America the Anxious by Ruth Whippman

Author:Ruth Whippman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

6.

GOD’S PLAN OF HAPPINESS

Both sets of grandparents are perched nervously in our living room, bitching about the quality of the bagels, not quite as good as those other mythical bagels they used to get from Bakery Utopia in Somewhere-else-ville. The small talk is forced and uneasy, the product of that uniquely suburban Jewish combination of pastel blue cupcakes and imminent genital slicing.

Our families are over from London for Zeph’s bris, the formal circumcision ceremony that Jewish boys go through on their eighth day of life. I am love-addled and exhausted, still bleeding, oozing hormones and inexplicably weeping at laundry detergent commercials. Barely more than a week ago, this longed-for baby was still inside my body. In approximately ten minutes time, a stranger will come to our house and sever a section from his penis. I profoundly do not want to be here.

So why are we doing this? The motivation isn’t exactly religious, at least not in the strictest fear-of-God sense. As a family, we are what you might call Jew-ish. My husband, Neil, has the kind of hyper-Semitic look that means that the instant he puts on any kind of hat—whether baseball cap, Stetson, or bishop’s mitre—he is instantly transformed into a Hasid. But he ditched the religious part of his religion the moment he had squawked his way through his bar mitzvah portion, retaining only a lingering all-purpose sense of guilt and a love of discussing his health complaints at the dinner table. I am technically only half Jewish, and we are, at most, agnostic. (Neil calls it “atheist.” I only stop short as a hedge against lightning strikes.) So we could have opted out, invoking my Methodist grandmother or crying “child mutilation” like many of our mixed-marriage friends.

But, to my surprise, my atheist husband—the same man who, when asked to be godfather to a friend’s child, renamed his role “Dawkins-father” (I wasn’t impressed. If anyone’s running a more sexist ship than God, it’s Richard Dawkins)—felt strongly that he wanted his sons to be part of the tribe. Apparently, the uneasy truce we have reached with the mash-up of our genes and beliefs is that our kids get a Christmas tree every year but must pay for it with their foreskins. Because for Neil, this peculiar infant hazing, a ritual stretching back in time to Abraham, and toughed out by virtually every Jewish boy since, is the ultimate act of welcome, the mark of belonging.

And although Neil’s path to this decision was obviously more “instinctive tribalism” than “positive psychology journal,” in one left-field but important way, he is right. Everything I have learned so far about happiness points toward community identity and strong social bonds being the single biggest factor. And apparently I’m convinced enough by this fact that I am prepared to stake my son’s penis on it.

The doorbell rings, and there stands the mohel, wheeling behind him a suitcase so large it looks as though his cutting tool of choice must be a samurai sword. I cling to my sweet baby and fight the urge to run.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.