When I found out I was circumcised, I was horrified.
I
was in second grade when I first heard about circumcision. A group of
boys at school were talking about it. I walked into the middle of the
conversation. At this point, I knew some penises looked different than
others, but had assumed it was just one more way people were naturally
different, like hair or eye color. One of the boys accused the Jews of
circumcising their babies. I was the only Jew at my school so I felt I
had to defend my people. How could a religion of tikun olam do something destructive to their newborns?
The
scariest part for me, then, was thinking this might have been done to
me. I couldn’t believe my parents would have done this, so I told the
other boys there was no way Jews did this to their newborns and that I
wasn’t circumcised. I didn’t find out I was wrong until some time later.
One day, my dad pointed to the table in my house where it had happened
to me and talked about it. He seemed proud but he might have been
joking. After he told me, I ran to my room crying. My mom comforted me.
Before this, I had felt proud of being perfect, unaltered. Now I knew I
had been changed.
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