THE EIGHTH DAY : At a Bris, the Baby Chills Out With a Sip of Sweet Wine; It’s the Adults Who Get the Willies

It’s a nervous thing to attend a bris , the Jewish ritual in which 8-day-old boy babies are circumcised by technicians known as mohels . But here I am in my kid brother’s West L.A. living room, cooing at the baby his wife holds in her arms, about to watch a ceremony that my late father would have done pretty much anything to avoid.

My father’s generation of American-born Reform Jews, by and large more assimilationist than either their parents or their children, considered mohels archaic, as outmoded in Pop’s postwar California as fur hats in summer, or a strict kosher diet, or the rule that requires menstruating women to cleanse themselves in ritual baths. Los Angeles in the ‘60s was not 18th-Century Minsk; there were good hospitals and experienced surgeons--experienced Jewish surgeons. My sister-in-law, on the other hand, though a non-Jew, reasonably figured that if her boy was going to be brought up Jewish, he might as well start at the beginning. And she thought that a mohel , at least one who is pretty much a mohel full-time, might actually be a safer bet than a general obstetrician.

Of course, he is very much a Westside mohel , this guy in my brother’s living room, pressed suit and shiny brogues, an MD from a fancy medical school, with a glad-handed ease that one might associate with someone in the business of demanding points on the gross. He has a grace that undoubtedly serves him well at the Lamaze classes and the temple-brotherhood meetings where his name is dropped like Barney the Dinosaur’s. He has the confidence of a young man who has been set up with many, many daughters over the years. Look at this guy and you don’t think Isaac Bashevis Singer; you think Hugo Boss.

All of us gather around the dining room table, family friends and relatives drafted into various roles in the service, and the mohel tells a few jokes, explains how he gave up medical practice to become a mohel full-time, and he tells us how many circumcisions he performs each year. The baby’s father, who knows what this ceremony costs, does some quick multiplication in his head and lets out a small groan.

The mohel asks me to take Zachary from my wife’s arms and hand him off to my mom, and there is a strange feeling to this, a smidgen of ironic distance, so at times it is hard to remember that I am actually at a bris instead of at a Sunday School lecture about a bris . I am honored to be godfather to my nephew, and I shall cherish him always, but at the moment, it seems as if I am playing a role, like when my sixth-grade class visited a courtroom downtown and Mrs. Slike made me pretend to be the bailiff. We are less than a dozen here, but the mohel is playing to a much bigger crowd.

“You can get up and leave,” he says, “or you can just close your eyes. Usually nobody in the room sees anything, except for me. Personally, I always look.”

I am glad, at least, of that.

He straps Zachary into a contraption that resembles a tricked-out Boogie Board, propping the baby’s legs outward and upward into a position that suggests the gynecologist’s stirrups. The baby begins to bawl. Aunt Ruth, not normally an animal lover, becomes suddenly fascinated by a pet turtle crawling in another room, and she wanders off to look at it. My mother stares at the ceiling, unable to conceal the tears that well in her eyes.

The mohel recites a prayer, then wets a cloth with a few drops of sweet wine and presses it to the baby’s lips. The crying stops as suddenly as it had started, and in a few swift motions, it is done. The only person who does not look away is my wife, who watches as intensely as if she were to be the one required to perform the operation next time. We all raise glasses of Manischewitz Concord Grape and drink to the splendid future of the child.

The ceremony done, the blessings through, the mohel reaches into his briefcase and hands each of us a photocopied press kit. In Los Angeles these days, you never know who might need a mohel .