Circumcise your heart

In passing, we read in liturgy recently that God asks us to circumcise our hearts. A member exclaimed: “You’re going to have to explain that one!”

I actually think it’s worth delving into, and we can learn a lot from it, but drilling into this metaphor requires some robust engagement with physicality and body gore. If you know that’s not for you this morning, feel free to check out of this sermon at any time without judgement. I’ve taken a punt by looking at an ugly expression in Torah, and if it brings up anything triggering for you, you can leave and we’ll let you know when the sermon is over.

Circumcise your heart.

Funnily, it had never occurred to me before that the expression was anything but ordinary. It appears at least twice in the Torah that I can find, and possibly more, as well as variously in the Prophets, the rabbinic writings, and the liturgy.

It’s just one of those sayings, isn’t it? It’s the reason for the season. That we pray and fast and atone and repent during these Days of Awe, in order that we might emerge on Yom Kippur with circumcised hearts.

But, confronted with the member’s incredulity, I was suddenly struck. Because I actually don’t know what it means. The term became defamiliarised and looked like a word I had never seen before.

After all, it’s funny, isn’t it? It’s an action that we can imagine on one body part, even if we’d prefer not to, but which is ludicrous if applied to another.

But more than ludicrous, it’s grotesque! Circumcising a heart sounds visceral, violent, bloody and gory. It sounds like macabre surgery.

Why do we have such an obscene metaphor placed so centrally in our Yom Kippur liturgy?

This has sent me on a journey through dictionaries, concordances, and the grammar commentaries of ibn Ezra. So, come with me, if you will, on an adventure to understand what a circumcised heart looks like, how to get one, and why we may need one, especially this week.

Well, firstly, we need a definition.

I always do a little chuckle when I go past the cafe in the park between the synagogue and Surbiton station, because it is called Orlah. I’m somebody’s language, I’m sure it’s a beautiful word, but in Hebrew it means foreskin. It can mean uncircumcised, but also unskilled, closed, and forbidden.

Lips can be uncircumcised, as Moses tells God that he has uncircumcised lips, and cannot do the work of talking to Pharaoh. This might mean literally that Moses had some kind of cleft palate or scarring around his mouth. It might be more metaphorical, suggesting that Moses had a stammer or speech impediment. But the image is of lips overlaid with layers of unwanted skin that prevent being understood.

Ears can be uncircumcised. The Prophet Jeremiah chastises the citizens of Jerusalem for having uncircumcised ears, adding that they are unable to hear God’s word. Here it is almost certainly metaphorical, and conjures an impression of ears cemented over by excess membranes.

Even trees can be uncircumcised. For the first three years, they bear fruit that shouldn’t be eaten. The early fruit is forbidden because, according to ibn Ezra, is dangerous and useless, like the foreskins of lips, ears, and hearts.

The word for circumcise is milah. This one is more exclusively used for male genitalia, but please do not only imagine the safe medical procedure practised by experts in the NHS. In our Torah, circumcision is something that can happen to adults, without anaesthetic, in the heat of the desert. That is how it is for Abraham, the men of Shechem, and Joshua’s soldiers.

This is probably the version of circumcision we are expected to picture when God tells us to remove the foreskins of our hearts.

Notice that all of these expressions are somewhat revolting. The imagery is gory. That’s probably deliberate.

We have been trained by the sanitised philosophy of the West to imagine the Bible as an intellectual text chanted gently by angels with harps. But no such creatures exist in our text and Scripture wasn’t written to be a gentle thought experiment.

One of my favourite biblical commentators, Roland Boer, wrote a book called The Earthy Nature of the Bible: Fleshly Readings of Sex, Masculinity, and Carnality, where he gets us to see how embodied and physical our holy texts are.

In every passage, Torah is blood and guts and sweat and excrement. It’s life as it is really lived: raw and without disinfectant.

When we understand that the Torah doesn’t blanche at corporeality the way we might, we can understand God’s call to circumcise our hearts.

The Prophet Jeremiah declares: “circumcise yourselves to God and remove the foreskins of your hearts, O people of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem.”

In Deuteronomy, Moses tells the Israelites: “circumcise the foreskins of your hearts, and stiffen your necks no more.”

This is a metaphor for repentance. We are to imagine something surgical, messy, full-bodied, and painful. And isn’t that what atonement really is?

There may well be moments of healing that are civil, calm, and muted. But the moments of real change, at least internally, don’t involve sitting comfortably and smiling. Change hurts.

It involves real inner turmoil and strife. It cuts deep in its own way, no less than a wound. It means breaking and healing and breaking again, like the stitches of a botched operation.

When I think of the moments of most intense atonement, I have undergone them because I had to.

Because I outgrew an older version of myself. Because I needed to quit an addiction that was hurting me. Because I had to find a better survival strategy than one that had served me when I was younger.

And I cried and I ached and I experienced pain. And that was just part of the circumcision of the heart.

Ibn Ezra says this kind of atonement cannot be done alone. You need to ask God to circumcise your heart with you. He says: God will rip away the foreskin of your heart, and remove the layers of insensitivity that obstruct your heart.

And knowing this I become aware of those layers of hard membrane that keep clogging up my spirit. And I know I want God’s help to strip them away.

My own arrogance and ego, which keeps me from seeing myself as I truly am.

My anxiety and fear, which keep me from doing the right thing now, by focusing only on a worrisome future.

My snappiness and my temper, which keep me from building more meaningful relationships with the people I love.

I wish to cut away them all.

All the many escape routes I have found to keep myself away from sitting still with God, whether it’s over-working, or over-eating, or over-exercising. Or running away into books and words.

All of these are layers that I once built up to protect myself. Slicing them off would leave my heart rawer, more vulnerable, and exposed. The process would be painful and it would require more recovery time than I allow myself. But I know I need it.

Bloody, gory, embodied, and fully physical, I know I need to change.

So, I ask God’s help, this Shabbat Shuva, to see the layers of dead skin on my spirit. May God be a surgeon of the soul, ready to tear away those defences that do not serve me. May I do all I can, this Yom Kippur, to circumcise my heart.

Amen.