If not for Adam's sin, all mankind would have had the status of Israel. . . To some degree, circumcision restored Abraham and his descendants to the status of Adam before his sin.
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Handbook of Jewish Thought, p. 39, 47.
The phallus is the "tree of knowledge" grafted onto a formerly perfect human body (that was non-gendered). The grafting of the phallus onto the rootstock of the Tree of Life (Adam's perfect body) created the desecration that led to the Fall of mankind.
Ritual emasculation, circumcision, pictures, ritually, a return to the original rootstock that is the non-genital, non-gendered, human body.
Therefore, as stated by Rabbi Kaplan, circumcision emblematically returns the Jewish body to the state of humanity prior to the desecration that is the grafting of the phallus (the tree of knowledge, and thus death) onto the perfect rootstock of the Tree of Life: Adam's pre-desecration (pre-Gen. 2:21) body.
Since the desecration of Adam's body was hidden in the text of the Torah, it wasn't until a "shoot" or a "tender plant" grew out of the very stump of the human race apart from sexual propagation that there was any inkling that a desecration took place in Genesis 2:21.
The fact of the asexual arrival of a Jewish male who had to
open the womb of the stump of the human race (the female body) apart from the services of the phallic tree or its seed allowed Jewish sages to make sense of all the agricultural metaphors strewn throughout the messianic passages of Isaiah.
Isaiah chapter 11 and 53 alone point out that the death, sin, and suffering associated with the desecration of the human genome through the advent of the phallus, the tree of knowledge, will be undone with the arrival of the Messiah who will be a "sucker" or "basal shoot" growing miraculously (asexually) out of the stump of Jesse, a Jewish maiden, in the line of Jesse.
John
In a very general Judeo/Christian sense, Messiah is the man who undoes what Adam did when he first sinned in a manner that brought about the expulsion from Eden (where there was no death, disease, or want). In this general sense, Messiah is a sort of second Adam, who, rather than sinning in a manner that causes the evil inclination, and death, and disease, instead reverses the very act or sin that brought these menaces upon the human race.
In the deepest psychic caverns of Jewish thought nothing is so well known, if hidden, than the fact that the phallus is the flesh whose grafting onto the pure and perfect rootstock (Adam's pre-sin body) caused all the disease, evil, and death, that contaminate this world.
Thus, we shouldn't think it strange in the least that the foundational act that symbolizes being a Jew, or as Rabbi Hirsch says, entering into the Jewish mission in the world, is bleeding (symbolically removing) the very flesh, whose grafting onto a formerly sinless and perfect body (worthy of living in Eden) creates the original sin, and thus the Fall of mankind into the realm of the evil inclination.
No prophet so clearly prophesies the nature and essence of the arrival of Messiah as does the prophet Isaiah.
He cries that no one will receive his and his fellow prophets prophesy of the arrival of Messiah. "Who has believed our report!"
For Messiah shall sprout up before the Lord as a basal shoot grows out of the original rootstock of Adam.
Isaiah's agricultural analogy is miraculous. Too perfect. Adam allows sinful flesh, the phallus and testes, to be grafted onto a perfect body, such that the phallus becomes the tree and every one of Adam's post desecration offspring become the fruit of that sinful tree, grafted, as it was, and were, onto the perfect rootstock created by God.
And yet, as any good gardener knows, when the rootstook feels threatened, it can sometimes ignore the sexual reproductive habits of the tree grafted onto its rootstock and send a shoot, a basal sprout, out of the stump of Jesse, through asexual mechanisms, virgin propagation, in order to begin again what was conceived in the mind of God from the very beginning.
Messiah is not just another man grown out of the sinful flesh grafted onto the rootstock of the first Adam. Messiah is the second Adam, the true Son of the first Adam, as that Son was conceived to be propagated prior to the desecration that takes place in Genesis 2:21 when the false flesh is grafted on to grow a species of sinners in the very Garden of God.
Messiah is not part of that sinful species grafted onto God's original rootstock. Messiah is a shoot shooting out of the stump of that stock proclaiming to all the world the nature of the desecration and sin through which all men and women, save one, Jesus of Nazareth, are conceived and then born of the sinful tree grafted onto the very rootstock of God, the pre-sin body of Adam, in the very Garden of God.
Every iota of Jewish thought and scripture screams out to the world to open their eyes and see that the Salvation of Messiah has come into the world. He was propagated asexually, as the true Son of Adam, as a sprout from the rootstock of God. He was in the body of Adam, in Adam's roots, before the grafting on of the flesh that is the father of all sinners.
Everyone who recognizes Jesus as Adam, as the second Adam, is part and parcel of the new creation grown out of the very flesh that was grafted onto the rootstock of God to steal God's vineyard from him. Any person who takes part in the stealing of God's vineyard, by glorying in their sinful flesh, as though that sinful flesh can appease God for the theft of his vineyard, by performing fleshly mitzvot, righteous acts performed through the sinful flesh, as if God will look the other way concerning the fact that the very flesh performing the mitzvot is the sign of the desecration that is the theft of God's vineyard, these sort will receive what they richly deserve.
John
