Insight into the Middle East Peace Conflict with Regard to the Intellectual Boycott, Which Struck One Afternoon While I Was Being Confused by My Half-Jewish Son’s Bris
The afternoon of September 9th, 2015, my son was circumcised in a traditional Jewish ceremony called a bris.
It was his first bris.
It was mine, too.
I watched, somewhat bemused, rife with the fourth trimester and the giddy haze of post-Caesarean painkillers, as heirloom tchotchkes gained sacred significance in a language completely foreign to me during an ancient choreography that ended with him and I in sobbing tears as, concurrently, perplexedly, celebration and love made themselves felt.
I used to be a Lutheran.
Used to be a lot of things.
Then life in my womb, and in his DNA, three thousand years of history, a story of strife, a culture, a tribe.
A son, lambs’ blood on the lintel of my hospital room, my Jewish husband asleep on the pull-out couch as oxytocin floods my nervous system, a stream of visitors, new cousins and grandparents, evolution incarnate as Darwin sings in the background with his finches like a Greek Chorus.
And suddenly, the non-observant, non-practicing, sardonic, sarcastic, secular, punk rock, THC-loving worldly father of this child is insisting on a bris in eight days, like his, and his father’s, and HIS father’s, and I’m mispronouncing “mohel” as I do internet research while my incision heals, and then, eight sleepless nights later, we gather.
And while it’s all happening, while my stitches are dissolving and we are learning to be a family of three and I am being confused by the Hebrew used to describe the people and objects involved in the coming ceremony, Stephen Hawking is calling out to Academia to boycott Israel, to keep papers and science and intellect and progress away from a government he accuses of genocide, to starve the Tech-Giant of its diet of knowledge and wisdom in a bitter siege, to take its professors and scientists and writers and artists and astrophysicists and go home.
And while Stephen Hawking is calling for an intellectual boycott, and my son is having a bris, there are Palestinians suffering, restricted, in fear. They cannot lay roots; they cannot grow. But there are Israelis suffering, too, restricted, in fear; skies raining shrapnel as children, conditioned to trauma, huddle in shelters when they should be asleep.
I was once an Academic. I share empathy, with Stephen Hawking, with the Palestinian people, with mothers with new babies, and as the Rabbi chants sacred words and pours wine into a kiddish cup while I am firmly situated within my extended Jewish family, a shicksa they accept nevertheless, I think about intellectual boycott.
In an ethical world, do we deny all of humankind its breakthroughs, at the expense of human beings?
And as the Israelis and Palestinians suffer and Stephen Hawking calls for an intellectual boycott and my son has a bris, my husband holds him, the next scion, a connection, of blood, of genes, of generations upon generations which came before, natural selection at work, and the prayers echo, and the grandparents beam, and my husband smiles.
Why does it have to be a bris? I’d said. Only one of us is Jewish, I’d said. I am extremely anti-organized religion, I’d said.
It’s important to my mom, he’d said.
And, as I watch him, and his mother, and his son, Jewish by culture as they self-identify, I am struck with insight.
We all just want to love.
We all just want to raise our children and find work that is meaningful and feel safe in a space that is our own. Arbitrary boundaries dictate whom to blame for all of the suffering, but love has no bounds, and thus it disseminates, seeps away into the ether, so there is no more love but only suffering.
I’ve solved the Middle East peace crisis, I want to announce over the sounds of my son’s tears, as he joins The Tribe in an instant, like his father and grandfather and so many great-grandfathers passed, Jewish by culture, alive in everyone’s memory.
It’s just boundaries that are the trouble, I want to continue. We are the same. We all just need love.
But there is more prayer and celebration and food and someone hands me my firstborn, impossibly tiny even after I’ve had eight days to grow accustomed to his size, and I offer him a bottle of milk as instructed, soothing him, rocking him, vestigial tears dripping off my nose, an instinctual Marco Polo to the sound of his cries, and I do not speak at all, and instead just listen.
And I, an Existentialist, a Christian once upon a time, know that somewhere, in Israel, this very same ritual is happening at this very same moment.
And I, an Existentialist, a Christian once upon a time, know that somewhere in Palestine, there is a sacred ritual, too.
And they are not so different.
And as I feel swept up in love, in acceptance, in meaning, in family, I am glad we opted for this route, my mother-in-law’s only criteria for properly raising a little boy, and I am glad to have played a part in the experience; because now I am tied, inextricably, by culture, by association, by law, by love to the Jewish faith — I am my beloved and my beloved is mine. Just as I am tied, inextricably, by culture, by association, by law, by love to my own history, independent from that of my husband’s, from which I cannot escape the formative foundations first set.
I cradle my newborn in my arms, watching family members eat and drink as he gazes back at me sleepily, the past already forgotten, completely content with the world because the whole world is me.
And in the Middle East, on either side of the border, of the meaningless invisible line, maybe so close that they are separated only by inches, two mothers cradle two babies; identical needs, Madonna and child, just love. We are all kindred.
And I feel blessed.
Shannon Frost Greenstein resides in Philadelphia with her children, soulmate, and persnickety cats. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, a Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine, and a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy. Shannon was awarded a writing residency through Sundress Academy for the Arts in October 2019. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Crab Fat Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, Bone & Ink Lit Zine, Rhythm & Bones Lit Mag, Ghost City Review, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter at @mrsgreenstein or her website: shannonfrostgreenstein.wordpress.com. She comes up when you Google her.