Shades of Green

“I’m very honored to be here, because Justin and Justice are very important…not just to me, but to many people across the Jewish community. The fact that we have people here from different synagogues and different sections of the Jewish people is really a compliment to you two. There are so many people who love you and are here for you from all different parts of the community. You two really act as a bridge between us. Usually you have young people who have a few people to look after them. You two have hundreds of people! And they’re going to be looking out for you for years to come.” -Rabbi Malcolm Cohen, at Justin’s bris.

When we told Justin, a few months ago, that he’d soon be having a hatafat dam brit  (literally, “drawing of blood of the covenant”), he received the news with such casual complacence, my jaw almost dropped.

We were actually hoping for a horrified “What????” A true connoisseur of potential comic moments, I’d actually  geared up for telling him with camcorder in hand, hoping to capture the hilarious, shocked expression on his face I could burn to DVD and haunt him with for decades to come. It’s not every day you tell your son you’re going to make his willy bleed. You expect a little more zing for your money.

While my personal memory is a bit fuzzy as to my own relationship with my penis at age six, I’m fairly certain if my dad told me we were going to drop my pants, have a rabbi grab my junk and give it a jab with a pinhead until blood came out, I think I would have done the McCauley Culkin cheek slap from Home Alone . Swooned, at the least.

Not Justin. When we told him about his impending bris - a rite of all Jewish boys – and explained what would be done to his relatively young equipment, his impressive nonchalance approached actual passivity. Disregarding the whole hullabaloo with a shrug and a smile, he went back to playing Skylanders on his Wii.

Unflappable, fearless Justin. You can see it on the recording. If there were a thought-bubble subtitle on the screen, it would have to read, “Whatever. You want to poke my peeper, weirdoes, knock yourselves out.”

I guess I should back up and explain.

Justin was circumcised at birth, but did not have the ritual, ceremonial brit milah or circumcisional bris that most Jewish baby boys have when they’re eight days old. This is a rather significant step into Jewish maleness. And all modern squawks of genital mutilation aside – (give me a break) – we Jews are culturally bound to the directions laid out in Genesis 17. Read it and weep. Particularly if you’re attached to your foreskin.

“You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and that shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you. And throughout the generations, every male among you shall be circumcised at the age of eight days.”

Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Barbaric? I don’t know. My non-Jewish friends overseas seem to think so. They go a little bit bat shit when I even mention it. But really? Long run? I’m circumcised. Adam’s circumcised. We’re still walking around without a limp. Problems?  Sorry. Take it up with a rabbi. To paraphrase Popeye, we yam what we yam.

So, for me and Adam and our particularly prickly double-dad adoptive situation, what do we do with Justin, who was circumcised in the delivery room, but came to us without the ever-important eight-day ceremony already under his belt, pardon the pun.

Enter Rabbi Fromowitz, certified mohel, and a personal friend and former rabbi of birth-grandmother Cindy. Rabbi F agreed to perform a hatafat dam brit for us, a “watered-down” version of a bris, in which no actual foreskin is cut or removed (since it’s already long-gone), but instead, a little spring-loaded clicker is used to quickly poke the penis until a single drop of blood shows. Click, click, latex gloves, a dab of gauze and that’s all she wrote. A little prick on the little, well, you know, and like the umpire says, you’re outa’ there.

“Mazel Tov,” Rabbi Wyne, Grandma Cindy's current rabbi said to Justin, inspecting Rabbi Fromowitz’s handiwork from distance respectful to Justin's modesty, which at six, is nearly non-existant, so he needn't have worried. “That didn’t hurt, did it?”

Justin, who grinned sheepishly through the whole procedure - five clicks to actually get the job done - that's how tiny and non-intrustive the needle actually is - beamed and said, “That didn’t hurt at all!”

“You’re lucky,” Rabbi Wyne said. “When I had my bris, I couldn’t walk or talk for a year.”

Ba-dump-bump! He always goes for the classics, that rabbi.

After the actual poking was done, the rabbis on hand marched Justin back into Grandma Cindy’s living room – (the actual procedure was done in a private room, away from the crowd, for heaven’s sake) –Rabbi Wyne announced “Here he is, a Jew!” and people smiled and clapped and patted our backs and sang “simintov and mazel tov,” and Justin looked proud.

It was a banner day for him. He even got to have his first sip of wine – Maneschewitz Concord Grape – a staple of Jewish homes everywhere, which he later pronounced “scusting,” with his usual scrunch-nosed Justin flair. And kiddo, just so you know, since 1888, Jewish wine drinkers everywhere would agree with you.

So, the bris proper, the poking itself, was not a big deal, neither emotionally or physically. Naysayers, relax. No animals or children were harmed in the making of this motion picture. He walked away smiling and proud of his own bravado, without so much as a scratch. Well okay, a tiny little pin spot, the red badge of courage, but not an actual cut. Thank you, Rabbi Fromowitz, for going gentle on the family jewels. Even us gay dads want grandkids.

One thing that did remind me of the differences in practice that still exist between Orthodox Jews (like Grandma Cindy) and Reform Jews (like me and Adam) was the Hebrew name Rabbi Wyne gave to Justin during the prayer he offered at the brief service and “baby naming” that followed. It wasn’t what we asked for.

Justin’s Hebrew name is Binyamin Aviel ben Avram v’Aharon, (Avram and Aharon being Adam’s and my Hebrew names). That correct name for Justin was warmly accepted and used by our reform rabbi, Rabbi Cohen, at our naming ceremony for the kids in our own synagogue, Temple Sinai, two months ago. No questions asked. Parents discretion. Dealer’s choice.

When we asked Rabbi Wyne, an Orthodox rabbi, to use the same name as he officiated at Justin’s bris, the answer was a polite no. We were told it wasn’t traditional. Not halachic or proper under Jewish law. Adopted boys do not receive the adoptive father’s name in Orthodox custom. If their birth father's Jewish faith is known, they are given the birth father's name. If it is not known, they are called “ben Avraham Avinu,” “son of Abraham, our father.”

So, not to put too fine a point on it, but Adoptive Dad #1 and Adoptive Dad #2 were more or less snubbed in the Orthodox naming prayer. Our names were not connected to Justin’s in any way. There were smiles, mazel tov’s and pats on the back from all who attended, but in the prayer that mattered, Orthodox custom deemed us not connected to Justin in any sense of legal lineage, and it makes no politically-correct exception for the fact that we stepped in to raise him. He is not “Benjamin, son of Adam and Ryan,” he is “Benjamin, son of Abraham our father,” a distinction given to adopted children and converts. Not exactly a preference in my eyes, certainly not what Adam and I would have picked for the day, but in the words of my friend Dianne, “Honey, it is what it is. Get over it.”

We knew it would happen, and early on, we did our best to take a run at it. We told Rabbi F and Rabbi W before the service, we’d like to have our names used. We still don't know if we'll show up in print on the certificate. Sensitively speaking, it was sort of a sticking point from the beginning when we knew an Orthodox bris was on the horizon. We'd hoped for inclusion in the actual naming part of the service, but assumed que sera. No cynicism intended, but Orthodox is Orthodox, and if you want your kids to have the liberal version of prayers versus the old-school verbatim, you’re pushing your shopping cart down the wrong aisle. As King Henry said to his sons, “There’s no sense asking if the air’s any good when there’s nothing else to breathe.”

So, yeah. It pisses me off a little. It stings.

Adoptive parents are told all the time, “you’re not real parents.” Sometimes outright by awkward, bumbling, well-meaning folks who say things like “it’s amazing they even look like you!” Sometimes by people prying for gossip -- and that group is neverending with their whispered, conspiratorial “what happened to their real mom," but always and forever, not a day goes by that someone doesn’t remind us in some covert or overt way, we’re not their real dads. It's ironic that adoptive parents are often praised as heroic, but simultaneously, in a million different ways, branded as a special subclass, one rung down the ladder from actual parenthood.

So, yes, I have to admit, I let it sting for one full day. Being snubbed in the prayer that gave my son his Hebrew name in front of his grandmother's community is a bit like saying, "we love him, but we want want to make sure we're all clear that he's not really yours." If we hadn't done an earlier naming ceremony in our own shul, where he was given a connection to our names in such an important, intimate, father-son sense of legitimized identity, I think I would have been devastated indeed.

How to explain to those who don't recognize our realness, we have taken great and careful pains to return two children to the Jewish birth they started from. We recognize the special story and the special symbolism they hold for some people, and it matters to us. Not because of that but in celebration of that, we faithfully take them to Jewish services every Shabbat, they study weekly in a Jewish Sunday school, they are enrolled in a Jewish private school Monday through Friday. We have, I say with all utter lack of humility, turned up the Jewish steam valve on their cultural and spiritual raising. Jewish values live, breathe, and are alive and well in our home.

So, fast forward to bris and a rabbi who can’t technically mention us in connection to the boy who will now be our son for a lifetime, and feelings are bound to be hurt. Hearing our absense and disconnection announced so clearly -- prayed so clearly -- whether it’s tradition, Jewish law, or whatever else you chalk it up to -- is, to us, just another sad sigh and a slap in the face, reminding us of our further perceived inequality in the eyes of people who should know better. “He is Benjamin, son of someone, and son of the Jewish people,” they seem to tell us, “but, he is not the son of you.”

How do I make peace with that?

Because I have to.

Adam read the notes below and said I was being generous. Maybe too generous. Because he's hurting too, hearing his name replaced at an important, incredibly profound and personal event by a different father...the historical figure of Abraham. Not Ryan, not Adam, but Abraham being called the only father of our child.

This is hard for us, trying to understand the technicality of halachah (Jewish law) in our unique situation. We also have to find a way to understand that not all Orthodox folks dig tonight’s exciting episode of My Two Dads. I still hear the words echo in my mind, before we got the kids, from an Orthodox rabbi, who told a friend, who told us, they wished the kids would go to “a regular family.” Ouch.

So, here’s how Adam and I have to make peace with being perceived by so many as "not really real."

Imagine the Jewish community as paint brushes, each with their own color.

Adam and I are yellow. Reform, vibrant, burning yellow. Hot as the sun and full of liberal ideas and the goal of inclusion. We practice diversity and bending and putting the emotional, unique and distinctly intimate needs of all types of people and all complicated modern circumstances before the strict letter of the law.

And our Orthodox friends, who we love and admire… Rabbis Wyne and Fromowitz included…are painting instead with a beautiful deep blue…much different than ours, but full of the richness of law, purity of purpose…the foundation on which everything else is built, from where we all began in a biblical sense, and if we don’t take heed and give it it’s honor, what kind of painters are we to begin with?

I can’t be pissed at their blue paintbrush for painting the world blue, any more than they can be pissed at mine for painting it yellow. Sometimes it's the only color you've got in your can.

If Justin and Justice are really a bridge between communities and branches of faith as Rabbi Cohen so perceptively pointed out, then I have to stop worrying about what offends me personally or hurts my feelings, and take a broader view and understanding. I have to be mature enough to realize I would be failing them as a father if I didn’t relax and appreciate an evolving Jewish world where we all have to come together and paint them green, because it’s the only obvious combination when blue and yellow collide.

Not just plain green either. As these kids grow, they'll find kindness and nurturing, certainly wisdom in both branches. They'll lean one way or another, sometimes pulling more of our color to their palette, sometimes reaching for their grandmother’s. They may be many things, but they won’t be simple green. They will be teal and tea and emerald and fern. They will be forest and moss and jade and sea. Their hue and lightness and tints and shades will be an evolution only they can determine. They'll be a product of two seemingly conflicting worlds, whose people are famously oppositional, but through them, are already finding surprising acceptance and syngergy. Justin and Justice will take Reform yellow and Orthodox blue and mix it in shades we have yet to dream of.

 “You must remember this,” I wrote in a Facebook toss-off yesterday, “a bris is just a bris.”

And Justin’s was beautiful.  Reform Jews and Orthodox Jews singing and clapping together, wishing our children only the best, both camps following Torah as it can only be defined in their own individual hearts, wishing our kids nothing but goodness and the happiest lives, no matter what shades of green they turn out to be.

Mazel tov, Binyamin Aviel ben Avram v’Aharon.

And mazel tov, Binyamin Aviel ben Avraham Avinu.

Doubly-named is doubly blessed, and I think in this case, there’s room in this faith for both of you.