Banning circumcision is dangerous
to your health By Spengler
On June 26, the District Court of the
Federal State of Cologne ruled that circumcision
of children for religious reasons at the
instruction of parents constituted the infliction
of bodily harm and therefore was a punishable
offense. As the judges concerned included their
email addresses and telephone numbers in a press
release, concerned individuals might wish to
express their views directly.
To: State
Court Judge Dr Jan F Orth, Cologne
([email protected]; tel +49-221-477-3304)
and District Court Judge Jorg Baack
([email protected], tel
+49-221-477-2008.)
Your Honors: Your
decision last week to criminalize the religious
rite of circumcision presents a threat to the
survival of the German people. Germans are failing
of the desire to live. At your present fertility
rate of 1.3 children per female, there will be
virtually no
German speakers left to
celebrate Goethe's quadricentennial, although a
few Jewish scholars still might learn German as a
supplement to Yiddish. In more ways than you
imagine, this decision poisons the hearts of your
countrymen and reduces their long-term prospects
for survival.
Whether the Constitutional
Court will uphold your decision remains to be
seen; in the meantime, you have put the life of
Germany's small Jewish community into suspension.
Physicians at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin have
stopped performing circumcisions for fear of legal
action. Even worse: you have provided a pretext
for every Jew-hater in Germany to denounce a
fundamental practice of our religion on the
spurious pretext of child welfare.
Not
even the Nazis thought of banning circumcision as
a way of uprooting Jewish life in Germany. If your
decree withstands a constitutional challenge,
Germany once again will be Judenrein. The
difference today is that you need us more than we
need you.
Never mind that your decision
involved the case of Muslim parents circumcising a
child for religious reasons. The matter of
circumcision comes to the West through the Jews,
regardless of the Muslim imitation Jewish
practices. This is our issue, and you will answer
to us in the court of world opinion.
In
danger of extinction: Germans aged 15 to 24 vs
over 60, at constant fertility
Source:
United Nations World Population Prospects
To suggest that circumcision
impairs health is silly on the face of it,
considering that the Jewish people, alone among
all the peoples of the world, have endured through
these past 4,000 years - not in spite of
circumcision, but rather because of it, as I shall
explain.
The State of Israel, the only
country in which almost every male is circumcised,
has the world's highest life expectancy at 82
years (in a tie with Japan and Switzerland). The
average Israeli man can expect to live four years
longer than the average German man. Israel also
has the highest fertility of any industrial
country, at three children per female. If the
respective fertility rates of Germany and Israel
continue, there will be more Israelis under the
age of 25 than Germans by the end of the present
century.
I will not address the scientific
grounds for circumcision (which among other things
drastically reduces the transmission of infections
including AIDS), because your decree has nothing
to do with science. Rather, as Heinrich Heine
wrote in 1844 of your city of Cologne,
Dummheit und
Bosheit buhlten hier Gleich Hunden auf
freier Gasse; Die Enkelbrut erkennt man
noch heut An
ihrem Judenhasse. (Stupidity and evil
mated here / Like dogs in the open gutter / You
still can recognize their descendants today / By
their Jew-hatred).
What we call the
b'rit, or covenant, brings the sacred and
eternal into the carnal and temporal sphere of
human life. That is the content of Jewish
practice: the sanctification of eating through
kashrut, of the family through the laws of
marital purity, and of time itself through the
observance of the Sabbath. But circumcision
precedes all of these. It denotes what all the
peoples of the world desire: to be holy (that is,
eternal) in their own flesh. It is the token of
God's love for Israel set in the body of Israel
itself, the sign of our immortality. God's love
for Abraham extends to his descendants, and
circumcision denotes the transformation of Jewish
flesh to a holy vessel for God's presence in the
world.
The great Jewish theologian Michael
Wyschogrod wrote:
God could have played a godly role,
interested in certain features of human
existence, the spiritual, but not in others, the
material. He could even have assigned the man
the task of wrenching himself out of the
material so as to assume his spiritual identity,
which is just what so many religious believe he
did. Instead, the God of Israel confirms man as
he created him to live in the material cosmos
... There is a requirement for the
sanctification of human existence in all of its
aspects. Israel's symbol of the covenant is
circumcision, a searing of the covenant into the
flesh of Israel and not only, or perhaps not
even primarily, into its spirit. And that is why
God's election is of a carnal people. By
electing the seed of Abraham, God creates a
people that is in his service in the totality of
its human being and not just in its moral and
spiritual existence [1]
. Israel is
the exemplar and model for the sanctification of
the human body, for the dedication of the
individual to God through a physical change,
through the sanctity of family life, and the
sanctity of all life embodied in our dietary laws.
But if you excise the sacred from human life, life
itself becomes intolerable. I submit that the
Germans are in danger of extinction because they
have ceased to tolerate life.
On this
matter I refer you to the decisive passage in the
iconic literary work of your culture, the wager
between Faust and Mephistopheles in the second
Studierzimmer scene of Goethe's Faust
I. Goethe is the most biblical of modern
writers, [2] perhaps the only one to restate the
existential question of Ecclesiastes so clearly.
[3]
The devil offers Faust the usual
inducements: money, fame and sex. But what Faust
wants rather is life - a real life, such as all of
humanity lives:
What is apportioned to all
humankind, Would I enjoy in my inmost
self, Grasp the highest and lowest with my
spirit, And bring their weal and woe into my
own breast.
Mephistopheles answers
with contempt. Mere mortals, he tells Faust,
cannot abide life, which was made for a God:
Believe me, who for millennia
past Has chewed on this hard crust: From
cradle to the grave No man ever has been able
to digest this sourdough! Believe our kind:
this whole Was made only for a God! He
basks in light eternal. Us he brought down
into darkness, While all you get is day and
night.
Your Honors: Believe us Jews,
who have eaten our bread with joy for so many
thousands of years, and who say each morning,
"Happy are we, how good is our portion, how lovely
our fate, how beautiful our heritage."
Mephistopheles is not entirely wrong: life was
indeed made for a god. But what God has made also
can be imparted to human beings. We cannot be
gods, but we can be godly.
What makes it
possible to digest the sourdough of life is to
impart the sacred to everyday life. That is why -
as the demographers have shown - only the
religious have birth rates above replacement in
the industrial world.
Germany drove out
the divine with fire and sword. Now it chews the
old sourdough with disgust. Germany's sin was to
envy us, rather than to emulate us. The great
German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig wrote of
this envy before his death in 1929. The Gentile
nations of the ancient past accepted their
eventual extinction, he explained, until they
learned of the hope of eternal life from the Jews.
The God of Israel first offered eternal
life to humankind, and Christianity extended
Israel's promise to the nations. But the nations
longed for eternal life in their own Gentile skin
rather than in the Kingdom of God promised by
Jesus Christ. After Christianity taught them the
election of Israel, the Gentiles coveted the
election of the Jews and desired their own people
to be the chosen people.
Rosenzweig hoped
that the Jewish example - of a people whose
immortality vouchsafed the Christian promise -
would inspire Christians to value the enduring
presence of the people of Israel. Mercifully he
died before National Socialism took envy of the
Jewish people to a new and hideous extreme by
positing the German "master race" as a neo-pagan
lampoon of Jewish election. The Germans have
failed as pagans, and they are failing as
Christians. Eventually they might fail of their
own lack of interest in life.
The
neo-pagan illusions of National Socialism have
been crushed, although they lurk at the fringes of
German politics. Despite their defeat, the
National Socialists may have succeeded in
extirpating the presence of the divine in German
life. No action by responsible public officials
since the end of the war has advanced their cause
as forcefully as the evil degree you have
promulgated.
You no longer have the power
to destroy us, but you yet may destroy yourselves.
We, the Eternal People, who have seen so many good
things disappear from under the sun, will view
this with sadness.
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