Moriah

People often choose identity over health, or even over life. They'll suffer, or even die, as martyrs to religion, or nation, or culture -- instead of changing their ways. That is remarkable, even though it is so much a part of life that we seldom notice how remarkable it is.

Other animals fight for kin and friends, and some can be said to have ``culture.'' Chimpanzees, for example, have ways of doing things that are passed down from one generation to the next, and differ from group to group. But if you put a chimp into a new setting, where no one sticks his arm straight up during grooming, he won't prefer to die rather than change his ``culture.''

Human beings are not chimps, and this is one of the ways we differ: The pains we take to maintain our symbols of connection to entities beyond family and neighbors.

Case in point: New York City's Department of Health has issued warnings about the dangers of a practice common in Hasidic circumcision ceremonies, as the New York Times reports here. In this tradition, metzitzah b'peh, the man who circumcises the infant then sucks the blood from the wound to clean it.

The problem: Many adult mouths contain a herpes virus. Oral suction can transmit this to the newborn. According to the city department of health, five recent cases of herpes in infants (one fatal, another the cause of permanent brain damage) can be attributed to metzitzah b'peh.

Now, a lot of Hasidic infants are circumcised in New York every year, so it would appear the risk is small. Still, why take the chance, right? Surely any parent would decide to skip this part of the traditional rite, and be safe rather than sorry.

Not so. Last week a group of rabbis met with the city's health commissioner and tried to intimidate him into backing off. Rabbi David Niederman of the United Jewish Organization in Williamsburg put it this way: "We will not compromise on performing the ritual the way it has been done for thousands of years."

Why not? Let us not tiptoe around the issue, out of a misplaced respect for religious belief: The rabbis' position is that the small risk is worth it, because this symbol of continuity is more valuable than an infant.

This is not, of course, how the rabbis frame the issue. They say the herpes link is not proven. But that's not the motive for their rejection of the city's claim. After all, they called for an end to the education campaign, and an end to investigations of particular men who may have spread the virus to the infants. It may be that the herpes link is an open question, but if that is so, then why tell the city to shut up and butt out? Why not let the question be answered?

People take risks to preserve their feeling of membership, is why. What bothers me about this story is that the potential risk being taken in the name of ``thousands of years'' of tradition is not being taken by the men at the microphones. If the city's public health research is correct, newborn infants are the ones taking the chance.

This is a conflict between memberships in two different human kinds. To the city, the infant is a citizen, whose right to health and life must be protected by ``us,'' the people of New York. To the rabbis, the infant is a member of their community, and the signs of that membership are not to be violated by outsiders with a non-religious agenda.

It's the kind of dispute that cannot be resolved by negotiation and bromides about diversity. One side must win, and the other lose.

What it is not, though, is a fight between ``science'' and ``belief.'' For the fact of the matter is that all religions, and indeed all serious human kinds, make demands that go contrary to a simple-minded definition of ``health.'' Nations ask young people to fight and die. Businesses stick workers in unhealthy cubicles and make them sit at computer screens. Medical training -- medical training! -- asks hopefuls to lose sleep, work to the bone, and otherwise stress out.

The key point is that ``health,'' like religion, is a set of beliefs, entangled with our sense of the kind of people we are, which is, in turn, entangled with our sense of right and wrong. There is no science of health the can stand outside politics, or correct our supposedly separate beliefs.

To me, then, claims that this or that belief is ``contrary to health'' have a hollow ring. I doubt there is a human being on earth who doesn't do things contrary to health for the sake of being a good member of the congregation, or a good citizen, or a worthy member of some guild.

This is a political conflict, about a political issue: Are newborns first of all part of the entire community, or are they owned by the leaders of the religious or cultural group into which they were born? I think the former, and so I hope the city sticks to its guns.