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© 2010 John D. Brey.

What percent of Jews go through the motions without any deeper relationship to the motions than culture and civic pride? ---- What could be considered going "deeper" concerning a practice like circumcision, where going much deeper would be tantamount to emasculation?

Is there a point where going deeper actually jeopardizes the life-blood of the organ which is central to Jew and Judaism? ----- Must a Jew hold back a cutting exegesis of the scroll in order to remain a Jew, and not, per se, a Christian? [1] ----- If a Jew cuts too deep in either life-giving organ (the scroll or its biological equivalent) does he sever the very sign of his identity, subjecting himself to a state of being, formerly signified by the now forsaken sign?

No doubt few are privy to the going deeper intended with a statement like that. It’s too often read wrongly in that it’s not read in the right vein (rather than the left). ------ So it’s refreshing to read a Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture (Berkeley) . . . reading Paul of Tarsus (Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew) in the right vein. ----- Professor Boyarin acknowledges a hermeneutical principal based on the dualistic distinction between Paul’s "carnal Israel," (Israel after the flesh), and "spiritual Israel," (Israel after the Spirit):

Paul describes historical Israel's existence as carnal, physical, material, literal, and therefore it follows that the hermeneutical practices by which that historical Israel constitutes itself are also carnal; the Jews read only according to the flesh. They do not see beyond the fleshly literal meaning to the spirit behind the language (p. 31).

Boyarin engages the question of supersession and decides that if Paul is neither an anti-Semite, nor one who wholly reject carnal Israel as a viable entity (Boyarin claims that Paul is neither an anti-Semite nor one who rejects carnal Israel) then:

If there has been no rejection of Israel, there has indeed been a supersession of historical Israel's hermeneutic of self-understanding as a community constituted by physical genealogy and observance and the covenantal exclusiveness that such a self-understanding entails (p. 32).

Professor Boyarin next ponders the antinomy between Paul's universalism, i.e., an Israel and Judaism which is globally or universally situated as God's relationship to all flesh vs. that Israel and Judaism which cannot but be exclusive since it's situated genealogically and logically to a distinct genetic/cultural entity:

What will appear from the Christian perspective as tolerance, namely Paul's willingness --- indeed insistence --- that within the Christian community all cultural practice is equally to be tolerated, from the rabbinic Jewish perspective is simply an eradication of the entire value system which insists that our cultural practice is our task and calling in the world and must not be abandoned or reduced to a matter of taste (Ibid.).

If circumcision cuts deeper than cultural, ritual, or covenantal obedience . . . can it cut the participant right out of the Jewish body, leaving him all alone in a Pauline zeitgeist?

The call to human Oneness, at the same time that it is a stirring call to equality, constitutes a threat as well to Jewish (or any other) difference. While it is not anti-Semitic (or even anti-Judaic) in intent, it nevertheless has the effect of depriving continued Jewish existence of any reality or significance in the Christian economy of history (Ibid.).

Going deeper than the literal address (and thus seeing universal meaning), appears to do irreparable damage to a Judaism based on community, history, and genetic identity. It appears Judaism must therefore remain opposed to a universal attitude concerning God's relationship to man? ----- If a Jew cuts too deeply into his fleshly scroll, so that the physical implications of bringing a knife precisely there are forcibly examined, the examination seems to threaten the ritual value of what would otherwise be a harmless scathing?

Must a Jew stop at a certain point in going deeper into Jewish symbols and rituals in order to remain a Jew? And is Judaism then, a mere scathing, which cannot cut too deeply into the spirit of things, and still remain Judaism? Is there a Judaism which cannot sever itself from its physicality without causing an emanation foreign to Judaism: a “spirit” beneath the flesh, distinct from the flesh; a “spirit” which, conceivably, is signified only through an apophatic sign-language, like the one whose genesis is found in bris milah?

* * *

For the Rabbis, circumcision is a physical means to "seeing" God in some literal sense. --- It’s as if the "spirit" of a "sign" can legitimately be conflated, compressed, or compacted . . . into the carnality of the "sign" itself . . . so that when a Jew after-the-flesh looks at the central element in circumcision, he needn't think about the central visual element as a "signifier" of something hidden by the opacity of the carnal sign. --- On the contrary, per the Rabbis, the carnal Jew is seeing God -- literally --- in the carnal sign manufactured at the bris.

The Rabbis conflate the “spirit” and the “sign” in circumcision while still holding fast to the claim that a literal seeing of God takes place. ---- Ergo, the participants at the bris are "seeing" God (literally) when what they see is a wounded and bleeding Jewish male-member having had flesh removed in a bloody and violent ordeal:

From rabbinic texts --- albeit quite a bit later than Paul --- we actually learn of the view hypothesized as a genuine Jewish theologoumenon. Some of the Rabbis read circumcision as a necessary preparation for seeing God, the summum bonum of late-antique religious life (Boyarin 1990a). This is, of course, an entirely different hermeneutic structure from the platonic allegorizing, because although a spiritual meaning is assigned to the corporeal act, the corporeal act is not the signifier of that meaning but its very constitution. That is, circumcision here is not the sign of something happening in the spirit of the Jew, but it is the very event itself --- and it is, of course, in his body. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, for the rabbinic formulation, this seeing of God was not understood as the spiritual vision of a platonic eye of the mind, but as the physical seeing of fleshly eyes at a real moment in history (Ibid., p. 126).

In one reading – no doubt profane to the carnal mind --- God pulls the wool (or at least the lamb’s skin) over the eyes of the Rabbis knowing they will conflate "spirit" and "flesh" in order to privilege carnal-spirituality. He gives Israel a "sign," the nature of which will trap them if they conflate “spirit” and “flesh.” If the Jews consign the “spirit” of the "sign" to the carnal nature of the sign . . . they’re still forced to "see" God in the manhood of a bleeding Jew. . . Or else, in the very least, it could be said that the bloody ritual of circumcision is stationed as the kerygmatic preparatory event necessary to establishing a face-to-face relationship with God.

The import afforded this rite, centered as it is on the organ central to the physical process of regeneration, could cause a Torah-loving Gentile to confront the question of whether when two versions of the Torah are presented from two tongues, the determining factor concerning which is really a fair presentation of the "spirit" of the Torah should be related not to the tongue (or the mind) but to the phallus (and thus the physical seed)?

In other words, does being born from an organ that underwent a momentary baptism (or having the physical act performed on your body) actually trump a lifetime of Torah study by someone whose father's carnal organ (and their own) wasn't properly baptized? ---- Does the physical act of having the prepuce removed from the physical organ really affect the mind and thinking in some fundamental manner so that when the one so affected opens up the carnal scroll of the Torah, he finds that the prepuce, which hides God from the uncircumcised mind, has been miraculously removed from the Torah scroll?

A problem arises when we try to apply the physical act of circumcision to the physical act of Torah study? --- Is there really something like an opaque "prepuce" which the Jewish scribes (or God Himself) place over the physical Torah scroll so that when the uncircumcised mind reads it, the prepuce hides the revelation of the Living God?

If not . . . then we must posit a "spiritual" prepuce which hides the Living God from the uncircumcised mind (when he reads the Torah). ---- Consequently, we now need a working hypothesis concerning the nature and relationship between this spiritual prepuce and the physical one which is handled in the carnal ritual.

* * *

Paul of Tarsus . . . who is surely the father of Christian dualistic thought . . . doesn't follow the Gnostics into full demonization of the "flesh," which would correspondingly be a demonization of Judaism and the Judaizers. Instead Paul allows conjugal bliss as a concession, rather than a spiritual right, or rite -- ala Judaism.

Paul doesn't demonize the "flesh" and therein doesn't really demonize Judaism (which he situates as Israel according to the "flesh"). ---- What Paul does do, is suggests that we are all in the "flesh," precisely for the purpose of covering a spiritual nakedness related to the spiritual death and depravity into which we are all born. The "flesh" is a temporary covering up of our spiritual nakedness which is remedied (rather than covered up) at the new birth.

Normative Judaism rejects the idea that we're first born into spiritual death and depravity. And thus, there can be no mere concession to the flesh, for the time being, and the being in time. ---- And since the flesh is not spiritually dead, it is thus "spirit/flesh" or some concatenation, conflation, or compression of the two into one unitary entity (husband and wife, says Rabbi Neusner, are the the lowest common denominator of the Jewish faith). Therefore conjugal bliss, contrary to being a mere concession to the fallen state, becomes a spiritual right or rite . . . the very summum bonum of a spiritual rite: the worldly emblem of the union of heaven and earth, spirit and flesh.

Liturgical celibacy/asceticism on the other hand is based on not taking Paul's concession to the flesh, and thereby rising to a higher level of relationship to God. Paul speaks of this higher form of existence when he says that he would that all were celibate like he (for he who is married thinks of how to please his wife whereas the celibate thinks only of union with God).

* * *

In the consideration of conjugal existence as a spiritual rite of passage, one might ponder the fact that long before the Christians nullified the sacredness of the union of man and woman, by means of a sacred virgin birth (a birth taking place without the sanctifying conjugation of man in woman, spirit in the flesh), the scripture speaks first of a wayward virgin girth?

Biologically, and scripturally, girth comes before birth. ---- But something should be said about the birth before going into the girth (so to speak). ----- Genesis 3:15 is without a doubt a verse pregnant with deeper meaning. In other words, it has girth even on the page. ---- In readings hear-and-there, there’s nothing quite like the peculiar Jewish opposition to a cutting exegesis which would unveil something beneath the less than limpid snake-tale found in Genesis 3:15. In the spirit of the Rabbis, we might ask who should be so foolhardy as to question the whys and wherefores should God like to digress from things spiritual to give a brief lesson in herpetology?

And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Genesis 3:15.

Christians have annoyed Jews from day one with interpretations of Genesis 3:15 which see something more than a mere lesson in herpetology. -------- In his Commentary on the Torah, Richard Elliott Friedman exclaims: "Just a snake, not the devil or Satan as later Christian interpretation pictured. As the curse that follows indicates, this story has to do with the fate of snakes, not with the cosmic role of the devil. There is no such concept in the Hebrew Bible."

Now the serpent. Rabbi Yitshak said, "This is the evil impulse." Rabbi Yehudah said, "An actual serpent." ---- They came before Rabbi Shim'on, who said to them, "Indeed, all is one. It was samael appearing on a serpent, the form of the serpent is Satan; all is one."

Zohar, Be-Reshit, 135b.

Resh Lakish said, "Satan, the evil impulse, and the Angel of Death are one and the same."

Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 16a.

Rabbi Shim'on goes on to delineate something frighteningly similar to the Christian version of original sin as coming out of the curse affected through the serpent in the Garden. This is far afield of Richard Elliott Friedman's forceful Jewish claim that the passage is nothing more than a brief synopsis of ophidiophobia!

* * *

The "rib," I contend, represents an upward displacement of the male generative organ. Even the rabbis traced Eve's origin to Adam's "Most private limb, from the thigh" (DR 11:11). I note, too, along with Bal (1985:323), that the vague penile allusion in Genesis 2 is no more euphemistic than the biblical use of "feet" for genitals (e.g., Judges 3:24; 1 Samuel 24:4; Ruth 3:4; Carmichael 1977: 329; Eilberg-Schwartz 1994:78).

Eric Kline Silverman, From Abraham to America, A History of Jewish Circumcision.

Eric Kline Silverman ---- Professor of Jewish studies at De Pauw University -- claims that "Adam's rib" is actually a euphemism for a more central organ of the Jewish faith (and he gives scriptural support). One needn't be too versed in the sacred verses to know that the fruit of that first androgynous pregnancy led forthwith to knowledge of good and evil instead of knowledge of the Living God. In other words, when a "woman" was born of a virgin girth, bad things followed, whereas allegedly good things followed the arrival of "man" from a virgin birth?

Furthermore, the first covenant -- established through Abraham and Moses -- was associated with cutting down to size the self-fecundating virgin girth --- whereas the second covenant was suggestively associated with a miraculously fecundating virgin girl.

The prophet . . . speaking of the establishment of the "new covenant" states that a "new thing" will be created on the earth by the Lord. --- What is this "new thing" that's the portent of the "new covenant": "a woman['s body] will encompass a man['s body]."

The Lord will create a new thing on earth --- a woman will surround a man (Jeremiah 31:22).

If Israel is in fact the emblem (outer sign) of this new covenant, then it’s appropriate that the serpent gets no role in peopling these signifiers (and that word is paramount) of the new covenant. Symbolically (and that word is paramount) the serpent is made emasculate, impotent, irrelevant. ----- It's the singular "seed of the woman" which births new covenant Jews.

If the male Jew's reproductive scroll is an analogue for the Torah scroll as a generative organ (one generates flesh and blood the other generates "knowledge" of good and evil: halakhah), then to follow the flow, we would like to wonder about the "seed of the woman" in relationship to an emasculated (mutilated) Torah scroll??

In other words, if it’s correct to claim that circumcision represents a mutilation of Adam's reproductive serpent (the serpent in the Garden), cutting him out of the picture (with prayer and kiddushim), then . . . in the theory that there's a fundamental relationship between the fructifying serpent in the garden (the organ of the bris) and the knowledge fructifying Torah scroll (the knowledge of halakhah) . . . then we should need to ponder just who can be said to be born of the "seed of the woman" where the Torah scroll (rather than its biological analogue) is cut out of the picture?? Who is that "Jew" who is born subsequent to the circumcision of the Torah scroll?

Abraham is not, in this case, the first Jew (his mother is not Jewish; he is not the seed of a Jewish woman). Isaac is the first Jew. Abraham's scroll is irrelevant (the unsullied seed of the woman -- Sarah -- is the primary player). Ergo God’s having Abraham cut a "Jewish" covenant in the blood of the serpent whom He would love to make irrelevant: whom He has made irrelevant in that central act of His love for mankind.

It should be conceded that Abraham only wounded the serpent to birth Isaac. He mutilated the serpent to weaken its bite (Maimonides), so that Isaac can only be thought of as a partial Jew (a sign of the full Jew) since in his birth the serpent has only seen the handwriting (or etching) on the scroll . . . nevertheless, the serpent still has his roll in the birth of Isaac.

A sagely remark is, "As below, so above (or vise versa)." ----- So what's the "heavenly" analogue to Abraham making his reproductive serpent irrelevant in the birth of the first "physical" Jew? ----- God making the Torah scroll irrelevant in the birth of the first "heavenly" Jew?

But how would God signify not only the wounding of the serpent, but the complete and utter destruction of the serpent's roll in the birth of the heavenly Jew??

* * *

Not withstanding the issue of "conversion" (to Judaism), if that issue is set aside for a moment, the statement that the "male line is irrelevant" is one which ironically, or miraculously, becomes pregnant with meaning. ----- If the male line is irrelevant, then that's unique to Judaism. ----- And therefore, the central liturgy of the Jewish faith (one that actually supersedes halakhah [circumcision can take place on Sabbath situating bris milah above halakhah]) . . . symbolizes the making irrelevant of the "male line." ----- It's stabbed in the heart. It's made to bleed . . . to cheers and prayers and toasts and kiddushim. ------- The serpent has finally been stuck a blow. A physical line has been established that will see the finishing-off of that which Abraham --- with knife in one hand and the serpent in the other --- only just began!

In light of statements from Maimonides, the Torah scroll can be thought of as the delivery system for what’s present in the quarried tablets (the tablets being the actual source of God’s seminal thoughts toward mankind: His seminal stones). ------- But true to the narrative, the seed in the quarry of the tablets gets contaminated during the delivery (the lamb scroll is originally sanctioned to deliver the seed on its cosmic journey from Groom to Bride).

In Ezekeil 28 we’re introduced to God's fore-angel, the protector of His seminal stones, and thus His throne, i.e., the angelic protection for the “Deliverer” of Israel (Ex. 23:20). ----- And if God's throne is stationed directly above His seminal stones (as depicted on the Ark of the Covenant), then comparing a certain protecting angel to God's foreskin finds an almost ridiculous analogue in the design of the Ark of the Covenant, where the testes (seminal stones) are under the throne, and the throne is protected by the wings of the fore-angel originally designed as a herald, a protector, and the outer skene of the seminal Deliverer.

We know from liturgical precedent that the fore-angel should be invisible after the Jewish bris, as well as during the allegedly sanctified entrance of spirit into flesh (man into woman) in the non-Jewish marriage consummation. --- In Lacanian terms, the angelic fore-skene is supposed to disappear as God rises to matrimonial glory on the central stage in order to consummate His marriage to Israel. The protector and Deliver disappear when the consummation takes place (John 14:20).

Naturally it’s hard to imagine one of the angels on the Ark going bad . . . so that he must be cut off. And of course there before us is the high priest sprinkling blood on the angel, or the throne beneath the angel, even as blood marks his biological signifier in that liturgy marking the wounding and eventual destruction depicted in Ezekiel 16.

The sages note that the circumcised organ resembles an ithyphallic organ: an organ readied for the Bride. ---- “As above, so below.” ----- Circumcision removes the opacity of the fore-angel who has contaminated the reading of the Torah by standing in the way: as though he were himself the Most High (so to say) who (the latter) is only really seen when the foreskin is nowhere in sight.

The fore-angel at Sinai pulled the wool (and the lambskin) over the tablets, therein contaminating the seminal thoughts of God toward mankind, thereby blinding the eyes of the children of Israel. --- Abraham wounded the fore-angel; but the fiery serpent struck back at Sinai, re-enslaving those who were readied for the Deliverer and the delivery then and there.

* * *

To be a Jew is to be born of a Jewish mother. ----- Furthermore, the mother needn't herself be born of a Jewish mother since she can be a convert. If a non-Jewish woman converts to Judaism, her offspring are Jewish. But if a non-Jewish man converts to Judaism, his offspring are not Jewish, unless they have a Jewish mother.

What this suggests in a logical sense is that Jewish identity is tied exclusively to the female ovum, the "seed of the woman," and not to the semen which consequently passes through the serpentine organ in the middle of the garden of the man's body.

The masculine (serpentine) seed has nothing to do with Judaism. It is irrelevant.

And yet ironically, incredibly, the quintessential "sign" (given by God no less) visibly marking the covenant of Judaism is a scar on the very organ that transmits the seed of the man. The very organ that is irrelevant.

Ergo, the relevance of the sign of the Jewish covenant must be the making irrelevant of the male reproductive organ? ---- In other words, if the male seed is utterly irrelevant to the making of a Jew, then there is an odd usefulness to a "sign" which takes a blade to the male organ. There is a strange usefulness to the conversion process which requires a non-Jewish male draw blood from the organ that is privileged in the making of a non-Jewish male.

This principle justifies a hermeneutic which collapses the Platonic/Christian distinction between "flesh" and "spirit," between the "letter" and the "spirit." ----- If a woman . . . in good spirit . . . can chose to learn the principals of Judaism, with the express desire to convert to Judaism, if she of her own spirit chooses to "convert" to Judaism . . . and this spiritual conversion process therein carries over biologically to her offspring, then the distinction between "spirit" and "flesh" has been destroyed, or collapsed, into something foreign to non-Jewish thinking.

It’s perfectly clear that Judaism is neither purely religious, nor purely biological . . . but some transcendence of the two which breaches the very usefulness of logical discourse or discursive thinking. In Pauline terms, there’s nothing "biological" about a “spiritual” Jewish identity . . . which ironically can only be true to the extent that we collapse the very usefulness of the distinction between "biology" and "spirituality" which is exactly what it appears is required to "convert" to Judaism.

In other words, if a Jewish believer already believes that there is no meaningful distinction between flesh and spirit (and according to the very tenets of Judaism that is what he must believe to be Jewish) then he (or she) can protest in good faith, and as a good Jew, that there is nothing "biological" about Jewish identity.

But a problem can be shown to arise where we’re forced to blur the distinction between the "letter" and the "spirit." ---- If a woman goes through all the motions to be "Jewish," learns all she can learn, practices the faith to the letter, and yet she hasn't undergone the authoritative "conversion" process, she cannot be a Jew. In other words, she can be a Jew in every single way except the formal or letteral "conversion" process, and yet she is still not "Jewish." The authoritative conversion process is part and parcel of anything she might believe or do . . . so much so that regardless of whether she believed with all her heart and mind and soul . . . and practiced with all her heart, and mind, and soul, she cannot be a Jew unless the proper Rabbinical authorities get involved and make good her "conversion." She literally cannot "convert" before God and have it take. There must be Jewish “men” involved in the process.

Furthermore, if the proper authorities are not involved, her offspring will not be Jewish. Yet . . . if another woman is only half the Jew that our heart, mind, and soul, woman is . . . but she is formally "converted" her offspring will be 100% Jewish by reason of the formal process of conversion, whereas the other woman will be not one iota Jewish even if her conversion is a heartfelt appeal to God rather than men.

What this seems to show . . . is that the Jewish men involved in the "conversion" procedure have some meaningful determination on whether this woman's offspring will be Jewish or not. If her offspring are "Jewish" then human hands and heads are right back involved in the birth of the circumcision. In other words, the covenant that God is said to cut by cutting out the male organ’s role in the process of forming a “Jew” is given back its authority in the spirit of the conversion process if men can determine something which by the dictates of circumcision, they have no rightful role in.

If fleshly circumcision documents in the flesh that the man has no say-so in Jewish identity, then why should a Jewish man have say-so in the spirit of the conversion process? ----- And worse, if, in Lacanian terms, the phallus is the quintessential signifier (or sign) of the role played by the letter, or the Logos, in relationship to the Spirit (the Signified) . . . then any attempt to confuse, or conflate, or co-opt the "seed of the woman" under the physical authority of the phallus, the man, the letter, or the law . . . is pure and simply an epispasmic hermeneutic which is contrary to the heart and soul and spirit of Judaism herself.

Taken to the extreme . . . the spirit of this saying . . . says . . . that since the male seed is irrelevant to the birth of the Jew, only a woman can "speak" Oral Torah: Oral Torah must come from the mouth of a woman to be truly Oral Torah. . . . Only Oral Torah can be "Jewish" Torah since the scribes are men and men are the signifiers of the phallus (and vice versa) . . . which is bled out of the Jewish birth, and thus the Jewish Torah.

To the extent that Oral Torah is Jewish Torah whereas the written scroll is for all of humanity --- only the voice of a woman can pronounce Oral Torah and have it remain Oral Torah (i.e. Jewish Torah). A Judaism born of the unscathed Torah scroll cannot be a spiritual Judaism since the very essence, or spirit, of Judaism, is that it’s produced from the “seed of the woman” apart from the male line which is made irrelevant in the central liturgy, and even in the central legal determination of Jewish identity.

There is only one proviso, only one loophole (so to say). ---- Should ever there be such a thing as a virgin born Jewish male (a male born from a circumcised pregnancy) . . . then he and only he (and perhaps his offspring) would be allowed to speak Oral Torah . . . Jewish Torah . . . since he would not be male per se . . . since he would not have a human father, he would not be birthed by the serpentine organ (the signifier of maleness) and thus the best that could be said for him is that he and his mother would be something like a dissevered androgyny (the severing of a woman surrounding a man) . . . which would allow him to speak Oral Torah from the mouth of neither a woman nor a man, but a literal “momma's boy” in the sense of Jeremiah 33:22 --- an androgynous man/woman who can be said not to be fathered by the serpent.

Only a virgin born male/female would truly conflate "flesh" and "spirit" -- "Jew and Greek" --- "male and female" so that he alone could be found-out as both one who possesses the biological analogue to the scroll, and the unsullied tongue capable of putting what he possesses into words by means of a circumspect tongue. ----- He alone would be capable of speaking Jewish Torah since his voice is male and female and neither at the same time.

* * *

In mystical circles, the tongue and the phallus are analogous to some degree. The phallus is related to the body (physical birth), and the tongue to the spirit (the birth of Oral [live: born on breath] Torah) [2]. ---- So if the "sign" of the covenant placed on the male organ is the signifier of the significance of the phallus in a "Jewish" pregnancy --- zero --- (ergo the blood and the scar) then where the phallus and the tongue are analogous to some degree, the circumcised tongue (the Jewish tongue) is the male tongue which has zero relationship to Oral Torah.

On the surface this appears as though it would overturn or invert the normal gender dynamics of Judaism. But that's not the case at all. What has to happen to make this work, without simply turning the gender dynamics of Judaism into a farce, is that the "sign" of circumcision can no longer be accepted as the conflation of the "spirit" of circumcision in the "flesh" of circumcision. The impossible idea of the “spirit” of the sign in the "flesh" must provoke/evoke a vision in the "spirit" based on all the rhyme and reason we can muster from the physical sign itself.

In other words, the very problem that arise when we realize that the Jewish phallus cannot transmit Jewish anything (so that the "sign" etched into the phallus actually works!) is that it seems to be in contrast to a Jewish view of woman as a threat to the Torah, and precisely to Oral Torah. No meaningful interpretation of the written Torah --- performed by a Jewish woman's tongue --- is included in the sacred writings which make up what is known as Oral Torah. Oral Torah is transmitted by the tongue of Jewish men.

So how can we rescue the logic that says only the woman's genital organ is seminal (so to say) in the production of Jewish flesh and blood (in which case the analogy between genital organ and organ of speech abides by the same principal) from the normal Jewish case that men's tongues and only men’s tongues have transmitted Oral Torah (which Oral Torah is the most seminally "Jewish" of all Torah)??

This can only be made to make sense by dissevering the fleshly sign of the covenant from the spiritual intent of the sign. We have to dissect the very thinking that is generally considered Jewish (i.e., the conflation of the sign and the spirit in the flesh).

If we do this, then the sign cut into the Jewish male's fleshly organ can signify a spiritual singularity in time whereby a Jewish male is actually (rather than symbolically) made a female/male (he is the first truly “Jewish” human being) by being born without the Y chromosome which in circumcision is symbolically cut off to make an otherwise Gentile pregnancy the harbinger of the authentic Jewish pregnancy.

The "sign" of the covenant is a double-entendre of biblical proportions in that the wounded organ which signifies the means for producing the birth of the first Jew (no Y chromosome) is also a picture of what will happen to the first genuinely Jewish manhood when the biological analogue and spiritual reality become intertwined in the singular unification of Creator and creature.

Notes:

1.The idea was thought about by Freud, who said that "Paul, by developing the Jewish religion further, became its destroyer" (Moses and Monotheism, p. 111).

2. See Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 139-141: "What is real about the phallus points upward to the tongue, and what is real about the tongue points downward to the phallus, for revelation of Torah is justified by circumcision of the flesh and circumcision of the flesh by revelation of Torah."