Circumsision is a religious act or justified as preventive health method

Circumcision is a religious act or justified as preventive health method?

By David Verveer

The other day, as reaction on a fiction I had written, we suddenly, jokingly started to discuss circumcision, which is performed on the Jewish boy, when only a week old, in order to allow him to join the agreement between God and the Jews. Not being religious, I still think the circumcision is a positive act, but like many others, I prefer that this rite is performed in hospital by a qualified medical doctor rather than an orthodox Jew, who specializes in circumcision, and knows which prayers to utter when he removes the foreskin of the baby boy's pin.

I personally was circumcised by the latter type, but something went wrong, and I nearly died due to loss of blood, and most probably this is the reason I got only daughters and no sons to continue our dynasty, but girls are also nice, and they do not require you to play football with them.

But getting to the point (no pun intended) why do the Jews and also the Islamic people circumcise, surely not because religious reasons, but in our dusty Middle East, and shortage of water, the space between the foreskin and the pin gets easily infected, a painful and dangerous complication, which is prevented by removing the skin.

I have read studies made by scientists against circumcision, claiming that it causes a shock and trauma to the poor boy, which will never heal, but if you consider the number of Noble price winners, who were or are Jewish, it seems that the trauma is manageable. Others claim that it reduces the pleasure in sex life, a subject I can't check, as my sex acts as a one week old boy were rather limited.

Only currently I read a study that circumcised men are less likely to get sexual related diseases, I don't know if that is true but it makes sense. Today, many boys are circumcised in hospitals around the world, without any religious seasons, as health preventive measure.

Let me end this learned discussion on circumcision by quoting an anecdote dated from the British Mandate era in Palestine.
A Jew was asked by a British Policeman, what they do with the foreskin, after removing it. The Jew told him that these foreskins are buried in the ground, and added; we than carefully irrigate them in regularly intervals, in order to get them to grow. The Policeman was amazed and asked, "Growing into what?" The Jew answered "Policemen of course, smucks all of them! This is of course only a joke; as they say, many of my best friends are British Policemen.