Skin in the Game: Man Gets Circumcised

LIFESTYLE

Truth and Circumstances

By Matt Pegas · May 18, 2026 · 8 min read

Since beginning conversion classes, my girlfriend encouraged a hope that I’d somehow be able to sidestep the most ancient requirement of Judaism. But as soon as I read in the Book of Genesis that Abraham was ninety-nine years old when he was circumcised of the flesh of his foreskin, I knew I was cooked. If Abraham had to do it at 99, then surely, I would have to at 31.

Although even the most progressive Reform rabbis encourage the covenantal snip, her Conservative rabbi—my future sponsor—considered it anachronistic for converting adults. Or so she’d been told. This confirmed something about Judaism that she’d been trying to impress upon me: that one could define their own level of observance, that it was about interpretation and asking questions, wrestling with G-d rather than following him blindly.

But when I finally met with my sponsoring rabbi a few weeks after reading Genesis, I wasn’t surprised to learn that his rumored laxity was the result of a particularly fateful case of broken telephone. He was deeply sympathetic, of course, because how could you not be? My situation was the type he’d cite as data to the Conservative Rabbinic Assembly: in an increasingly uncut America, it could significantly hurt conversion rates. But for now, and for the foreseeable future, circumcision was very much part of the deal.

I don’t know how his relative openness got spun into a report of his wholesale rejection of the requirement, but I do know that without this misunderstanding I never would have started down the conversion path. My girlfriend herself had agreed that if circumcision was a requirement, I should not do it. But now I was months in and fully in the dance. At every step, Judaism proved capable of meeting my spiritual needs and existential doubts: I was hooked. My calculus had shifted. I couldn’t go back.

Like most circumcision adventures, my journey started on a bridge overlooking the freeway in Encino, on shrooms. I orbited Judaism for years, living in the San Fernando Valley for eight, in a relationship with a Jewish woman for seven. When we talked about marriage and children, it was clear our children would be raised Jewish, but that my own conversion was encouraged but optional.

I’d had Shabbat dinner weekly since the pandemic. I stopped going to mass during whatever chapter of the Catholic church’s sex abuse scandal transpired in late 2018. But still, converting to Judaism felt forced. That day on the bridge, I experienced something singular: I loved everyone speeding beneath me in their separate metallic bubbles, and I felt profoundly lucky that I got to be one of them five days a week. I got to live and that was enough. I could move through life with as much doubt and uncertainty as I needed, but my destination—the destination of all of us—on a higher plane was inevitable. For just a second I felt truly at home in the world.

It was less this experience itself than integrating it that pointed me toward Judaism. I didn’t want to leave the bridge. The feeling of connectedness started to recede and I felt sad. During the mushroom trip, I’d worn a Star of David that my friend gave me as a kind of grounding talisman.

Other religions centered on the attempt to recreate the luminousness I’d just experienced—that feeling of finally having the answer—through various forms of ritual or meditation. Though I thought I’d just gotten some small taste of it, I knew I’d never really get “the answer” at least not until I died, and could see the weakness and danger of any system claiming to have it. Maybe a higher dose or intensive meditation practice could allow me to have that feeling of enlightenment for longer, but that was quite different than understanding it in an intellectual way, and certainly different than it being applicable to life. Judaism is the religion of “no one can see my face and live”, and G-d’s unsayable name, emphasizing the possibility of experiencing the Divine, while meticulously avoiding oversimplifying, anthropomorphizing, or otherwise making it too easily accessible. What it had instead was structure, and a strong emphasis on living here and now.

Maybe it was the boost in neuroplasticity from the shrooms, or maybe the time had just finally come, but I decided right then and there, Magen David in hand, that I would convert to Judaism. I’d make the open space in the middle of the star the center of my life. I’d stop trying to confront it directly in the manner of the occult and psychedelics.

With such a deeply felt origin, but a pretty deep aversion to being circumcised as well, you would think my rabbi’s ultimate affirmation of the requirement would have been experienced as a dire predicament, but it was not. Much more strangely, I found myself exhilarated. Of course I’d do it, and I was grateful for the fact it wasn’t negotiable. I thought back to reading Genesis, and of Abraham circumcising himself, and realized that I’d known my fate was sealed in that moment not only because the commandment was clear in a way such that no self-respecting rabbi would dispense with it, but because of something I didn’t quite admit to myself at the time: I wanted to be circumcised.

This is hardly rare for the uncut in America, and maybe at a younger age I’d had some self-consciousness, but by my early twenties, never having experienced any of the health and hygiene issues that afflict some foreskin-havers, I didn’t think twice about it. I fancied myself euro-coded and chic. The reasons I now, solidly into maturity, wanted to be circumcised were entirely religious. I wanted to be Jewish, and I didn’t want to be an uncircumcised Jew who was let in on a fluke. In the modern American context at least, how many other people could say they’d done something like this for G-d?

Did I really want to do this? The question recurred as the date of my procedure approached. My girlfriend flatly told me I should not. I never really wavered, but that didn’t mean I liked thinking about it. I wasn’t sure if this was an unhealthy cognitive dissonance, or just what anyone in my position would feel.

This dissonance led right up to me laying in a gurney, waiting to be wheeled into the surgery room, and the whole thing still not feeling real. The doctor was late, but the anaesthesiologist had talked me through roughly what to expect. I’d declined his offer to use my phone while I waited, and instead sat with my own thoughts which mostly consisted of: is it too late to turn back if I already paid my copay?

I hate being in hospitals, and though this one was smack in the middle of Ventura Boulevard’s cluster of bougie cosmetic clinics, it was sterile and gray-beige in a way that reliably triggers a sense of bodily decline and personal irrelevance. Details of my neighbors in the holding areas procedures drifted in from beyond my curtain partition.“Glamourous” by Fergie played on the radio and I almost teared up. Clearly, I was a little more high-strung than I’d realized. I looked at the bracelet listing my details including age: 31. Even with the best of luck and health, my life was about a third over. I had a funny feeling that I was both repeating my birth and rehearsing my death.

The doctor finally showed up, kippah in hand, ready to pray and operate both. Just as circumcision doesn’t require a rabbi, it doesn’t require a minyan—the quorum of 10 Jewish adults necessary for communal worship—but nevertheless when I got back from a final pee break, he’d gathered as many Jews as he could find in the building. One tattooed, millennial nurse who assured me she’d been Bat-Mitzvah’d and everything and an older, maternal one with a Brooklyn accent. I think the doctor just knew that he would feel more comfortable, and that the overall experience would be better if there were more of us: a worthy Jewish instinct.

The anesthesiologist wheeled me in, and they started to strap me up. I must have seemed scared because he told me not to worry and squeezed my hand. The Jews started to pray in Hebrew: I was deeply moved and petrified. “Let’s try this,” the anaesthesiologist said “what’s your favorite place in the world?” The happy-place trick. My mind could make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell, and I found peace most truly only in windows of time, not in space. “I think I just like to be home,” I said, my voice cracking. “Shut your eyes and picture yourself in your home then”, he said. I imagined myself recovering in my bed in a few hours, and it was, in fact, a comfort.

"Blessed are You, L-rd our G-d, King of the universe,” the doctor continued in English, “who has sanctified us with his commandments, and commanded us to circumcise converts and to draw the blood of the covenant from them.”

How many mainstream religious rituals require blood anymore? One of the nurses told me my arm might feel spicy as the anesthesia started, and it did: horrible in fact, like venom was pouring into it. I thought about Sean Penn getting a lethal injection in Dead Man Walking. I thought about the bridge overlooking the highway near my house, and seeing all the cars rush under in a roar of humanity. And then I surrendered to a black, faceless void.