By Debbie Galant

Livingston, NJ--Joshua Dylan Ringler, eight days old, doesn't know it, but he is about to become the center of an ancient ceremony that will bind him forever to the religion of his forefathers. That ritual is called a bris, and it involves a little surgery. Joshua Ringler is about to be circumcised.

This makes people tense. The Ringlers' split-level house is packed with well-wishers and an abundant platter of lox, whitefish salad and bagels is waiting downstairs in the kitchen. People are talking, laughing and making jokes about smelling salts. After all, they're about to witness surgery on a crucial part of the male anatomy.

Enter Rabbi Gerald Chirnomas, certified mohel, who strides in like the confident surgeon in some television medical drama, or perhaps a high-powered Hollywood director walking onto the set. In fact, this ceremony has something in common with both settings; it's surgery as performance art. Rabbi Chirnomas moves through the crowd, parting the sea of anxious spectators and snapping orders. Photographers are told where to stand, when they can shoot and where they should aim. Godparents are summoned, medical supplies checked.

Before the hour is through, Rabbi Chirnomas will have performed surgery on a card table in the middle of a crowded living room, invoked God's covenant with Abraham and reassured the Ringlers that Joshua is fine. There will be tears, but then there are always tears at a bris, just as there are always tears at a wedding. At a bris officiated by Rabbi Chirnomas, however, there will be laughter as well.

Rabbi Chirnomas, who also serves as the rabbi of a small Conservative synagogue next door to his home in Boonton, puts on a good show, which makes him one of the more popular mohels in northern and central New Jersey. "He's the mohel of choice in this part of Essex County," said Rabbi Steven Kushner of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, who estimates that Rabbi Chirnomas does 90 percent of the brises in his congregation. "He's really a fixture here."

Over his career as a mohel (pronounced moyl), Rabbi Chirnomas, 56, estimates that he has performed about 11,000 ritual circumcisions. At the Ringler bris alone, there are at least three former clients, adolescent boys who eye him warily when their parents introduce them to the rabbi. There are adults there who have witnessed his work 10 times or more.

"He's a comedian," one older woman at the Ringler bris confides to another. Her companion whispers back, "But he's good."

Rabbi Chirnomas doesn't hear them, but if he did, he would protest that he's really not trying to be funny. If his brises have their amusing moments, it's just his personality coming through. "The solemn part of it stays solemn and the non-solemn part doesn't have to be solemn," he explained. "I don't do stand-up comedy. The reality is that a lot of people are uptight at a bris. The slightest thing that might be taken as humor is grabbed on."

Take, for example, that crucial moment right before the rabbi begins to make his incision, when he turns to the baby's father and asks: "Do you give me permission to circumcise your son? Or would you rather do it yourself?"

The flabbergasted dad might as well have received an offer to fly a 747. "People find that very funny, and so they laugh. But I'm not doing it to be funny," Rabbi Chirnomas said. "The fact is that it is the father's responsibility to perform a circumcision on his son. In reality, when they call me to book me for the bris, they are in effect making me a messenger to do their bidding." Over the years, seven fathers have actually taken Rabbi Chirnomas up on his offer and, with the mohel's assistance, circumcised their own babies.

Then there is Rabbi Chirnomas's insistence that circumcision doesn't hurt. During a bris, all the time the mohel is explaining the ceremony, he repeatedly dips a rubber-gloved finger into a cup of kosher wine and lets the baby suck from it. Except when he is circumcising older, adopted babies, this is typically the only anesthetic the baby will receive and, in Rabbi Chirnomas' opinion, the only anesthetic he needs.

The most memorable part of any Rabbi Chirnomas bris is his standard disclaimer about pain. "The baby is going to cry," he tells the crowd. "And everybody assumes that the baby is crying because pain is being inflicted on him. The fact of the matter is, the foreskin of a baby of this age is relatively insensitive. And if you think in terms of pierced earlobes, most women tell me it doesn't hurt. And nowadays, many men tell me the same thing. So if you're having any sympathy pains, just relax and be calm. He's really not perceiving any pain." To prove his point, Rabbi Chirnomas will often observe that the baby is crying long before any medical instrument is near him.

In fact, Rabbi Chirnomas spends a lot of time telling people to relax. It's even part of the message on his answering machine. Before each bris, he takes the parents aside, explains the procedure and reassures them that they can call him afterward if they have any concerns. "It's a highly charged situation that I deal with," he said. "An important part of my responsibility and service to the family is to help them cope."

Another part of helping the family cope is finding enough ways to honor everybody. In Jewish tradition, one man--usually a grandfather--is selected to hold the baby during the circumcision. This person is called the sandek, but today, rather than holding the child, he sits in the honored position called Elijah's chair, closest to the card table where the bris is performed. Rabbi Chirnomas has come up with an honor for a second person, usually the other grandfather, whom he refers to as sandek two, and who gets to hold the baby during the naming ceremony after the circumcision. "It's purely for political reasons," the mohel explains. "That saves a lot of family aggravation."

The addition of sandek two isn't the only new twist in the 5,000-year-old tradition of circumcision, which began when God made Abraham the father of the Jewish people, and commanded him and all his descendants to circumcise their sons as a sign of that covenant. By tradition a bris is performed on a boy's eighth day of life, although it can be later--never earlier--if medical or scheduling reasons demand it. The thing that distinguishes a bris from a circumcision is the reciting of traditional blessings. But Rabbi Chirnomas has added a decidedly modern prayer--in which the mother asks that her son have a sense of humor, but never take himself too seriously--that was adapted from a prayer that General Douglas MacArthur wrote for his son.

Although the basics have stayed the same, a lot has changed since the time of Abraham, and Rabbi Chirnomas, who has a front-row seat onto the changing demographics of modern American Jewry, has seen it all: mixed marriages, interracial marriages, adoptions. Among the more unusual things he's been asked to do is conduct a bris during a ceremony where a baby was also going to be baptized. "That I refuse to do," he said. Modern Jews have wandered so far from tradition that Rabbi Chirnomas has had to add a sentence to his brochures reminding parents that it is inappropriate to serve meat and dairy products together at such a religious occasion. But the idea of mixing a bris and a baptism really bothers him. "You can't have the baptism at the same time. That simply negates the purpose of the bris. And then what's the point?" the rabbi asks. Then, softening, he answers his own question. The point, of course, is to satisfy two sets of grandparents.

Modern mohels also have to battle a modern medical controversy over whether infants should be circumcised and an increasingly voiced aversion to circumcising a baby in such a public way. "Every once in a while, I hear that it's barbaric, or that it's a mutilation. I shut it off," said Rabbi Chirnomas. "There's nothing mutilating about it, and the fact is that it does have a side benefit about it." The mohel dates resistance to circumcision to a 1971 statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics saying that routine circumcision was not necessary. a current position paper stops short of recommending it, but notes that the procedure may prevent urinary tract infections, cancer of the penis and cervical cancer in sexual partners.

Many people are also apprehensive about the idea of having a mohel do a circumcision in a home, rather than having a doctor do it in a hospital. Rabbi Chirnomas, like al mohels, argues that it's actually safer in the home. For one thing, mohels do many more circumcisions than obstetricians, who are the doctors who usually perform them. Rabbi Chirnomas also argues that homes, unlike hospitals, are not subject to staph infections.

Rabbi Chirnomas trained to become a mohel in 1959, studying for four months under the two chief mohels at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. He was then observed and certified by the hospital's head of pediatrics. Although he planned to be a pulpit rabbi and lead a congregation, he sought extra training as both a mohel and a shochet (ritual slaughterer) in order "to be able to perform any mitzvah."--good deed--"that came my way." He found, however, that he could not do the slaughtering. After leading synagogues in Canada and in Maine, he moved to Boonton in 1971, intending to abandon the rabbinate and become an optometrist. While studying optometry he accepted a rabbinical position to support himself and began doing brises on the side. He discovered he did not want to give up the pulpit after all and gave up optometry instead; his mohel practice, meanwhile, grew.

Despite Rabbi Chirnomas's popularity, there are some people who find his take-charge manner too rigid or his requirements for preparing for the bris too onerous. But not Rabbi Alan Silverstein of Agudath Israel synagogue in Caldwell, who is also the current president of the International Rabbinical Assembly, the official body of Conservative rabbis in the United States. Rabbi Silverstein, who has observed Rabbi Chirnomas more than 100 times, believes the mohel is simply being a professional. He has seen brises by other practitioners where there is less preparation, where the surgery takes longer or where the baby is allowed to cry endlessly with no comment. They can be really unpleasant. "Rabbi Chirnomas is totally in control," he said. "And I like that."