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Adventures in Moheling

Max Mintz shares some fun anecdotes about his work as a traveling mohel with Houston’s Jewish Herald-Voice:

One of his strangest experiences occurred earlier this year, when he was invited to a brit milah in Tulsa, Okla. “When I arrived in Tulsa, my bags did not arrive with me, which was not good, since I can’t take knives on a plane,” he explained.

“The people at Southwest Airlines found my bags in Houston, and offered to put them on the next plane to Tulsa,” Mintz explained. “However, it wasn’t going to be possible to wait for my instruments to arrive, perform the bris and then get back to the airport in time for my plane back to Houston.

“There was a chapel at the airport, which they agreed to let us use,” the mohel explained, “and they managed to get my bags to me on the next plane. In the interim, we transferred people from the synagogue to the airport; I performed the circumcision in the airport chapel; they had brought food for the seudat mitzvah [mitzvah feast]; and there was enough time left for me to get on the last plane to Houston.”

The full article is here.

A Cut Above the Rest: In Search of the Perfect Mohel

Sam Apple, author of the delightful “Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria’s Jewish Past With Its Last Wandering Shepherd,” has just published a hilarious essay on the Los Angeles Times Web site about his search for a mohel to circumcise his son. The setup:

I did not want just anyone to cut my son’s penis. I wanted the best. And so when my wife, Jennifer, neared the end of her pregnancy, I decided to interview mohels.

I had good reason to be nervous about ritual circumcisers. In 2004, three New York babies contracted herpes from a mohel, who, in keeping with an ultra-Orthodox Jewish tradition, used his mouth to draw blood from the wound. I had no intention of letting a mohel — or anyone else for that matter — put his mouth on my newborn son’s genitals, but the moral of the story was clear enough: If you’re going to chop off part of someone’s penis without asking permission, you’d better choose your chopper with care.

The full article is here.

The essay is a finalist in the “Be Joel Stein” contest run by the L.A. Times columnist of the same name. You can vote for your favorite (i.e. Sam Apple’s essay) here.

Full Disclosure: Sam’s a good friend of mine (but don’t hold that against him). I was even at his son’s bris.