So before you make a claim, have a source. You don't.
We should not pass lightly over the contiguity between the mohel’s act of drawing blood and cauterizing it, and then immediately pouring wine to apply to the child’s lips. Now we see why no blessing anticipated this cup. It was not meant to be consumed as wine at all, but was instead reserved as an oral transfusion of wine as blood for the child. . . Moreover, it is at least of interest that the cauterizing method strongly favored by medieval tradition calls on the mohel to suck the blood from the wound with his mouth [metzitzah].
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Covenant of Blood, p. 91.
But it does not explain the necessity of sucking by the mouth, a practice preserved staunchly even as late as modern times, when attempts to replace it with more antiseptic means were vigorously rejected by traditionalists. They continued to follow the normal tannaitic cauterizing procedure of sucking the wound orally, which is to say, emulating the act of drinking wine.
Ibid. p. 91.
When we see, then, the wine being reserved for the infant to drink – a mirror image, so to speak, of the blood being sucked from him at the very same time --- and when we observe also the content of the extended prayer that adds Ezekiel’s words (line 55-56): “`I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood; and I said to you: `In your blood, live’; I said to you: `In your blood, live’” (Ezek. 16:6), we cannot help but notice a certain ritual integrity centering on the symbols of blood. In short: (1) The child’s blood flows from the wound, and the mohel sucks it out. (2) He pours wine, reserving it briefly for use in the naming prayer. (3) He says a naming prayer that includes the words from Ezekiel, “`In your blood, live,’” after which he puts the wine (as blood) on the baby’s lips.
Ibid. p.93
The practice reported by Kohen Tzedek turns up again in a medieval work that lists differences in custom between Jews in Babylonia and Jews in the Land of Israel. There we see that using a blood-water mixture was known to be a typically Babylonian practice. We get further information as well: "In Babylonia, they circumcise over water, and put it on their faces. In the Land of Israel, the circumcise over earth." And where on their faces did these young men apply the blood? Parallel texts in other medieval collections of geonic responsa tell us precisely--- "on their mouths." Just as the newly circumcised child had wine representing blood put on his mouth, so the older boys applied the child's actual blood (mixed with water) to theirs.
Ibid. p. 105.
Medieval Jews dunked the severed foreskin in a bowl of spiced water during circumcision, then washed their hands and faces in the bloody liquid (Trachtenberg 1939). Sometimes the infant's blood directly dripped into a basin of perfumed water for adolescent boys to rinse their hands, and faces, and mouths (Hoffman 1996: 103-105). In addition to evoking the ancient temple sacrifices, argues Hoffman, these ablutions expand the ritual focus beyond the child to encompass the entire community in covenantal renewal. . . During the annual Passover seder, Jews spill a drop of red wine to somberly recall the spilt blood of the Egyptians. Wine also symbolizes blood during the circumcision ceremony (Goldberger 1991: chap. 4; Hoffman 1996). The mohel raises a goblet and recites the standard blessing over wine (kiddush). But no sip immediately follows. Why the peculiar delay, which threatens to waste a ritual utterance of God's name? Because, answers Hoffman (1996:91), the wine is blessed as wine but quaffed as blood. . . The first person to sip during the circumcision ceremony is the infant. After the mohel performs metzitzah, he traditionally spits the child's blood into a goblet of wine or sloshes the blood and wine in his mouth and expectorates into a cup. Then the mohel dips his finger and gives the child a taste. The boy's parents next take a sip, followed by the mohel. . . Today, most Jews sip only wine. But they once drank blood. . . Sipping the circumcision wine as wine rather than blood also dilutes the symbolic potency of the rite. The Torah , to repeat, firmly prohibits the consumption of blood, one of the premier laws incumbent on all of humanity and not just Jews. Yet paramount ritual remembrance of the covenant, with all its promise of progeny, requires participants to violate this decree by drinking a child's "life force." To abandon this complex morality, regardless of whether or not one endorses it, is to deny the ceremony the very power that has enabled it to endure.
Eric Kline Silverman, From Abraham to America: A History of Jewish Circumcision, p. 138.
Silverman's last few statements are profound. How ironic that Jews drain circumcision blood of its lifeblood. The blood of circumcision, which is the very lifeblood of Jewish ritual, and thus reality, is drained of its symbolic import, its lifeblood, so that the ritual can become one more mitzvah slavishly practiced as though slavish obedience to the harsh law of the flesh ---that enslaves the old man ---- is made more real than circumcision blood, which, when properly understood, i.e., when not drained of its symbolic lifeblood, frees man from his slavery to law and allows him to ascend to the divine freedom of right action and right motivation.
Drinking blood is against the law. But since circumcision is the birth of the spirit, which is never under the law, since it's the spirit of the law (the law is its slave), whatever the spirit does informs and commands the law. There is no salvation without the ingestion of blood. Jesus said unless a man drinks the blood of circumcision he will not enter the kingdom of God. But a man cannot, and will not, drink circumcision blood unless, and until, he comes to believe that circumcision can free him from the slavery he incurred by means of the means of his first birth, rather his first conception, through the organ sacrificed to provide the blood for his new birth, his becoming born-again.
Circumcision blood is the conception of the essence of a Jew. The lifeblood of the ritual, when properly understood, allows us to conceive the spirit of Judaism.
John
