Last Monday I attended a press conference at Yeshiva Torah Vodaath in Brooklyn called by the plaintiffs in a federal suit challenging New York City’s regulation of bris milah. It was far more than a smart public relations move although it was that too. I don’t want to make more of it than it was but I saw it as something of an inflection point in the maturation of the American Torah community. Here’s why:  

1. CONTROL THE NARRATIVE

The plaintiffs represent three major Orthodox constituencies AgudathIsrael Satmar and Lubavitch and some might see in their joining together a manifestation of unity worth celebrating. I’m all for Jewish unity but I don’t think that’s the big story here. Those a bit familiar with the communal scene know that on a pragmatic level there’s a good deal of communication and partnering between these groups and many others on all sorts of matters. What would indeed be a boost to communal unity would be for “centrist” groups whose poskim permit the performance of an indirect form of metzizah to join in this lawsuit in support of the larger principles at stake here.

But the most salient aspect of Monday’s event was that the plaintiffs took control of the “narrative” of their case rather than leaving it to the non-Jewish and secular Jewish media and to bathrobe-clad bloggers in their basements to define the issues and the positions and motives of the players. Each attendee received the entire set of court papers and listened to the expert witnesses describe their testimonies and a question-and-answer period followed in which no topic was off limits. This was a press conference worthy of its name – professionally conducted informative and dispassionate. What a contrast it provided to the unruly “gotcha”-driven media circuses that go by that name in the world at large.

1. HOMEGROWN RESOURCES

In this litigation the frum community has demonstrated an ability to field its own homegrown resources in defense of itself. Consider: Yerachmiel Simins the attorney who presided over the press conference and a long-time advocate on this issue learns in kollel; Yaakov Roth one of the two big-firm attorneys representing the plaintiffs clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; and the three expert witnesses -- two hospital department heads Drs. Daniel Berman and Brenda Breuer; and a professor and former academic dean at Columbia Business School Dr. Awi Federgruen – are all observant Jews as well.

One need not consider it the apex of our community’s achievement to have produced large numbers of highly competent and credentialed professionals to believe nonetheless that it is valuable to be able to turn to such individuals to make a compelling case for the principles and practices that we and they all hold dear. 

1. A PRESS OF OUR OWN

This was a by-invitation conference exclusively for the frum press. One of the most glaring examples of the bubble of unreality that the secular Jewish media inhabit is the near-total blackout in their pages of the very existence of an alternative Orthodox media. The average reader of the Forward and the Jewish Week would not even recognize the names of these publications and this in the Jewish capital ofAmerica.

That the Orthodox a minority segment of the American Jewish community provide a weekly readership in the many tens of thousands for a multiplicity of magazines and newspapers with high production values and sophisticated content is a testament to a community possessing a vitality and a lively diversity that can only discomfit some in a secular Jewish orbit that sorely lacks both. The implicit message of this gathering was that we’re doing just fine thank you without the pillars of the secular Jewish media many of which are on life-support propped up by funding from Federation and other non-profits. We appreciate the attention you obsessively lavish on us we really do but perhaps you can show your weekly affections for another part of the Jewish community for a change.  

OF TROPES AND SLIPPERY SLOPES The bris milah lawsuit represents a line in the sand of sorts for the Orthodox community. On the surface it all seems like much ado about very little. All thatNew York City has done after all is mandate informed consent on parents’ part something we’re all familiar with in other contexts. Furthermore the regulation is not Heaven forfend for bris milah itself only for the metzizah b’peh that follows it. And those statistics about the increased mortality rates following metzizah seem quite daunting don’t they?

But examining matters more closely it dawns that all is not quite as innocuous as it appears. The informed consent regulation is a virtually unprecedented governmental intrusion into a faith community’s practices with the mayor deigning to serve as poseik acharon on how and if metzizah ought to be done. At least until a few months ago when Obamacare’s custodians unleashed a full-bore assault on religious liberty this sort of thing just didn’t happen in the land of the free. Indeed we await a supportive amicus brief in either of these cases from counsel for secular and heterodox Jewish groups who work so assiduously to ensure that school choice programs across the country make not the slightest crack in the Wall of Church-State Separation before which they daily genuflect.

Nor is the concern that those pushing this regulation ultimately have bris milah in their sights a conventional slippery slope argument because our antagonists have themselves provided a map of that slope’s contours. The city health department’s literature “strongly advises that parents not have metzizah b’peh performed during the bris” the health commissioner has publicly stated that it should “never be performed” and the mayor has come out in favor of banning it. Then reading in the Centers for Disease Control’s June 2012 report on the topic that “[p]reventing the practice of direct orogenital suction is difficult because ritual circumcision is a religious practice that usually occurs outside of health facilities ” a light goes on in one’s mind.

All of this is set against a backdrop of a NYC health department with a seemingly monomaniacal focus on metzizah: uninterested in investigating the etiology of non-metzizah-related herpes infections in scores of neonates incurious about why the incidence of milah-related infections is so exceedingly low and blasé about educating parents on prevention of any form of transmission of such infections other than through metzizah. Contact sports body piercing thrill-seeking activities risky personal behaviors – the health authorities seek to bring the regulatory boot down on none of these only on metzizah. Most disturbing of all are the reports of doctors and nurses – including authors of the research papers on which the regulation was predicated -- engaging in menacing and likely illegal tactics against parents of sick children in ways for which “thuggish” is perhaps too mild a description: incessant browbeating of parents and rabbis tampering with records and threats of psychiatric assessments and abuse investigations.  

In truth this issue represents a coalescence of tropes about the fervently Orthodox community that are forever percolating through the media and blogs and in certain quarters of Orthodoxy bubbling up now and again to elicit public attention and outcry. The chareidim neglect their children. The chareidim maintain a wall of silence refusing to report anything negative about their own. The chareidim refuse to cooperate with secular authorities. The obscurantist chareidim disdain science and dismiss its findings.

And now with Michael Bloomberg’s latest description in The Atlantic of those of his constituents opposing the metzizah regulation as “10000 guys in black hats outside [my] office screaming ” yet another meme surfaces. I’ve described it elsewhere as the portrayal of chareidim as “an undifferentiated mass of extremist angry people preoccupied with censuring others and living in ever-present fear of various real and imagined dangers.” Try substituting “faces” for “hats” in the mayor’s statement and it becomes apparent just how out-of-bounds his words are.

The irony of it all is that the actual facts of this saga debunk every one of these tropes. Advocates of metzizah have sought conciliation and scientific clarity while opponents have been interested only in blackballing mohelim and ending the practice of metzizah facts be darned. So for truth’s sake consider the following:

• Parents and their advocates shared the facts of cases under investigation; health care workers and the health department ignored them.
• The health department made herpes a reportable disease in the belief that a flood of reported incidences would follow; precisely the same handful of cases were found to exist after reporting became mandatory as there were before.
• Agudath Israel repeatedly urged the City to eschew unilateral regulation and opt for the same process of cooperative consultation that resulted in the 2006 New York State metzizah protocols adopted jointly by a broad spectrum of Orthodoxy and every county in the state but New York City; it was summarily rebuffed. 

Finally there is the relevant science the epidemiological and statistical underpinnings of the regulation. In a comprehensive treatment of the metzizah issue in the forthcoming issue of the journal Dialogue (full disclosure: I serve as its managing editor) the two sides make their respective cases. Suffice it to say that proponents of metzizah stand on firm scientific ground; it is the closing of ranks in the medical community around the opposing position that carries with it the scent of scientism.