Upper West Side Bris
When my nephew was born that fall,
his bris fell on a holy day, Shmini Atzeret.
The mohel, an Orthodox rabbi,
weighing his religious obligations,
consented to perform the service,
but he had to walk forty blocks,
climb eleven stories up the highrise stairwell,
to avoid “working,” a legalistic term
having little to do with effort.
My wife and I had driven up from Baltimore,
a four-hour trip that made me feel
like a martyr, an epic effort out of The Odyssey,
the tolls, the traffic, the impossible parking.
When Finklestein’s faint tap came
at my brother-in-law’s door,
an eloquent Morse Code signal of fatigue,
the bearded man mopping his face,
my embarrassment cut my sense of sacrifice
like a sort of moral circumcision itself.