Keeping Alive The Rite Of Circumcision

June 02, 1986|By Magda Krance.

Rev. Noah Wolff looks like the grandfather he is, with his gray hair and glasses, his serious but gentle demeanor, his portly build that promises a good broad lap. His voice is calm and even. He exudes a sense that everything is going to be all right--a very good attribute in his line of work.

He visits the magnificent or simple homes of Chicago-area Jews without pomp or flourish, toting a doctor`s little black bag and a large flat black case. Rev. Wolff speaks with soft authority to the anxious parents who have invited him. His manner reassures, and in these homes reassurance is needed.

It is The Eighth Day after the birth of a boy. It is time for the infant son to enter the covenant of Abraham. It is time for the bris milah, the ritual circumcision.

Rev. Wolff is a mohel (pronounced moil), a specialist trained in the religious and medical nuances of circumcision. He is not a rabbi, but carries the title ``reverend`` because of his religious function. His singular specialty has survived despite centuries of religious persecution and, more recently, decrees by the American medical establishment that circumcision is no longer necessary or recommended.

Circumcision grew medically popular in much of the English-speaking world between 1870 and 1910, riding the wave of Victorian prudishness as a ``cure`` for masturbation. For most of the 20th Century, American doctors practiced routine infant circumcision in the name of preventing infection, cancer and bad hygiene. No other country in the world made it a medical habit;

elsewhere, it was strictly the stuff of religious practice mainly for Jews and Moslems. (Curiously, male members of the British royal family are circumcised by London`s main mohel.) For much of this century, mainstreamed American Jews bypassed tradition for the ritual-less hospital procedure.

In 1971, though, after much study, the American Academy of Pediatricians began advising against routine circumcision. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists did likewise in 1978. Over the past several years, Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Maine and of Washington/Alaska, and Blue Shield of California have stopped paying for routine infant circumcision, and Blue Shield of Pennsylvania recently announced that after July 1, it would no longer cover the procedure.

In these litigious times, it`s one less risk to take. In large hospitals medical interns often perform the procedure. For many of them, it is their first surgery. Accidents have happened.

None of this concerns Noah Wolff and his work, however. The raison d`etre for his work lies outside medical fashions and insurance risks. He is one of few, an instrument of ancient tradition, a preserver of continuity for the devout and lax alike.

It is the morning of The Eighth Day in West Rogers Park, in the home of Bernard and Bonnie Citron and their first child, Maxwell Ian. Friends and relatives crowd the small living room, chatting and joking nervously. Down the hall, women guests fuss with Bonnie over the feast to come.

``I figured the worst thing that could happen was a C-section and a boy, and that`s what happened,`` says Bonnie with a weak smile.

By tradition, parents informally announce the bris to friends and family, and hope for a minyon--the quorum of ten adult males that must be present for any Jewish prayer service to occur. (A formal invitation would mean an obligation to attend.)

Wearing a blue medical coat, Rev. Wolff opens the large black case and takes out something similar to an infant`s recumbent car seat. This goes on a table in the living room, where some disposable diapers, gauze pads, Vaseline, and a silver chalice filled with wine are already neatly laid out.

He fills out the circumcision certificate, then explains for nearly the 10,000th time the origin and significance of the bris. ``There`s an interesting custom of setting a chair aside for Elijah the prophet at every bris because we`re told that Elijah fought very arduously during his lifetime for the preservation of this rite, and in commemoration of that we symbolically invite him to every bris,`` Rev. Wolff says, as he does each time, more or less, interjecting key phrases in Hebrew. ``On that chair is the covering that has the phrase, `This child is being entered into the covenant of Abraham; so shall he be entered into the study of Torah, marriage, and a life of good deeds.` ``

Jewish or not, it`s likely that many in the Citrons` living room have never been to a bris, so Rev. Wolff explains everything. The origin of the mitzvah, the religious commandment itself, is found in the Torah and the Book of Genesis, ``where we are told that Abraham our patriarch . . . was asked by God to be circumcised. He circumcised his son Isaac on the eighth day after birth as well as all the male members of his household, and this was to be an everlasting covenant between God and the children of Israel.