“The way we always do it”: Why some Jews see value in metzitzah b’peh (oral suction at circumcision)
“This is the way it was done, the way we always do it, the way it should be done,” says Hadassah, a soft-spoken 28 year old Chassidic woman from Borough Park. Why does she do it? “I try not to think about what we do,” she admits. “That’s the beginning and end to it.”
Really? I say. “It doesn’t make sense to do things and not think about it,” she agrees. But “you grow up like it, that’s what you are used to.”
We are talking about the ritual of metzitzah b’peh (“oral suction”), direct mouth contact to draw blood from a newly circumcised penis. The mohel sips wine, extracts a small amount of blood with his mouth, spits it out, and continues with the ceremony.
First based on a Talmudic injunction to draw out blood for the sake of avoiding danger, presumably on the basis of ancient Greek medicine, such direct oral suction was the way circumcision was practiced in Jewish communities for hundreds of years. Only later, beginning in the 19th century under the pressure of modern scientific theories of disease, did MBP give way to substitutes (involving a sterile pipette). While the use of such techniques is now universal in non-Orthodox communities, as well as widespread in modern Orthodoxy, MBP is still widely practiced.
