In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

103 3 The Cut That Binds Time, Memory, and the Ascetic Impulse Elliot R. Wolfson i needed so much to having nothing to touch— but i’ve always been greedy that way —Leonard Cohen Memory, Mindfulness, and Masculinity Throughout the ages commentators have given a host of explanations to account for the significance of circumcision, arguably one of the most important rites in the history of Judaism when viewed from both the anthropological and theological perspectives. A rather innovative attempt to characterize circumcision is found in David M. Levin’s study on phenomenological psychology, The Body’s Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism (1985).1 In the context of discussing the correlation of bodily limbs and the “body” as a “primordial text,” Levin casts his attention to the part of the blessing of grace that is traditionally uttered after one eats a meal with bread, the birkat ha-mazon, which mentions the covenant of circumcision that God “has sealed into our flesh.” Constructing a midrashic reading of this liturgical text in an obvious Derridean vein,2 Levin observes, “‘Sealed’ protects the truth of which circumcision would remind us, viz., that the ancestral body of the Jewish people was created by grace of a primordial incision or inscription: the writing and attesting of the divine signature , the grammatology of the original divine de-cision.”3 Reflecting further on the use of the expression to circumcise the foreskin of the heart in Deut. 10:16, Levin notes that “circumcision is symbolic of a process of opening,” indeed “the very essence of circumcision—the heart of the matter, as it were—lies in the fact that the incision opens. Circumcision therefore corresponds to the breaking open of a path.”4 This act of incision/inscription sealed upon the sexual organ, resulting in what Levin aptly calls the “breaking open of a path,” in turn constitutes an act of re/membering, for it reminds the male Jew of the sign imprinted upon his member , the seal inscribed upon the flesh that bespeaks the consecrated union between God and the community of Israel that must be realized in time but that is not 104 Elliot R. Wolfson essentially of time. Circumcision, therefore, “initiates the ancestral body into a spiritual process which Jews call ‘remembrance.’”5 The remembrance spoken of here obviously is not the common everyday memory of isolated experiences that are time-bound, the capacity to retain images in the present of that which is past to help one anticipate events of the future, but it is rather a recollection that transcends the linearity of time by gathering together past, present, and future in the circular resumption of what has never been, a calling to mind that allows one “to see old things with a newer, farther look.”6 Circumcision is the cut that opens the flesh of the spirit to the reminiscence of a primordial bond, a kind of memorial thinking,7 which involves concentration on the point in which consciousness in its entirety is ground, a return, that is, to one’s origin.8 In a word, circumcision is a rite de retour,9 a retrieval of the beginning that stands not in the past but unfolds always in the future, the breaking open of the path that engenders memory across the divide of time. Nowhere in the biblical or classical rabbinic texts, so far as I am able to surmise, is the ritual of circumcision connected specifically with the words memory or remembrance.10 At best, it may be argued that, inasmuch as the rite of circumcision is referred to as a “sign of the covenant” (Gen. 17:11) and the nature of a sign is such that it brings to mind,11 there is an implicit connection between the covenant of circumcision and memory. Such is the case explicitly in several biblical verses with reference to the word covenant. For instance, in the narrative regarding the sign established by God with Noah after the deluge, the rainbow, the word for memory is used in conjunction with the word covenant (see Gen. 9:15 and 16).12 Or again, in Lev. 26:42, we read of God guaranteeing that He will remember the covenant that he made with each of the three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Notwithstanding these and other pertinent examples that could have been mentioned,13 there is no specific correlation in the traditional sources between the covenant of circumcision...

Share