The First Mohel

Dr. Robert Worthington-Kirsch isn’t your ordinary phlebologist. He can diagnose and treat your varicose veins.

He can read your x-rays, CT scans, MRIs, and ultrasounds. He can tell you precisely what’s wrong with your aging or ailing blood vessels, and he can tell you how to fix them.

There’s something more: Dr. Worthington-Kirsch is the only Messianic Jewish mohel in existence. Mohels are very important. There’s no Judaism—Messianic or otherwise—without mohels.

Mohels—or if your heritage favors the Yiddish pronunciation, “moyels”—have the mostly invisible job of performing ritual circumcision on male Jewish infants. They aren’t conferred the rock-star status accorded to the great rabbis and sages of old who interpreted the Torah for their generations, but without mohels, without circumcision, Judaism as a way of life has no way to move from past to future.

Undergoing Brit Milah—the specific practice of Jewish ritual circumcision—is what technically brings a Jewish male into the Abrahamic covenant. It’s an integral part of Jewish experience and identity.

A person who has undergone Brit Milah is Jewish, obligated to all the demands of Jewish law. It’s not so much a rite of passage as it is a promise: A family circumcising their child understands that they are irrevocably inducting him into the thought world and lifestyle of Judaism, a way of life that can never truly be left behind.


First Fruits of Zion