Hollywood's Greeks, היוונים של הוליווד

The proposed San Franciscon municipal ban on circumcision has focused attention on the most ancient of Jewish rituals. Australian actor Russell Crowe was one of the latest to weigh-in. Asked by Jewish friends what he thought of their decision to have a bris for their son, he replied via Twitter: "Who are you to correct nature? Babies are born perfect."

Crowe pretty much summarized the position of the Seleucid Greeks who banned bris milah at the time of the Chanukah miracle. The Greeks worshipped nature, including the human body. They studied nature to derive its rules of symmetry, which they attempted to embody in their art.

What they lacked was any sense of nature as raw materials to be transformed by man in partnership with Hashem. Thus the Jews insisted that physical perfection is only achieved through a creative, positive alteration of the natural body. Only after his bris does the Torah refer to Avraham Avinu as "tam" – complete or perfect.

Rather than viewing nature as a static, self-contained system, the Jews insisted that everything in the created world was brought into being only in order to relate it back to the Creator. In the process, nature itself is altered. As Chazal say, "There is no mitzvah in the Torah that does not contain the power of techiyas hameisim (revivification the dead) -- i.e., the transformation of nature.

The change of the newborn male child from his "natural" state is an act of entering into a covenant with Hashem. A divine covenant, is always effected by an act of cutting – in the case of bris milah, through an act of cutting from the infant male himself. That act of cutting expresses our sense of incompletion without joinder to the other party to the covenant -- Hashem.

Such a yearning for connection to G-d was beyond the Greeks, whose mythology portrayed the gods as subject to every human foible in spades. Those gods involvement in human affairs was capricious, at best, and more frequently malevolent; the best course for human beings was usually to avoid their attention.

How different from the Jewish view of a perfect G-d, Who out of His benevolence brought into existence the entire universe, as a complex, interrelated system awaiting Man to relate all its diverse parts back to the Creator.

That's what Russell Crowe, the modern day Greek, cannot understand.

Source: Jonathan Rosenblum