But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchà ¨d forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
I can't say. But Roth's story concerned another knife wielded by fathers against their sons, one Abraham was intimately familiar with.
Roth ends his novel with his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman arguing that circumcision is good because it immediately lets the baby boy know the world is a place of violence, not peace and love. Also, "circumcision makes it clear as can be that you are here and not there, that you are out and not in -- also that you're mine and not theirs".confirms that there is an us, and an us that isn't solely him and me." In other words, the painful act of cutting the skin off the end of an innocent boy's penis to better make it resemble a weapon is good for the young whippersnapper, for it tactilely teaches him the need for pain and violence and the division of the world into us and them, good guys and bad. "The heavy hand of human values falls upon you right from the start," Roth writes approvingly, "marking your genitals as its own."
I never knew that. I was under the impression that my genitals were mine; were me, just as my hands and brain are. Roth's argument struck me as strange coming from a writer who made his reputation by being the Jewish malcontent. It seemed that Roth was offering this justification for circumcision -- which Jews and Muslims trace back to Abraham, as another sign of his obedience to God -- as a token of guilt redemption for all his criticism of fellow Jews. The wayward son, the creator of Jewish masturbators and fornicators, was finally seeing the wisdom of the father, Abraham. Father knows best, after all.
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