By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Dr. Aaron Witz might have been satisfied being a general pediatrician, were it not for his friends. As Witz finished his residency, several acquaintances began to have children and requested his services to perform their brit milah.
“They knew I was a pediatrician, and they said, ‘Can you do our son’s bris,’” said Witz, 37. “At that time I really did not have the skills or have any knowledge of brit milah, and so the thought intrigued me.”
With career and religion beginning to intertwine, Witz took his friends’ ritual needs to heart and trained to specialize in newborn circumcision. The clinic he opened three years ago at Swedish Hospital’s First Hill and Eastside campuses is the only one of its type in the area.
Witz then took that service a step further. He took a week-long course that trained him to be what his friends had asked him to become in the first place: A mohel, which gave him the religious tools to perform the service that goes along with the surgery.
The first step, he said, was performing his first bris on his own son.
“What a transcendent experience, what an emotional experience,” he said. “It took a lot of self-control, a lot of focus, but I’m so glad I took that opportunity to do that. And it turned out great, no problems.”
Witz’s rabbi, Jim Mirel of Bellevue’s Temple B’nai Torah, guided him through the spiritual part of the ceremony. Mirel also cultivated Witz’s interest in pursuing certification to become a mohel and acted as his sponsor to help him get accepted into the Reform movement’s Berit Milla program at Hebrew Union College.
“He wanted to become a mohel because he felt this is his way to give back to the community,” Mirel said.
Mirel said that while the region has a number of mohelim, including one at his own congregation, Dr. Steve Chentow, who has been performing circumcisions for nearly 30 years, Witz is part of an up-and-coming generation performing brit milah.
“He’s just someone who loves doing it,” Mirel said. “His face lights up. He’s the perfect guy to be a mohel because of his medical skills, and because of his love of Judaism.”
Unlike other mohel training programs that teach rabbis and lay people, the HUC’s program is restricted to licensed doctors or nurse midwives, all of whom must be proficient in performing newborn circumcisions.
The program gathers together physician from around the country who can compare practice, technique and any complications that arise. Witz said that spiritually it was an uplifting experience.
“What a way to really confirm your Judaism, and the importance of this procedure,” he said.
The instructors spent a lot of time on the halachah of circumcision as well as on texts from the Bible, essays and commentary on the procedure.
“One of the rabbis there was also a professor at Harvard in the psychiatry department who talks about what this procedure means: ‘Why do we do this?’” he said.
The answer, Witz said, is one word: Covenant.
“If you think about it too much, it’s a strange procedure,” he said. “But we do it, and we’ve been doing it for thousands of years.”
Jewish men, he added, have “an inbred instinct that if they have a son, this procedure will absolutely be done. And no matter what the social commentary is, whatever the medical literature is, it will still be done. And that’s just a given.”
To not do so would be a disconnect from that man’s family and tradition, he said.
After finishing the mohel training, Witz took another six months to digest what he had learned before beginning to offer up his services as a mohel earlier this year. He has since worked with several Seattle-area families, mostly within the Reform movement, and he has traveled as far as Walla Walla to perform a bris there. (Full disclosure: Witz performed my own son’s brit milah in October of this year).
Unlike a wedding or Bar or Bat Mitzvah, Witz believes brit milah is the biggest of Jewish lifecycle events.
“It really sets the tone for how everything else is going to follow,” he said. “If [the bris] doesn’t happen right… that might taint their views of Judaism down the road.”
Which is why he makes a point of meeting with families beforehand to get to know them and to give the baby a checkup to make sure he’s ready for the procedure.
“It’s a very complicated eight days,” he said. “You haven’t done your job if you don’t allow the family to have that emotional experience of love and goodness and [to] feel very strong about what’s happening at that moment.”
Though Witz sees the bris as a very spiritual moment for a family, he understands that he is putting newborn babies through a serious surgical procedure.
“Before, this was kind of thought of as a simple, easy procedure, that the baby doesn’t feel anything, [he’s] not going to remember [it] — lots of different reasons why people didn’t take this procedure very seriously,” he said. “Every parent takes this procedure very seriously.”
It’s because of that understanding of a previous lack of medical standards, and having seen bad outcomes from other circumcisions — plus the ability to provide follow-up care — that he created his newborn circumcision clinic, based upon similar models at the Mayo Clinic, where he did his residency.
“It’s basically having that same medical standard for circumcision as any other procedure,” he said. “It’s really looking at the best interests of the baby.”
For more information about the Newborn Circumcision Clinic, call 206-215-3184 or visit www.swedish.org.