Jewish mom proposes replacing bris with naming ceremony

Article here. Excerpt:

'Rebecca Wald's father had to perform circumcisions during his medical training. It was awful. Her husband, also a physician, wasn't a fan of the procedure either. He understood the medical complications. So when the Walds' son was born in 2005, the family decided not to circumcise the newborn. But they are Jewish.

“My husband and I are Jewish, but we couldn't see putting our newborn through the trauma and exposing him to the complications,” Wald explains. “Every circumcision has complications, by the way, because of the lifelong damage it does to the organ.”

The bris, however, is a Jewish tradition dating back thousands of years, to Abraham, the biblical patriarch of Judaism. Instead of having a mohel slice off the 8-day-old's foreskin, Wald urges Jewish families to consider throwing a naming ceremony called a brit shalom. “Jewish families who don't want to circumcise often want to keep the affirming aspects of the bris while skipping the pain and damage of the procedure,” Wald says. “This is what brit shalom is all about.”'