by MARK S. LITWIN, M.D.
“They’d still like you to perform a bris but don’t want to put him through any unnecessary pain,” she said. “Can you do it after he dies?”
I could, it seemed. My rabbi assured me that Jewish tradition allows for such circumstances. The ceremony is different, of course — there’s no talk of bar mitzvah or marriage, and the prayer for healing is redirected at the grieving family. A post-mortem circumcision allows a moment of normality before the immense loss must be confronted. The rabbi taught me what to say to make the ceremony kosher: the Hebrew phrase “Ani hu ha’Elohim” (loosely translated as “Above all else, there is God”), repeated seven times.
…
Explaining to those now gathered the meaning of what we were to witness, I began the procedure I had done a thousand times. I took the baby from his father, unwrapped his soft blanket and gently laid him on the utility table. But today there were no squirming legs, no lidocaine injection, no smiling grandparents recalling their own son’s bris a generation ago. Just a drop of purple blood.
The New York Times for more