The Still Small Voice of God
Emily was featured in a September 27, 2020 article in The New Journal titled, “The Still Small Voice of God” about how observant Jews in New Haven distill beauty and closeness from socially distanced religious practices.
Rachel Somerstein’s baby, Jonathan, had fallen asleep on the dining room table even before the brit milah began. His mother guessed that it was the sugar water-Tylenol mixture that the mohel had given him, but newborns sleep a lot, and Jonathan was only ten days old. Soon, the circumcision ceremony would take place, welcoming him into the covenant of Abraham and to his family. It was the ideal situation: Emily Blake, his mohel, said with a laugh that her definition of a “perfect bris” is one where the baby doesn’t cry but where the parents are moved to tears.
Jonathan’s father nearly passed out as he observed the procedure. The mohel placed a Gomco clamp, shaped like a steel bell, on the baby’s penis. It would protect the head of the penis during the procedure and limit blood flow to a minimum. Blake took a scalpel and cut straight along the foreskin, easy and simple. It is a ritual of blood, one that Blake strives to make as painless as possible.
Jonathan is an easygoing baby. It took him a few moments to cry when he was first delivered from the warm womb into a hospital room. Giving birth during a pandemic wasn’t easy, said his mother. The virus was ravaging her home state of New York and she worried that she may have to give birth alone. As Jonathan kicked inside her, more than 100,000 people around the country died from COVID-19.
But as soon as she found out she was having a boy, Somerstein knew she had to have a bris, a circumcision ceremony done according to Jewish law and with kavanah, which refers to a mindset of sincere intentionality that must accompany Jewish rituals. Although her husband is not Jewish and has not yet converted, the couple keeps a kosher home, practices Shabbat, and says the Shema prayer with their daughter before she goes to sleep each night.
Somerstein had envisioned renting a place downtown in their small village of 14,000, nestled by the Shawangunk Mountains in the Hudson Valley, and inviting all their siblings, parents, and close friends. But because of the pandemic, the guest list dwindled to just five: Jonathan’s mom, dad, sister, and grandparents.
“At one point I felt so sad about it,” she said while watching over her son and 4-year-old daughter. “It’s so sad that we couldn’t introduce our son to our families the way we wanted to.”
But having a brit milah was important to Somerstein. She wanted to give her son the freedom to decide how he wanted to practice Judaism when he grew older and this was a way to give him that agency, she said. Jewish men who do not have a bris done by a mohel with the proper blessings, in the proper time frame (not before—and ideally on—the eighth day of life), or with the proper intention, must have a ritual drop of blood taken from their penis to make the circumcision “kosher,” as Blake calls it.
The baby’s grandparents, father, older sister, and mother, said prayers over him. One of the blessings they recited was the birkat hagomel, spoken after someone has survived a dangerous journey—in this case, childbirth.
Four years earlier, Somerstein had survived a C-section for her daughter without anaesthesia. This time, she had gone into prodromal labor five days days before Jonathan was born. She was dilating and having contractions, her body was preparing for a baby that was coming but not ready yet. Jonathan was finally born at 9:17 p.m. on a Tuesday, with big cornflower blue eyes and pudgy legs. In early August, Jonathan was just over a month old, “figuring out who he is as he figures out the world around him,” says his mother.
During the bris, after they said the prayers, they gave Jonathan his Hebrew name—Yonatan. It was the name by which he would be called to the Torah, his covenantal name. On a laptop screen, Jonathan’s aunts, uncles, and grandparents said blessings. They each drank grape juice and wine, in lieu of a celebratory meal that could no longer be held in person.
Now that many brises have to be celebrated over Zoom, Emily Blake, Somerstein’s 64-year-old veteran mohel who has dedicated more than three decades of her life to this work, likes to begin the ceremony with a pun: they’re doing this “chai-tech” (“chai” means life in Hebrew).
“We are accepting things we never thought we’d have to live with, in this pandemic,” said Blake on the phone one morning as she drove from New York to New Haven for a bris. “I think people are just so happy they’re getting a joyous moment to celebrate, that there’s this new baby coming into their family. It’s a moment that you can step out of the incredible sadness of being stuck in lockdown, to have the sunshine break through that dark cloud.”
