Where is Eco-Milah When You Need It?

The training of Reform Mohalim is presented in this news item as a return to observance, but I'm not so sure. It seems that a certain number of Reform parents want their sons to be circumcised anyway, but they run into problems with the fact that the mother and the rach hanimol aren't Jewish:

There were . . . points of conflict engendered by the Orthodox and Reform understandings of who is a Jew. Traditional Judaism considers people Jewish only if their mothers are. But the Reform movement began counting someone as a Jew if either parent was Jewish.

In recent decades, intermarriage has been escalating: In some Reform congregations upwards of half the families have a non-Jewish member. Even when they later embraced Judaism, there could be problems when seeking the service of a mohel (the singular of mohalim).

"An Orthodox mohel might not accept a mother who converted to Judaism, if the conversion wasn't done by an Orthodox rabbi," said Rabbi Lewis Barth, co-founder of NOAM and dean of Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles.

Some non-Orthodox parents have been subject to a kind of shell game, noted Fred Kogen, who took his medical degree at the University of Chicago. The trick depends upon secular Jews not knowing the faith's liturgical language. He explained that a bris is something more than a circumcision. The latter is a surgical procedure; it becomes a bris only when the proper blessings are said, welcoming the boy into the Jewish people by name.

"Parents would get a Mr. Orthodox mohel, right out of central casting with a long white beard," Kogen said. "He'd change the blessing, murmuring something in Hebrew about it being done pending the `future conversion' of the child."

To free Reform parents from those dilemmas, the NOAM program was established, Barth explained. Participants, who are often recruited by their rabbi, go through intensive short-courses in the theology and liturgy of the bris. It can be a life-changing experience, say veterans of the program, which is offered at various locations around the nation.

Instead of pretending that the Jewish part of the Bris is negotiable, it would probably better for a non-Jewish baby to have a regular secular circumcision in a hospital. For ceremony, they could just do something completely meaningless, the milah equivalent of Eco-kashrus: Ze ha'alfalfa sprout gadol yiyeh . . . (Hat tip: Yeshivah Orthodoxy)