"The Eight Day", Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Our
parsha begins with childbirth and, in the case of a male child, “On the
eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised” (Lev. 12:3).
This became known not just as milah, “circumcision”, but something altogether more theological, brit milah, “the covenant
of circumcision”. That is because even before Sinai, almost at the dawn
of Jewish history, circumcision became the sign of God’s covenant with
Abraham (Gen. 17:1-14). Why circumcision? Why was this from the outset not just a mitzvah, one
command among others, but the very sign of our covenant with God and His
with us? And why on the eighth day? Last week’s parsha was called Shemini,
“the eighth [day]” (Lev. 9:1) because it dealt with the inauguration of
the Mishkan, the Sanctuary, which also took place on the eighth day. Is
there a connection between these two quite different events? The place to begin is a strange midrash recording an encounter between the Roman governor Tyranus Rufus 1 and
Rabbi Akiva. Rufus began the conversation by asking, “Whose works are
better, those of God or of man?” Surprisingly, the Rabbi replied, “Those
of man.” Rufus responded, “But look at the heavens and the earth. Can a
human being make anything like that?” Rabbi Akiva replied that the
comparison was unfair. “Creating heaven and earth is clearly beyond
human capacity. Give me an example drawn from matters that are within
human scope.” Rufus then said, “Why do you practise circumcision?” To
this, Rabbi Akiva replied, “I knew you would ask that question. That is
why I said in advance that the works of man are better than those of
God.” The rabbi then set before the governor ears of corn and cakes. The
unprocessed corn is the work of God. The cake is the work of man. Is it
not more pleasant to eat cake than raw ears of corn? Rufus then said,
“If God really wants us to practise circumcision, why did He not arrange
for babies to be born circumcised?” Rabbi Akiva replied, “God gave the
commands to Israel to refine our character.”2 This
is a very odd conversation, but, as we will see, a deeply significant
one. To understand it, we have to go back to the beginning of time.
The Torah tells us that for six days God created the universe and on the
seventh he rested, declaring it holy. His last creation, on the sixth
day, was humanity: the first man and the first woman. According to the
sages, Adam and Eve sinned by eating the forbidden fruit already on that
day and were sentenced to exile from the Garden of Eden. However, God
delayed the execution of sentence for a day to allow them to spend
Shabbat in the garden. As the day came to a close, the humans were about
to be sent out into the world in the darkness of night. God took pity
on them and showed them how to make light. That is why we light a
special candle at Havdalah, not just to mark the end of Shabbat but also
to show that we begin the workday week with the light God taught us to
make. The Havdalah candle therefore represents the light of the eighth day –
which marks the beginning of human creativity. Just as God began the
first day of creation with the words, “Let there be light”, so at the
start of the eighth day He showed humans how they too could make light.
Human creativity is thus conceived in Judaism as parallel to Divine
creativity,3 and its symbol is the eighth day. That is why the Mishkan was inaugurated on the eighth day. As Nechama
Leibowitz and others have noted, there is an unmistakable parallelism
between the language the Torah uses to describe God’s creation of the
universe and the Israelites’ creation of the Sanctuary. The Mishkan was a
microcosm – a cosmos in miniature. Thus Genesis begins and Exodus ends
with stories of creation, the first by God, the second by the
Israelites. The eighth day is when we celebrate the human contribution to creation. That is also why circumcision takes place on the eighth day. All life,
we believe, comes from God. Every human being bears His image and
likeness. We see each child as God’s gift: “Children are the provision
of the Lord; the fruit of the womb, His reward” (Ps, 127:3). Yet it
takes a human act – circumcision – to signal that a male Jewish child
has entered the covenant. That is why it takes place on the eighth day,
to emphasise that the act that symbolises entry into the covenant is a
human one – just as it was when the Israelites at the foot of Mount
Sinai said, “All that the Lord has said, we will do and obey” (Ex.
24:7). Mutuality and reciprocity mark the special nature of the specific
covenant God made, first with Abraham, then with Moses and the
Israelites. It is this that differentiates it from the universal
covenant God made with Noah and through him with all humanity. That
covenant, set out in Genesis 9, involved no human response. Its content
was the seven Noahide commands. Its sign was the rainbow. But God asked
nothing of Noah, not even his consent. Judaism embodies a unique duality
of the universal and the particular. We are all in covenant with God by
the mere fact of our humanity. We are bound, all of us, by the basic
laws of morality. This is part of what it means to be human. But to be Jewish is also to be part of a particular covenant of
reciprocity with God. God calls. We respond. God begins the work and
calls on us to complete it. That is what the act of circumcision
represents. God did not cause male children to be born circumcised, said
Rabbi Akiva, because He deliberately left this act, this sign of the
covenant, to us.
Now we begin to understand the full depth of the conversation between
Rabbi Akiva and the Roman governor Tineius Rufus. For the Romans, the
Greeks and the ancient world generally, the gods were to be found in
nature: the sun, the sea, the sky, the earth and its seasons, the fields
and their fertility. In Judaism, God is beyond nature, and his
covenant with us takes us beyond nature also. So for us, not everything
natural is good. War is natural. Conflict is natural. The violent
competition to be the alpha male is natural. Jews – and others inspired
by the God of Abraham – believe, as Kathryn Hepburn said to Humphrey
Bogart in The African Queen, that “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” The Romans found circumcision strange because it was unnatural. Why not
celebrate the human body as God made it? God, said Rabbi Akiva to the
Roman governor, values culture, not just nature, the work of humans not
just the work of God. It was this cluster of ideas – that God left
creation unfinished so that we could become partners in its completion;
that by responding to God’s commands we become refined; that God
delights in our creativity and helped us along the way by teaching the
first humans how to make light – that made Judaism unique in its faith
in God’s faith in humankind. All of this is implicit in the idea of the
eighth day as the day on which God sent humans out into the world to
become His partners in the work of creation. Why is this symbolised in the act of circumcision? Because if Darwin was
right, then the most primal of all human instincts is to seek to pass
on one’s genes to the next generation. That is the strongest force of
nature within us. Circumcision symbolises the idea that there is
something higher than nature. Passing on our genes to the next
generation should not simply be a blind instinct, a Darwinian drive. The
Abrahamic covenant was based on sexual fidelity, the sanctity of
marriage, and the consecration of the love that brings new life into the
world.4 It is a rejection of the ethic of the alpha male.
God created physical nature: the nature charted by science. But He asks
us to be co-creators, with Him, of human nature. As R. Abraham Mordecai
Alter of Ger said. “When God said, ‘Let us make man in our image’, to
whom was He speaking? To man himself. God said to man, Let us – you and I
– make man together.”5 The symbol of that co-creation is the eighth day, the day He helps us begin to create a world of light and love.
1 Quintus
Tineius Rufus, Roman governor of Judaea during the Bar Kochba uprising.
He is known in the rabbinic literature as “the wicked”. His hostility
to Jewish practice was one of the factors that provoked the uprising.
2 Tanhuma, Tazria, 5.
3 This is also signalled in the Havdalah prayer which mentions five havdalot, “distinctions”, between sacred and profane, light and darkness, Israel and the nations, Shabbat and the weekdays, and the final “who distinguishes between sacred and profane.” This parallels Genesis 1 in which the verb lehavdil – to distinguish, separate – appears five times.
4 That, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is why Genesis does not criticise idolatry but does implicitly criticise, on at least six occasions, the lack of a sexual ethic among the people with whom the patriarchs and their families come into contact.
5 R. Avraham Mordecai Alter of Ger, Likkutei Yehudah.
2 Tanhuma, Tazria, 5.
3 This is also signalled in the Havdalah prayer which mentions five havdalot, “distinctions”, between sacred and profane, light and darkness, Israel and the nations, Shabbat and the weekdays, and the final “who distinguishes between sacred and profane.” This parallels Genesis 1 in which the verb lehavdil – to distinguish, separate – appears five times.
4 That, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is why Genesis does not criticise idolatry but does implicitly criticise, on at least six occasions, the lack of a sexual ethic among the people with whom the patriarchs and their families come into contact.
5 R. Avraham Mordecai Alter of Ger, Likkutei Yehudah.
