Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

One of the websites on chabad.org dealing with pidyon haben starts with the subheading “special care must be taken with new entities”. The idea is a well known one in Torah: first fruits and all that. But if there’s one thing that having a baby — and by that I mean ‘watching my wife have a baby’ — has taught me it’s that children are confounding because they are not new entities. In two ways, my wife’s c section drove home for me the cliché that reproductive rights are about a woman’s right to control her own body. First, because surgery is the plainest example of people not having control of their bodies, of their embodied humanity being reduced to a biological system to be mastered and controlled by medicine. And second, when women are pregnant, children are not IN their bodies, they ARE their bodies. Or rather she is theirs, or it belongs to both of them.

This conflation of body and identity is particularly troubling to the more rabid versions of American protestantism obsessed with ‘individualism’. Indeed, so troubling to them is this the deep connection between mother and child that they define the origins of individual life so early in a fetus’s career that they consider day-after pills to be murder. On this account the mother is, as Luther once said of the virgin Mary, ‘a mere container’.

But not Jews. We know that new entities are all occasions on which special care must be taken. We also know that new entities are made through separation, mavdil. Our duty to cut the world at its divinely-defined joints is what ennobles us and makes us co-participants in god’s ongoing construction of the universe, a universe that otherwise would be tohu v’vohu — all mixed up. By naming children, as we have today, we make them individuals – sons of and daughters of someone. Not, any longer, parts of them.

But as Maurice Godelier reminds us, a man and a woman do not make a child — they make a fetus. The actual kid is made by the community it is part of.  One of the great insights of people living in Melanesia, where Godelier and I both have lived, is that people are made up out of other people and objects: blood, semen, breastmilk and, in our case, bagels, lox, and the occasional musubi. Christian culture oscillates endlessly between its self-imposed paradox of insisting on individual autonomy while longing for communion with the group (a paradox resolved in their central religious ritual). But for Papua New Guineans there isn’t really ‘society’ and ‘individual’, there are just people grown out of other people, bodies that relationships pass through. Where I used to live in Papua New Guinea, when a woman becomes elderly, her children give pigs and money to their mother’s side of the family, to compensate them for using up the woman’s body which was grown by her parents. When a man dies the killers give pigs and money to his family, who in turn distribute it to everyone has a claim on the deceased — anyone who ever fed him. It is these constant exchanges of food, wealth, and human bodies (and occasionally body parts) which human life is all about. People are not connected by being the same in Melanesia, they are connected by being different — by take roles in rituals that establish who they are to one another.

This is true of Jewish life here in Honolulu as well. Since the kids have come home we’ve had a steady stream of visitors filing into our apartment and filling our refrigerator with food. Our kids are already being grown by the community, and the community, in turn, is being elicited by their bodies. This circumcision and the seudat mitzvah to follow is creating not just two new people, but new relationships amongst all of us. We separate ourselves into new people — giver, receiver, father, son, the person willing to make the last-minute costco run. Lador vador — as one friend of mine emailed me, generations are passing through us.

Finally, people in Papua New Guinea have something else in common with us — they realize that making people is the most serious and important work one can do in life, and they aren’t afraid to mark that seriousness on the surface of the body. Circumcision is a hard thing for parents to do to their kids even if, today, there are various surgical means to keep it from being painful and even — in the long run — permanent. Many people ask: why continue with such a traumatic custom? The answer is that we do it because it is hard, because it is irrevocable, and because it is permanent — just like our commitment to Judaism. Our globalized world is chock-full of people who think it is a good thing to be completely free to chose which cultural tradition you will embrace, like searchers for ‘spirituality’ who flit between religious traditions on a weekly basis. Too often today ‘tradition’ means a colorful ethnic outfit worn once or twice a year or a  small menu of ‘heritage’ foods. Against this backdrop of single-serving heritage we continue to insist that Judaism is an identity that is inscribed on our bodies and cannot be taken off. It can not be worn only when convenient, or cast off lightly when one tires of it. Today we’ve made a very, very serious decision for our children without their consent, knowledge, or understanding. We have written that decision on their body in a way that will cause them physical pain and doom them to life as a tiny minority group that few people in the islands know about or understand. We have done this because their bodies, like ours, are not our own, but something that Judaism passes through. We have made this intervention in their lives serious in order to signal how seriously we believe that Judaism is the best possible and most important decision we could make for our children. Eventually Dan and Sam will be able to decide for themselves whether or not to chose Judaism. But in order for that to happen Judaism must chose them first. And is what we have done today.