"A lot of the jokes are forced," Rovinsky says. "They take the edge off. My goal is to provide families with as painless and comfortable a procedure as possible."
The one-liners come, fast and furious. Performing for the parents and the small black video camera that yarmulked cousin Bernie Dworkin has aimed at the dining-room table, Rovinsky lets 'em fly:
"This kid's so well endowed, I'm gonna have to charge the parents double!"
"Let me just make the snip here...Oops, it's a girl!"
A baby spraying him with urine right before the cut: "It's payback time! I always remember to wear my wet suit too late!"
Sometimes the parents get in on the act. When Rovinsky changes a boy's soiled diaper, he declares himself the "full-service mohel." To the mother standing beside him, he asks immediately afterward, "Do you breastfeed?" The father, on the opposite side of the table, counters with, "Wow! You really are a full-service mohel."
His fee--once again, he stresses it's an honorarium, saying he will perform the circumcision for free if the parents are in financial straits--is $150 for midwife referrals. Rovinsky says he performs an average of 15-20 a month, netting about $2,000 in that period--not enough right now, he admits, to support his wife and three children. Once, he did as many as 22 in a 24-hour period. For the bris milah, he's earned from zero to $1,000 plus plane fare.
But even as Rovinsky attempts to market himself nationally to the alternative medicine scene, some anti-circumcision advocates have raised questions about the legality of a rabbi performing what they call "surgery without a license" on gentiles. Some states exempt mohels and Muslim clerics who perform religious circumcision from official certification by state medical boards. In other states, such as Texas, they are simply non-entities, unaddressed by law or regulation. Mike Young, a veteran lawyer with the Texas Department of Health, says: "This is a hole you could drive a truck through. The Medical Practices Act, which the State Board of Medical Examiners concerns itself with, defines a physician as someone who declares himself a physician, someone who says he is performing medicine to cure or treat an illness or injury. Mohels don't claim to be doctors, so under this definition, they couldn't be prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license."
For a district attorney to prosecute a mohel, Young says, the rabbi would have had to botch the circumcision pretty badly. "I mean, think about the publicity--some Baptist prosecutor charging a Jewish practitioner with injury to a child for a centuries-old religious practice? In my opinion, you'd have to have a rabbi who was routinely unclean and unsafe."
Camellia May, a Houston midwife and the head of its local NOCIRC chapter, is more than a little peeved about the state's refusal to regulate mohels and Muslim holy men who practice religious circumcision. "The state regulates the hygienic practices of beauticians or fingernail-parlor operators, yet ignores the surgical alteration of a baby's genitals. I guess it means adults getting their hair cut or nails done deserve uniformity in training and cleanliness, but babies don't matter. Just because a mohel or a Muslim holy man rather than an M.D. performs circumcision does not make it risk-free." Of course, she sees injury in all circumcisions, because they cause pain and alter a child's body.
May wants to make it clear that her efforts are focused on those in the 98 percent non-Jewish majority who circumcise. Yet she has discovered that the pull of conformity can be just as powerful as religious conviction. "When it comes to circumcision, there is no one on this planet who can be totally objective and without prejudice," she continues. "But people aren't open to discussion. If I say something against circumcision, I have people screaming that I'm trying to oppress their religion. If I try to talk about medical benefits to being intact, suddenly I'm trying to take away their parental rights to decide how their baby's penis should look or force them to have a son with ugly genitals...My belief is that this is the way baby boys are made by our Creator, and we shouldn't alter healthy, functional tissue."
Rabbi Michael Rovinsky sticks to his guns--he insists he is operating firmly within the laws of the states where he performs both bris milah and circumcision, including Texas. He knows his Jewish clients are coming to him to fulfill the Jewish people's covenant with God, and the non-Jews have equally strong, though perhaps different, motivations. For him, the belief that his technique reduces pain constitutes his mission to bring a humane Judaic principle to a widely practiced (if controversial) procedure.
And it's also his ticket to move back to Dallas and make a living from his work. For the rabbi with the beeper, Web site, 800 number, and customized license plate that reads MOHEL, the fulfillment of both goals means getting his name and his face out there.
He stands beside the operating table in his parents' dining room as cousin Bernie crouches over the video-camera eyepiece. He moves forward, then back; the two of them are trying to find the best location for him to stand during the making of the educational-promotional video.
"I want you to shoot close enough that you can see the procedure," Rovinsky tells Bernie, "but not so close that you can't see me.
