Re: jewish emancipation also means emancipation from ancient rituals

A botched circumcision and its aftermath:
"On August 24, 2020, as I attempted the first pee of the morning, I felt
a tightness on the underside of my penis. A tiny hair had formed a
tourniquet around a skin bridge on the genital. I was not in immediate
pain, but I knew that something irrevocable had happened, as if time
itself had caught up to me with an abacus in hand, demanding a full
accounting.
My penis was shaped by the Cold War and God’s covenant with Abraham. My
father, born in a small village outside Leningrad in 1938, had been
circumcised. By the time of my birth, in 1972, Jewish children were
generally not circumcised in the Soviet Union, part of a long-standing
campaign against religion. Seven years later, soon after our arrival in
the United States, my father fell under the influence of some
“Chabadniks,” Hasidic followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who were going
door to door telling Soviet Jews in Brooklyn and Queens that they had to
circumcise their boys. The surgery was performed under general
anesthesia at Coney Island Hospital, the Chabadniks singing and praying
joyfully in an adjoining room, and resulted in an immediate infection as
well as painful urination that lasted until I was nine.
Most poorly performed circumcisions stem from two misjudgments on the
part of the circumciser: either too much or too little foreskin is
removed. In my case, it was too little (and, one might add, given that I
was seven years old instead of the eight days prescribed by the Torah,
too late). After the infection had subsided, the shaft of my penis was
crowded by a skyline of redundant foreskin that included, on the
underside, a thick attachment of skin stretching from the head to the
shaft of the genital, a result of improper healing that is called a skin
bridge.
..
The man who lives near me, a forty-eight-year-old musician, is the son
of Italian farmers who moved to the U.S. They did not speak English, yet
were somehow persuaded by American doctors to have their son
circumcised, a procedure rarely done in Italy. He remembered, as I did,
a period of difficult urination. “I was screaming,” he said, “but the
masculine Italian response was just to laugh about it.” A second surgery
was performed to correct the first when he was around six years old. He
told me that the psychological effects of both surgeries have been
lasting: “It’s affected my sexual performance and my experiences around
partnering and creating bonds with people.”
We will never know the full extent of such stories, because men are not
supposed to talk about these things. We must either laugh it off or be
stoic about what happened “down there,” like the Egyptian nobles of 2400
B.C."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/a-botched-circumcision-and-its-aftermath