The Rosh Hashanah Surprise

‘Thought that I was finished,
Thought that I was complete,
Thought that I was whole instead of being half of something,’

-The Proclaimers

I may as well tell you about the really disconcerting thing that I mentioned on October 24th. Disconcerting to me, anyways. Even though I have all these science degrees, and a seven-year-old son, I was blithely unaware of 20th century doctors’ fads and- apparently-more than usually imperceptive and lacking in prurient curiosity. Thus I never for a moment dreamed that I might be circumcised until Mum told me, when I was thirty-three years old. I thought I knew all about that kind of stuff and it is a shock to find myself so woefully ill-informed...

Gosh. Here I was thinking I was more in touch with my feminine side than most men and it turns out I am some kind of hyper-masculinised freak. I mean, *mucous membranes* on your genitals, how girly is that? Yuck.

Purely by accident, I found out on Jewish New Year. And Mum says they didn’t do it for health reasons, but because of God’s covenant with Abraham. I vaguely thought St. Paul had said all that sort of thing was rubbish 2000 years ago. Perhaps my family is more conservative than I had thought. Maybe we are actually part of one of those strange crypto-Jewish lineages who have been hiding out from the Inquisition for hundreds of years. My mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s name was Robanski, is that a Jewish name? I don’t know.

I guess it is reassuring to find there is some organic basis for my attraction to these uncompromising monothesistic creeds of the desert...