From Peaceful Beginnings

“I AM A JEALOUS GOD WHO PUNISH

THE CRIME OF FATHERS UPON CHILDREN

UP TO...” GREAT-GRANDFATHERS...

(Second Commandment)

The body is the very first temple of the holy and circumcision should be proscribed by a religion which refuses images in its temples. Infantile sexual mutilation (excision, circumcision) castrates the specific organs of autosexuality. Contemporary psychology, psychoanalysis and sexology agree to see in this practice, invented by puritan societies, traditional (Africa, Middle-East, etc.) or modern (Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, New Zealand and USA in the 19^th century), particularly harsh repression of autosexuality, conceived as harmful and/or as sin par excellence and original sin. This sexual “education” through violence is often accompanied by that of corporal punishment: hitting , claps, spanking. hits behind what is so gently done in front. Strikes accompany it, up to the Spine Crown and the Cross, as shown by Ernst's paintingwhere the fallen halo evokes the cut off foreskin. It is the norm in the Bible and John the Baptist and Jesus paid with their lives their supporting baptism by water. Since then, numerous attempts of abolishing circumcision occurred. The most elaborated one was that of the movement of the reformist, mosaicist, democrat and feminist rabbis ^(*), born in Frankfurt in 1843. It opposed circumcision for socio-political and legal reasons: circumcision isolates the Jews and is criminal assault against the child (“a barbarous and bleeding rite”, said Rabbi Abraham Geiger ). It also fought circumcision on religious grounds : the Book of Deuteronomy (the Book of Moses, and thus the Ten Commandments) does not prescribe it, Moses opposed that of his son (Exodus, 4: 24-26), it was not practised under his reign (it was set back into practice for men only, after his death, in Gilgal – Joshua, 5: 2-9), there is no (no longer) equivalent for girls. It was the first post-Renaissance Jewish movement to refuse circumcision. Geiger and his friends had perfectly understood that Moses was opposed to circumcision but, unfortunately, the reformist could not believe their eyes of the falsification of one of the Ten Commandments that hides that one of the Ten Commandments forbids circumcision. When the rabbinical authorities answered their arguments, they admitted defeat and most dissidents came back to circumcision. But the “heresy” gained the United States where some practise non-mutilating nomination. Since then, only Sigmund Freud harshly denounced circumcision, in 1909:

“The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism; for even in the nursery, little boys hear that the Jews have something cut off in their penis – a piece of their penis, they think – and this gives them a right to despise the Jews.”

The abolition of circumcision during the reign of Moses is scarcely highlighted. It is yet a historical fact (Joshua, 5: 5) and the custom was reinstituted in Gilgal only after his death (Joshua, 5: 2) – the Bible speaks of recircumcision at this time simply because the first circumcision was the Mosaic one: circumcision of the heart. The Book of the Exodus recounts that Moses opposed circumcision:

“During this journey, he (Moses) stopped in a hostelry; the Lord approached him and wanted to make him die (if he did not have his son circumcised). Zipporah seized a stone, removed her son’s outgrowth and threw it at his feet (the Lord’s) saying: “Are you thus united to me by blood?” The Lord let him (Moses) alone. Then she said: “Yes, you are united to me by blood, because of circumcision!”

(Exodus, 4: 24-26) ^(*) (our parenthesis)

These verses show that the Pharaoh (Adonaï, Aton) tried to keep control over the fugitives and ensure his power through circumcision. But Moses refused it; he was aware of its psychological consequences:

“The duration of our journey… had been of 38 years. At that time, the whole warlike generation had disappeared…” (Deuteronomy, 4: 14)

“The whole” was somewhat inaccurate. As Zipporah belonged to a circumcising tribe, circumcision was a trifle for her. In order to save her husband’s life, during a scene of atrocious cruelty under the threat of the Pharaoh who took Moses chained up, she carried out the operation. In a mad rage to have been forced to it against her spouse's will, she cheered up her men through defying the Pharaoh with an insulting gesture. This gesture sealed a family covenant against Pharaoh and circumcision. But the child was traumatized to such an extent that, forty years later, he ordered the collective crime in Gilgal, a direct prelude to Jericho, the first genocide in history.

The Second ^(**) Commandment abolishes sexual mutilation

The concern for condemning the forced circumcision of his son was keenly present to the mind the author of the Ten Commandments. A humiliated father, wounded in the flesh of his flesh and in his dignity, solemnly pronounced in front of the people the first declaration of the duties and rights of man in history, of universal value, basis of elementary ethics and juridical systems ^(***). Abolishing Abraham’s law of subjection by terror, the new Covenant respects the human body: "Do not commit homicide." So, Moses condemns circumcision as soon as the Second Commandment:

“You shall not make yourself idols, nor any image of what is… down on the earth.”

(20: 4)

Mohammed, opposed to circumcision like Moses, echoed this verse:

“You will not alter the creation of God.” (Koran, 30: 30)

For collective or not, circumcision achieves an indecent, perverse image upon man’s body and the denudation of the glans makes the phallus a fetish in seemingly permanent erection (“It's so much prettier!”). Worshippers of the masculine phallus and contemptuous of the feminine one, the Egyptians practised – and still practise – upon girls and boys, the most terrible repression of autosexuality that one can imagine: the mutilation of its specific organs. They had imposed it on the Jews as a token of slavery. Having freed the Jews, Moses could not tolerate that some would perpetuate the barbarous customs, human sacrifices, bloody homage to polytheism, to the archaic, telluric divinities of fertility and procreation. He denounces chapter 17 of the Book of Genesis. A "jealous God" cannot admit idolatry of the phallus. But the orthodox commentators of the following verse:

“... I am a jealous God, who prosecute the crime of fathers (circumcision) upon (committed upon) children up to the third and fourth generation... (grandfathers and great-grandfathers; going beyond is impossible).” (20: 5),

through an unlikely double-meaning, interpret it as if it said: … who prosecute children for the crimes of fathers. But it does not and no less than seventeen inaccuracies or neglects of the rabbinic interpretation compel us to think that it is inexact and that the expression: “the crime of fathers” designates sexual mutilation of children, which is thus condemned and abolished:

Ⅰ - The common sense arguments

- first, if the sentence had this meaning, its would also have this construction,

- second, the text does not say “the crimes” but “the crime”, a precise, well-known crime upon children...: sexual mutilation,

- third, asserting that God punishes children for the crimes of fathers, the orthodox interpretation gives the term “jealous” the aberrant meaning of suspicious till the injustice of condemning children and grand-children irresponsible for paternal criminality. The just will not will not allow such interpretation; a jealous God is jealous of his own creation, which man may not alter,

- fourthly, besides, one could not understand why a punishment of criminality applied to the whole family would dead abate at the fourth generation. On the other hand, it is natural that the punishment of circumcising criminals could not be applied beyond great-grandfathers,

- fifthly, it duplicates the 6^th Commandment: “Do not commit homicide.”,

- sixthly, at the contrary, the 2^nd Commandment brings out mutilative paedo-sexual criminality as very particularly reprehensible. Moses was aware of the gravity of mass crimes, striking a whole part of the population (children in the case in point). Justly locating sexual mutilation amongst crimes against creation (humanity), he distinguishes it from ordinary crime. Similarly, the Koran forbids circumcision (16: 89 and 30: 30), condemns its generalization by Abraham (2 : 124 and 4 : 118-119) and affirms sharing (2: 136, 3: 84 and 17: 55) the Mosaic conception, both theological and humanitarian, of respect of the physical integrity, dignity, privacy and modesty of the child,

- seventhly, consequently, for the first time in history, a legislator enacts an imprescriptible penalty, striking the elderly years after their crime,

Ⅱ - The linguistic and syntactic arguments

- eighthly, the singular: “the crime of fathers”, refers to a precise crime; if the matter were criminality in general according to the orthodox interpretation, the text would have used either the double plural (the crimes of fathers) or the double singular (the crime of the father),

- ninthly, one does not prosecute a crime upon a person but a person for a crime and “children” is the indirect complement of “crime” and not of “prosecute” (several translators use “punish” in order to avoid this incorrectness of the French Rabbinate),

Ⅲ - The historical (Biblical) arguments

- ^(*) tenthly, circumcision was not practised during the reign of Moses,

- ^(*) in the eleventh place, the circumcision of Moses’s son was made against his father’s will (cf. above),

- in the twelfth place, these two arguments imply that the forbidding of sexual mutilation concerns boys as well as girls,

- in the thirteenth place, the version of the 2^nd Commandment in the Book of Deuteronomy (5: 8) rubs out the terms “upon children”. But how could the most sacred text of the Torah since carved in stone by God in person, have varied? The Book of the Exodus, well-known to the people, could only be falsified intellectually. The thing was favoured by the blue-pencilling in the Book of Deuteronomy, a book of priests, easy to modify. The cut making could be operated at the return from the exile in Babylon, at the time of the alleged discovery of the manuscript buried in the temple. It enabled setting back into force circumcision that had to be abandoned in the jails of Nebuchadnezzar; it was a custom of the “Egyptians”, his worst enemies

- in the fourteenth, a few verses below the 2^nd Commandment, the Bible enlightens it and Moses, in shrewd sexologist, advocates capped penetration:

“You will make an altar of earth ^(**) for me… If however you build a stone altar for me, do not build it with carved stones for by touching them with the iron, you made them lay. You must not either go up on my altar through degrees so that your nudity does not uncover itself there.” (Exodus, 20: 21-23)

Moses affirms through this image that the pagan custom desecrates the human person’s body, offending God. Besides, these verses must be brought together with the following:

“God tilled man – a dust removed from the soil –…” (Genesis, 2: 7)

- ^(*) in the fifteenth place, God does not make discrimination between sexes; it is impossible that he should have ordered Abraham a sign of alliance for boys to the exclusion of girls,

- ^(*) in the sixteenth place, Abraham also circumcised Ishmael and circumcision, as harmful and useless to the ones as to the others, does not give the Jews more right than the Arabs to the land of Canaan.

- in the seventeenth place at last, he tolls the bell for the inhuman “exclusion” of the opponents that institutionalizes identity discrimination, the worst one.

This range of convergent mistakes or neglects, likely voluntary, hides the right interpretation in order to conceal the condemnation of circumcision by the 2^nd Commandment. The “crime of fathers” can only be sexual mutilation of children. Therefore God, or Moses, did not wrongly word the 2^nd Commandment. The supporters – and blind victims – of circumcision cleverly twisted it through a sacrilegious interpretation introducing an inexistent double meaning, in order to conceal that “the crime of fathers” was mutilation perpetrated in Egypt upon both sex children. The obvious mistake in the inadequate use of “prosecute” in the translation of the French Rabbinate can be analysed as unconscious confession and denunciation of the falsification committed by the ancestors.

For when he dictates his Commandments, the Eternal does not play with double meanings. Now here on the Sinai, the historical context is that of abandonment of sexual mutilation. In order to restore it, its fanatic victims falsified the sense of the 2^nd Commandment by pulling the text in an unlikely misinterpretation. Manipulation of the faithful is obvious. The sole attenuating circumstance would be a pathological denial of the reality of the meaning of the 2^nd Commandment, due to blind faith in Abraham’s Commandment and to the deep psychological trauma its implementation provokes. It is high time to put an end to it.

Abolishing Abraham’s, the 2^nd and 6^th makethe Ten Commandments: the first historical declaration of the duties and rights of man, a declaration of the right of the child and the human person to its first right: that to physical integrity and property of their body. It forbids any mutilation without grave and strictly medical motive. Religions and animisms valuing one hair of a child less than temples, books and oral tradition, deserve to see them destructed or forgotten. One can even think that in the 3^rd Commandment:

“You will not invoke the name of the Eternal your God to support lie...” (20: 7),

Moses reproaches Abraham for having perjured saying that God would have ascribed him circumcision. A shrewd reader of the Bible, Mohammed took up this accusation in verses 4: 118-119 of the Koran. For if God ever ordered Abraham circumcision, he forbade Moses to do it. Either it was not the same God or he changed his mind between both Alliances, or still Abraham lied and no God ever ordered circumcision.

The Book of Deuteronomy very especially bans sexual mutilation

Modern exegesisconsiders that the Book of Deuteronomy was written under the direction of Moses with a great unity of style (unlike other books of the Bible). It is not content with condemning sexual mutilation in the Second Commandment; contrary to other books of the Torah, it does not speak about excluding the “non circumcised” from the temple and the meal of Passover but insists upon the fact that the only condition of the 2^nd Covenant is the respect of the Ten Commandments. Indeed, introducing them ^(*), it takes care to say:

“Observe everything I lay down for you, without adding anything to it... ” (13: 1)

We are in the presence of a Preliminary Commandment. Forbidding everything that is not included in the following, and thus sexual mutilation, it reduplicates the second.

The Deuteronomy then speaks on thirteen occasions (4: 5, 4: 8, 4: 14, 4: 45, 5: 7, 5: 31, 6: 1, 6: 20, 7: 11, 7: 12, 8: 11, 11: 1) of “the laws and rules… ” (4: 1) it advocates but circumcision does not figure there. Neither does it figure in the regulations of verses 12: 1 to 27: 26. Furthermore, in those very regulations, it recommends, not without humour:

“You will make yourself tassels at the four corners of the cover you will wear.”

(22: 12, Ecumenical Bible)

On the other hand, Moses excludes distinctive physical signs; the consecration of the Jewish people to the divinity does not allow it to distinguish itself through gross exterior signs:

“You are the children of the Eternal, your God: do not cut your body, do not shave yourself between the eyes, in the honour of a dead man. Because you are a people consecrated to the Eternal, your God, and you are the one he chose, the Eternal, to be for him a special people amongst all the peoples spread over the earth” (14: 1),

he also shows his distrust towards the last (circumcised) survivors belonging to the old warlike generation:

“The one who has crushed or mutilated genitals will not be admitted in the assembly of the Lord.” (23: 2)

In order to notify the abolition of Abraham’s law, he points out that the Eternal changed his mind between both Covenants:

“The Eternal did not conclude this covenant with our fathers but with ourselves, who are here today, all alive.” (5: 3),

He does not ignore the ancient Covenant:

“... he will not forget the covenant of your fathers...” (5: 3)

but seems to refer to the version of chapter 15 of the Book of Genesis, which does not mention circumcision, rather than to that of chapter 17. Then he explains the great difference of nature between both Covenants, a difference that condemns the Covenant through submission:

“The Eternal talked with you face to face…” (5: 4),

Both Covenants are discrepant; whereas Abraham had kept his face on the ground, the New Covenant is a genuine covenant between equals, in which Moses obtained the abolition of sexual mutilation from Pharaoh:

“And now, Israel, the Eternal, your God, only expects from you that you should revere the Lord, your God, follow his ways in everything, love him and serve him with all your heart and all your soul, observing the precepts and laws of the Lord which I impose on you today, so that you would be happy.” (10: 12-13)

On the other hand, Moses lays down “circumcision of the heart”:

“Thus circumcise your heart, stop stiffening your neck.”(10: 16)

Inviting the Hebrews to relax, he underlines an obsessive symptom, undoubtedly a sign of pride but also of emotional distress, fear of beheading, of total castration, of impotence. This “circumcision” is granted by God as a grace:

“And the Eternal, your God, will circumcise your heart and your descendants’ heart so that you love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul, and make your living.” (30: 6) ^(*)

Mention of the descendants, a reference to Abraham’s Covenant, is significant of the replacement of circumcision of the body by that of the heart.

By making the respect of the natural Law the only requirement of the Covenant with God, Moses abolished sexual mutilation. Bedouin Zipporah’ husband kept his people in the desert for forty years; he enjoyed the life of nomads and did not have sufficient military power to invade the land of Canaan without the help of the Egyptian army, a help that was refused to him because he did not want to impose circumcision. It can also be thought that the son of Bedouins who had killed the Egyptian murderer (Exodus, 2: 11-12), preferred nomadism, praised by nowadays Jewish writers, rather than genocide of his brothers. This refusal was fatal to him; grouped together around Moses's circumcised son and profiting by his mutilation, the old circumcising guard decreed the return backwards and, as Freud and a few Egyptologists thought, Moses was probably murdered in a coup d’état previous to Gilgal where keeping his skin whole could not save it from the Levites.

For achieving this Biblical recall, “God” cannot have ordered circumcision to Abraham and condemned sexual mutilation for Moses. As revealed by “The secrets of the Exodus” ⁵, the God in question was a deified man, the Egyptian Pharaoh, then one of his successors for the Second Covenant. The archaeologist Madame Desroches-Noblecourt just brought great support to this thesis: a transcription of the Ten Commandments has been found in a tomb of the time of the pyramids . Would it be the grave of Pharaoh Moses (Ramses or Ra-Moses I^st), according to the explanations of the Sabbah brothers?

Our restoration of the meaning of the Second Covenant, a covenant though speech rather than mutilation, locates Christianity as the direct heir of Mosaic Judaism, authentic and moderate, adversary and martyr of the Levite extreme-right. The latter tolerates the philosophers (Spinoza, Marx, Freud), it slaughters religious or political leaders (Moses, John the Baptist, Jesus, Rabin). It also locates circumcision as an insidious technique of domination through unconscious putting under terror, a state criminality against humanity.

So do we pay a tribute to the genius of the great legislator enemy of slavery and barbarity, for his major juridical invention of the concepts of crime against creation (humanity) and of exception to the statute of limitations. He had the intuition of the particular seriousness of a crime striking a whole group of the population and above all children. But Moses had a “heavy mouth and an embarrassed tongue” (Exodus, 4 : 10), likely because he had been a child separated from his mother at birth. Besides, the atrocious scene, that he endured powerless, of the circumcision of his son by his own wife, had traumatized him. Therefore, his advance in criminal law was victim of his deep repulsion for the very use of the term circumcision; he worded the new law through periphrasis. Puritan traditionalists profited by it to falsify the meaning of the Second Commandment.

Here are millennia that some cultures, in order to dominate the people through a traumatism provoking deep guilt on sexual life (the “original sin”), ignore the Mosaic Law protecting the respect of the body and the right of the human person to its property. Sharp claims to the right of liberty of cult and to a respect of cultures ignoring that of the child exert a brazen intimidation that prevented governments and courts to condemn infantile sexual mutilation outright whatever the sex of the child may be. Even in Europe, only in April 2006 did a Finnish magistrate’s court ^, follow the requisition of the Prosecution to rank circumcision amongst common law criminality, without a penalty being pronounced. In September 2007, this decision found an echo in Frankfurt where the court of appeal declared circumcision liable to damagesfor illegal attack to the right of personality and illegal body injury ^, . However, in both cases, the child was defended by one of his parents. Without this nothing would have been done; when both parents agree, the child is irremediably victim. Whereas mainly private initiative ^(*) leads the fight against infantile sexual mutilation, positive law of democracies and of the universal declaration of the rights of man in this matter would gain by coming back to the letter of the Ten Commandments. For the traumatism of infantile sexual mutilation, a hateful manipulation of the unconscious by military, sacerdotal or medical castes, is liable to traumatize humans and make them feel guilty by deeply rooting in the belief in an original sin, and to fanaticize the believers through giving them the conviction of the superiority of their belief. But verily, infantile sexual mutilation is the only original sin. This dogma must be abandoned. Law cannot speak against life.

This is why we preach the return to the deeply respectful of the human person vision of the great liberator of the Jewish people and to his historic declaration of the rights of man. Long before the advent of democracy, it forbade a man to kill or mutilate another man, so prohibiting the death penalty and laying down the right of the human person to the property of their body.

The only Promised Land is that of the grave,

Make love with your foreskin, not war without it!

“The steel that mutilates us from satin,

Our useless wounds far away,

We’ll change our gates into lanes

And make our cities gardens.”

Jean-Jacques Goldman (Il suffira d’un signe)

Sigismond

Only the weapon of criticism and the criticism of tears can silence the criticism of weapons.

(mailto: oldsigismund@hotmail.com – http://groups.msn.com/circabolition)

Martin S. Thy Rod and thy staff they comfort me, Christians and the spanking controversy. Sorensic; 2006.

The Virgin thrashing the Child Jesus in front of three witnesses: André Breton, Paul Eluard and the painter” (Köln: Museum Ludwig)

^(*)The Israeli Encyclopaedia Judaïca is the only one to admit that the German Reform Jews abandoned circumcision for twenty years and to dare broaching the core of the religious controversy (cf. below). Neither the Dictionnaire encyclopédique du judaïsme (Paris: Éditions du cerf; 1993) nor the Encyclopedia of Judaism (New York: Neusner; 1999) do it. The latter asserts that only intentions of abandonment of the rite were worded, raising a general outcry. But all encyclopaedias mention the forced circumcisions operated by the Maccabeus upon their “heretic” coreligionists. Attempts of revolt against the holocaust of the foreskins, indirectly responsible for that of the Jewish people, are the most often swept under the carpet.

Quoted by the Dictionnaire encyclopédique du judaïsme. Paris: Éditions du cerf; 1993. p. 433.

Encyclopaedia Judaica. Jerusalem: Keter publishing house limited; 1972. t. V, p. 571.

Analysis of a phobia on a five-years-old boy (Little Hans). 1909. London: The Hogarth press ltd.; 1955. S.E., X, p. 36, n.

^(*) literally translated from the French Rabbinate. Paris: Les éditions Colbo; 1966)

Sabbah M. & R. The secrets of the Exodus. London: Thorsons Ltd; 2002.

^(**) Rabbinic numbering

^(***)Moses also was the founder of one of the very first two-level-jurisdiction systems. However, the limits of the charismatic leader who on one hand gathered his people to recite them poems, on the other hand did not hesitate to commit the genocide of the peoples he encountered on his way, are obvious. A law worded in the second person is that of a dictator who, affirming himself God, reserves for himself the right to violate it.

^(*) These arguments are those of the German Jewish reformist movement.

Sabbah M. et R. The secrets of the Exodus. London: Thorsons Ltd; 2002. New York: Helios press; 2004).

^(**) The temples of Akhet-Aton were built in bricks of earth and straw (cf. “The secrets of the Exodus”).

Cf. the article "Bible" of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

^(*) An Eleventh Commandment synthesizes the first: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, all your soul and all your strength.” (6: 5, French Rabbinate). Jesus-Christ extended it by recommending: “You will love your neighbour as yourself.”

^(*) Verses 10: 16 and 30: 6 are the only acceptations of the term "circumcision in the whole book of Deuteronomy.

Figaro Magazine. 13 mai 2005, n° 18902.

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Court+rules+circumcision+of+four-year-old+boy+illegal/1135220958830

http://www.france.fi/article.php3?id_article=1142" http://www.france.fi/article.php3?id_article=1142 - CIRCONCISION (site of the French embassy in Finland)

http://tinyurl.com/2w73d5" http://tinyurl.com/2w73d5

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/104271.html" \t "_top" http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/104271.html

^(*) www.nocirc.org

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