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© 2016 John D. Brey.

In chapter three of Professor Elliot R. Wolfson's masterpiece, Circle in the Square, i.e., Erasing the Erasure/Gender and the Writing of God's Body in Kabbalistic Symbolism, Professor Wolfson engages the topic of gender in, or on, the Body of God. The context for the engagement is the nature, or relationship, between the Torah-scroll, or more generally the "written" revelation of God, and the theological idea of an incarnate, or tangible, representation/manifestation of the Godhead.

Establishing the foundation for the study as simply as it can be stated, if the Ein Sof, the intangible/invisible God of Jewish monotheism, can't be seen, or engaged (so to say), if he can't father young, since he's immaterial, if he can't speak face-to-face to his wife or offspring (since he's wholly-other, holy-immaterial), then it goes without saying that he needs some sort of make-shift "body" or "medium," to negotiate the chasm that exists between his otherworldly otherness, and the other-world composed (unlike him) of tangible things.

For many Jewish sages this mediatorial body is represented by the tangible Torah-scroll, the deliverer of the written word, the written word representing God's personal testimony as it exists even prior to its engagement with the target audience. Which is to say, as Professor Wolfson points out, the Torah-scroll represent both God's personal testemony (the words), and also the tangible deliverer of those words. -----The Torah-scroll represents the path the words take on their way directly to God's fleshly bride, and thus his fleshly offspring; both of whom go by the name "Israel" (the mother acquiring the surname and the male offspring adopting the name of the male progenitor).

A couple seminal quotations from Professor Wolfson's essay will cut out literally pages of introductory groundwork concerning the direction and destination that's to follow:

. . . It is clear that the zoharic authorship, consistent with standard medieval views, reflecting in turn ancient Greco-Roman as well as Near Eastern cultural assumptions, identified the writing instrument (pen or chisel) with the phallus, on one hand, and the tablet or page with the female on the other. It is evident from other zoharic passages that the act of engraving---which signifies in its most elemental sense the process of forming or giving shape by digging out space from slabs of matter ---is understood in sexual terms as phallic penetration . . . (p. 62).

It may be concluded from these and other passages that in zoharic literature engraving letters, or more generally the process of writing or inscription, is a decidedly erotic activity: the active agent of writing is the male principle; the written letters are the semen virile, and the tablet or page upon which the writing is accomplished is the female principle. . . It is obvious, therefore, that the letters must be seen as the semen that the male imparts to the female. (p. 68).

If, as Professor Wolfson points out, the written Torah-scroll is fancied the mediator between Ein Sof, the unknowable God, and those material beings he wants "to know" (yada), and if, as Professor Wolfson points out, the letters and words are the semen, and in this case they’re words directly from God's own personal testemony (since he delivers them personally), then it becomes perfectly clear precisely why the text where these things are discussed treat God as the Groom, and Israel as the bride and offspring of the Groom. . . The words are given directly to the bride who is the receptacle receiving the words.

In the same context where Professor Wolfson speaks of the hermeneutical relationship between the pen and the penis, i.e., where he speaks of the relationship between the word and semen (the pen is the penis, the written word is semen, the virginal page the bride) he makes this seemingly contradictory statement:

As I have suggested at length elsewhere, circumcision especially expresses the phallic nature of writing, for through this ritual the letter/sign of the covenant (`ot berit) is inscribed on the flesh. The incision on the penis of the infant boy is the first act of writing, which all other acts of writing emulate (p. 75-76).

If the penis is the pen, the writing tool, then the title of Professor Wolfson's essay, Erasing the Erasure, seems oddly misplaced? The word "erasure" typically speaks of a mark left by "erasing," or the very act of "erasing" itself? If the pen is the writing tool, then writing something on the penis (the pen) seems misplaced? This is particularly true since the two letters typically imagined as being written in the flesh of the infant boy are dalet-yod (di) which mean “enough,” or “it is finished” . . . no more ink, or semen, is needed.

The ritual where this original act of writing takes place, bris milah, speaks not of "writing" per se, but of the "spoken" word ---milah. -----In other words, the very word associated with the ritual cutting of the penis, the engraving of “enough” (it ---the written testimony--- is finished), on the pen itself, is the Hebrew word "milah," which means a "spoken" word in contradistinction to a "written" word.

Milah-Circumcision is the most ancient ritual of Judaism. It represents God's covenant with Abraham and his descendants. Through Milah God was establishing the fact that the history of this nation would transpire on a level that transcends the mere physical. . . Through Milah it would be possible to return to the level of Adam and Eve before the sin. In other words, mankind would again have direct access to the spiritual dimension. . . Milah represents the highest level of spiritual perfection for mankind, a perfection that completely transcends the physical. . . It made the sexual organ into a "holy sign of the covenant" . . . through which they [Israel] would be able to use the sex act to draw down souls from the highest spiritual levels. . . The Israelites were thus totally sanctified to God, and became virtually a separate species.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Inner Space, p.165-166, Handbook of Jewish Thought, p. 54.

Rabbi Hirsch, like his student, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan (quoted above), taught circumcision as a symbolic rebirth not associated with the physical birth which occurs eight days earlier. According to Rabbi Hirsch, circumcision is a new conception, a new birth, completely other than the birth affected in the night, through the physical passions, and the serpentine ruler of those dark animal passions:

Milah is not a completion of, or supplement to, physical birth, but the beginning of a higher "octave." It marks the second, higher "birthday," man's entry into the Divine level of free and moral action. Physical birth belongs to the night . . . But milah, birth as a Jew, belongs to the daytime.

Hirsch Chumash at Gen. 17:23.

Within the interpretations of two distinguished Rabbis, and probably the greatest student of Jewish symbolism who has ever lived (Professor Elliot R. Wolfson), it seems particularly easy to place the founding ritual of Judaism into a pretty straightforward framework. ------Rabbi Kaplan points out a number of things that segue too nicely to be inconsequential. He notes that circumcision represents a return to the status of Adam before the Fall, and thusly, to a time of spiritual purity shattered by the first, or, dare I say, original, sin. ----As such, as a return to prelapsarian space and time, brit milah allows the circumcised Jew to draw down souls from the highest spiritual levels such that these souls, coming from this higher testemony, represent virtually a new species of human being.

It's precisely this new species of human being, and the new birth through which the new species is situated, that shines a beacon light on the nature of ritual circumcision. For when we examine the rituals and symbols associated with the practice, focusing on the quotations of two eminent Rabbis (and a Professor of Jewish symbolism), we're faced with an image of a Judaism situated within the ritual of circumcision which seems disturbingly unfamiliar to the very Jews who practice the foundational ritual. 

Whereas Rabbis Hirsch and Kaplan situate bris milah, ritual circumcision, as a conceiving/birthing ritual, representing a Jew being born on the eighth day, for a purpose, and as a new spiritual entity, "foreign" to the fleshly humanity born only the first time, Professor Wolfson adds that this birth is imaged such that the "pen," and thus the written testimony, is replaced by the tongue, and thus the spoken word, milah. . . This is to say that the pen is literally written out of the new testimony that comes through the spoken word, milah, which is a logocentric testimony. The pen, the grammatological organ that the pen-is, that it's representing, i.e., the penis, is being told "enough," di[e]; you're no longer needed, your time has come, it is (your reign), truth be known, finished. Grammatology has been super-seded (one upped) by the seed of the Logos, the spoken word: milah.

These truism reveal the existence of two Jews. A firstborn born of the intact scroll, the grammatologically conceived Jew, the one conceived by the semen (words) come through the scroll, versus a brand new Jew, a firstborn born after the grammatological Jew; a new Jew conceived through milah, the spoken word, and not the semen (semantics) come through the intact scroll. -----In Professor Wolfson's equating of the pen and the penis . . . and thus the grammatology conceived through the written testimony, we have a picture of an Israel for whom the testimony was originally delivered orally, but which, after the Fall, the golden calf, was delivered through the dead letter, the grammatological scroll, giving live-birth through the dead-letter.

Those Jews born again, a second time, after the erasing of the pen through which the semantics of the written testimony came into the world, speak of an "original sin" transforming Adam's biological scroll into the organ of death, the organ that, while conceiving beings conceivably alive at birth, are, nevertheless, every one of them, born with a death sentence hanging over their heads. Orthodox doctrine speaks of death passing, in every case, through the Adamic scroll, therein contaminating all who are generated through that process.

The first Jew born of "milah" (the spoken word) super-seedes the grammatologically conceived Jew. He tells those whom he considers his bride, that they will be made pregnant precisely as he came into the world, not through the scroll, or grammatology, but through the spoken word, milah, which is to say, through his tongue. He reveals that they're not written in the testemony attached to, and delivered through, the scroll. But that they shouldn't worry too much about that since it is they, and not those come through the intact scroll, who are, logically, if not grammatologically, the true circumcision, the true offspring of "milah," offspring of the spoken word.  He said they should not be too concerned when Jews conceived in the written scroll, and come through its analogue, the fleshly pen, tell them they can't be Jewish since they're neither situated in the written testemony, nor come through the testimony come through Abraham's intact scroll.

The relationship between the pen, the penis, and thus the written word, written testimony, segues too nicely with the concept of the ritual writing out of existence of the pen, whereby a new species of humanity will be conceived not from the testimony come through the written word, and thus the words delivered by a phallic-scroll, but through the tongue of the first-fruit of this new species of humanity ----he who was conceived through the spoken word (the first creature conceived through "milah"), rather than the written scroll; the first person born of the spoken word of God, rather than a written account come through a quasi-godly scroll.