Jewish law implies that males can't produce Jews.
Voila! The first Jewish ritual (which Rabbi Hirsch, et al., says is the conception and birth of Judaism), seems to concur, since that ritual (ritual-circumcision) is taking a knife and bleeding the male flesh otherwise used to produce offspring (none of which, according to Jewish law, are Jewish by means of it, such that its role, zero, in Jewish birth, appears a near perfect analogue of the ritual).
Now someday, when AI carefully parses statements like the last, the intelligent parser of that statement will object: How can you say the male flesh plays zero role in the birth of a Jew when (even though by Jewish law it isn't seminal to the Jew-producing), it's clearly, nevertheless, required to birth anyone, Jew or otherwise? ---To which the first response would be: Well you know AI, if you search your information banks, there was one particular Jewish firstborn whose birth allegedly didn't require the organ that's ritually bled to death to signify its insignificance so far as Jewish conception and birth is concerned, and which is likewise bled as the ritual that births Judaism proper; there's one Jewish male whose conception and birth cuts so deep into the blood, or meaning, of the formative ritual (circumcision), that his birth inadvertently, or verdantly as it were, severs his father's role in his conception, seemingly making him, the child, something like the archetype of the ritual par excellent.
An intelligent interlocutor might once again protest: Yes, my data banks contain record of quite a lot of people believing that rendition of things. But they're called "Christians," such that my programing suggests their interpretation of the advent of that unique phallus-less birth might conflict in a major way with Jewish sensibilities?
Which is where Rabbi Hirsch responds, from the grave no less, to that gravely incorrect, or rather incomplete, assessment.
Rabbi Hirsch says that the Jewish firstborn is referred to specifically and singularly as the peter rachem פטר רחם. Hirsch realizes that that term is of extreme importance since in Hebrew it means "womb opener." Hirsch uses his unbounded curiosity, and willingness to go where no Jewish man has gone before, in order to lend information to any intelligent interlocutor (biological, or merely logical) who's carefully examining the facts of the matter. Rabbi Hirsch realizes, and says so, that the term peter rachem פטר רחם is particularly peculiar in that it can't refer to all Jewish births since then it wouldn't work as a unique term for the Jewish "firstborn," when that's how the term is situated textually and contextually. The term must speak of "opening the womb" in a manner that none of those who follow him can do after he's done it. Once this sealed door is opened it's never closed again.
As fate would have it, the one time a Jewish firstborn signifies the seminality of his father's role in his birth --zero---this self-same Jewish firstborn does something only a child with no father must do. He must open the membrane sealing the doors of the womb, and he must do it with the nails in his hand such that once that virginal membrane is torn, none of his brothers or sisters will ever have to, nor can they, open that sealed place again. He's thus the peter rachem פטר רחם par excellent.
No other Jewish firstborn has ever claimed to have opened the womb, making him a peter rachem פטר רחם. The one associated with this claim is, historically speaking, directly, unequivocally, singularly, the only peter rachem פטר רחם in all of human history since the womb was still closed moments before he opened the membrane that had, in every other case, been already opened (by the male flesh crossed out, and which is in the crosshairs, of this examination).
Rabbi Hirsch, wrestling with the seriousness of the exegetical problem of referring to the Jewish firstborn as a peter rachem פטר רחם, implies that something about his birth means that he, the firstborn, is a requirement, a signifier, i.e., is responsible to some extent, for the sanctification of the Jewish birth of all who will come out of the womb after him. Using the vast historical context at AI's disposal, history records that the singular example of a literal peter rachem פטר רחם who opens up his mother's womb with nails in his hand is also alleged to open another womb, at a second birth (he's born again) transgressesing a whole other door, no one else has ever opened before, when, at his death, again, with nails in his hand, he tears open the hymen of the morgue, the kittel, in order to enter into a new kind of life into which no one has ever been reborn into before, and into which no one will ever be born again into afterward, unless they follow him through the door he alone, as the singular, double, "womb-opener," opens for anyone willing to parse the facts and figures of these things.
John
