the entire west coast”), and a list of glowing recommendations from pediatricians.
But Rabbi Denbo has many years’ experience in “the game.” For now, keep your head down, remember to kick upstairs, and if you fail to show the proper respect, be careful they don’t give you the bris of death.
3) Train well, Grasshopper.
Luke Skywalker had Obi-Wan. Siegfried had Roy. You too will need a steady guiding hand. “Not too long ago, one mohel taught another,” says Denbo. “That’s the way it always was. You didn’t go to school to learn it, you began when your teacher felt you were competent.” Denbo himself trained in Israel under the auspices of a rabbi who had over 100,000 circumcisions under his belt.
In 1984, the rebellious Reform Movement’s Berit Mila program decided every mohel also had to be a nice Jewish doctor. No medical degree, no snippy-snippy. “There is a misconception where, because someone is a doctor, people think he’s better, which is not true,” says Denbo. “Just because he is a doctor doesn’t mean he comes with the same reverence and passion towards this idea of a Bris.”
Them sounds like fighting words to us. But whether he’s an MD or just an experienced cut man, you will still need a sensei. Your apprenticeship will give you plenty of time to sharpen your skills. Just one thing: remember that part in Star Wars where Luke tries to use his light saber with his helmet blind down. Don’t do that.
4) Watch how you handle that tool.
To succeed as a mohel, you’ll need the right gadgets: a sharp scalpel and a good solid clamp. Hospitals use the Gomco Clamp, while mohels seem to favor the Mogen variety. If your equipment fails, you’ll know a circumcision gone wrong by the look of it: pus-like discharge, excessive swelling and bleeding, balanitis xerotica obliterans infection—otherwise known as “penile lichen.” Denbo doesn’t beat around the bush: “I’m not going to be nice and say that nothing could go wrong,” he says. “Infections can be foreseen. With any type of procedure like this, you can have excessive bleeding.”
Ah yes, the bleeding. Jewish law requires blood be removed as an impurity, though how you do so is up to you. Most mohels favor the hand, others suck away excess gore through a sterile straw. And then there’s Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer. Fischer, a Rockland County, New York-based mohel, is a die-hard adherent of metzizah bi peh, the ultra-Orthodox practice in which the mohel sucks away the blood with…his mouth. Trouble is that his clients might not be so die-hard. As reported in the Daily News on February 2nd, city officials are investigating whether a baby boy perished after contracting herpes from Fischer during a bris. Two other boys also contracted herpes after Fischer performed the ritual on them. We suggest you practice safe sucks.
5) Retain counsel.
Folks, we live in a litigious society, and people can be surprisingly sensitive when it comes to the genitals of their infant children. Rabbi Denbo, like most mohelim before him, doesn’t have medical malpractice insurance. He remains sanguine about the legal fallout from a botched bris. “There are no contractual obligations from one party to another,” says Denbo. “Obviously if something happens, the mohel would be responsible. But there is no insurance. The contract is trust.”
Spoken like a man who’s never watched Judge Judy. But Denbo, of course, is a natural. “The first time I did it I fell in love with it,” Denbo recalls. “To bring someone into the covenant, to change someone not only physically but spiritually, is a profoundly moving thing. It’s nothing to do with physical health. It’s a connection the Jewish people have with Hashem. That is the greatest testimonial of our heritage.”
Edwin Baxter’s testimonials were not as convincing. His attorney said he couldn’t afford to pay for a professional circumcision, Baxter’s wife said her son bled his way into the ambulance painlessly. (Probably beginner’s luck—his twin brother was next, most likely followed by any number of little Baxters: the clan is 10 children strong in a two-room house.) Baxter begged God’s mercy of the jury; “this state thinks it’s child abuse when I was doing what other godly men did,” he said, and then gently lay his head on the courtroom table. Baxter’s four months into a three-year sentence.
Want to be America’s Next Top Mohel? To enter the contest, send a large self-addressed envelope and the results of your latest eye exam to New Voices, 114 W. 26th St, New York, NY 10001. No work samples please.
