The Last Exile

Frack if I know, but if I had a penny for every time someone told me the Jews got it wrong; I wouldn’t need to work for a living and neither would my children or their children until possibly the seventh generation. I am really, really, tempted to entitle this post ‘minu beneikhem min ha-higgayon’ or ‘keep your sons from learning scripture’. Now Rashi, one of the greatest of rabbincial scholars suggested this phrase meant it was more necessary for one’s sons to learn the oral torah (Talmud) in order to grasp the full implications of the written Torah. I surmise, he had a valid point. CBC

A Vancouver-area father has been found guilty of negligence causing bodily harm after botching a home-circumcision attempt on his four-year-old son as part of a spiritual quest to make things right with God. The bizarre case centred on a battle over the religious freedoms of the former Jehovah’s Witness, who was trying to follow a literal interpretation of the Bible after a series of misfortunes hit his family. During the trial, the B.C. Supreme Court heard that after a bad motorcycle accident in 2002 left both the man and his wife with brain injuries, he began the religious quest that eventually led him to believe that both he and son needed to be circumcised to celebrate Passover.

The man, identified only as D.J.W. to protect the identity of his son, began researching home circumcision on the internet and in the Bible, and by listening to a radio show. His first attempt to circumcise himself ended up with his foreskin turning black and only part of it cut off. When he couldn’t stop the bleeding, he called an ambulance, and a doctor in a hospital emergency room ended up stitching up the bleeding wound.

The man later returned to the internet for more research and met some other religious fundamentalists, who were also dog breeders. They advised him they used a veterinary powder called BloodStop to halt any bleeding when they circumcised their 13-year-old son. At $30 a bottle, Blood Stop was too expensive for the man. But during a trip to Washington state to celebrate Passover with a friend, the man found another more affordable product, called Wonder Dust, meant for horses. The man also contacted several doctors and rabbis, all of whom refused to do the operation either because the boy was too young for a general anesthetic or because the family was not Jewish.

So after a trip to London Drugs to buy razor blades in January 2006, he asked his son if he could cut off his foreskin, so he could be just like dad. The man testified in court that, after the boy consented to the circumcision, he fed him some mead — a biblical beverage made from honey — lay him on the kitchen floor, stretched his penis across a cutting board and cut off part of the foreskin.
When asked in court whether the man used ice to ease the boy’s pain, he replied, “Where would the Israelites have found ice?” He then applied the Wonder Dust, gave the boy some ice cream and told him he could watch whatever movies he wanted that week, before heading off to church, leaving the boy in the care of his mother, who could not stand the sight of blood.

I know a wonderful woman, who when she was off her meds, believed she is the Canadian messiah and meant to lead Canada on the path of righteousness in the 21st century. She even joined the Liberal party and believed the forces of evil (eg Former Prime Minister John Chretien and his supporters) conspired to defeat her riding association candidacy. Mind you, there are some days when I think she might have made a better prime minister than the current one…

There is a man at the corner of Dundas & Yonge street who shouts randomly and indiscriminately at passerbyers to repent and accept Jesus as their personal sinner. Every time I go by him I try to steel myself for the inevitable shout near my ear but he always manages to make me jump. It just creeps me out. One day, an immediate ‘Fuck, No!” slipped out of my mouth and he followed me into the subway denouncing me as Jezebel until I lost him after I went through the turnstile. A short block east of Dundas & Yonge a group of ‘Black Hebrews’ have set up shop complete with their Israeli flags and browbeat passerbyers in an aggressive fashion to reject the white man’s bible. One day last summer I sat in Dundas Square sipping coffee and watched two men named “Moses” and “Jesus” argue so fiercely that it came to blows. Jesus was the first to go down before the police could successfully intervene.

Now as much as I would like to believe these kinds of things wouldn’t happen if we all followed Rashi’s wisdom, the truth remains – mental illness whether genetic or physically induced would still cast its pall and harm would still be done. The real challenge for our society is how we can help these people compassionately and humanely from doing harm to themselves or to others.