What Is The Spiritual Meaning Of Circumcision?

This is a question we received from Shlomo.

Let us look into the deeper Hebrew terminology of Brit Milah.

If we break down the word Brit, the first two letters—בר, Bet and Reish—create the word Bar. In Aramaic, Bar means “son.” In Hebrew, it also means “outside” or “wild,” as in the phrase Esev Bar (עשב בר), a wild grass that grows naturally in the open fields without human cultivation.

When we look at the word Bri (ברי) in Aramaic, it signifies “my son.” When we add the final letter, Tav (ת)—which carries the numerical value of 400 and represents the finality of creation—the word Brit transforms to mean: “My son in the matrix of space and time.”

The second word, Milah (מילה), translates directly to “word,” but it also means “cutting.” The two stem letters מל, Mem and Lamed, carry this same meaning.

In our physical reality, our skin acts as our boundary. It is the border that marks us as separate, isolated entities from the rest of the universe. In Hebrew, the word for skin is Or (עוֹר), which shares its root and sound with blindness (Iver—עִוֵּר). The physical skin is a spiritual “blind spot”—a veil of duality that makes us blind to our true nature, tricking us into believing we are completely independent of our Source. The brit connects to the aspect of the male within us, zachar (זכר) in Hebrew—the one who remembers the source, the being, the tree of life, the temple.

In the procedure of the Brit Milah, the foreskin is cut and removed. By removing this physical layer of blindness, the veil of duality is pierced, and a simple reality becomes visible: you are not a separate entity, but an expression of a Divine Thought.

Brit Milah thus reveals a profound secret: “My son, in the matrix of space and time, is a word.” A human being naturally tends to see himself as an independent, isolated entity with his own body, achievements, and life. But man is an expression of the Divine Word. Think of a spoken sentence: a period marks the end of a thought. Similarly, at the physical edge of the man’s body—perceived as linear in this world—comes a physical mark that says: Your appearance here in space and time is an expression of Divine Speech. It is a circular mark, reminding you that although you appear in finite space and time, your essence is an expression of eternity.

Because Brit also means “covenant,” Brit Milah is the Covenant of the Word. Whatever you experience in this spacetime reality is not random—it is the manifestation of a Divine Thought appearing here. Just as a spoken word suddenly appears from silence, a human being appears here (Po) as an expression of what is happening there (Sham—in the Source, the Temple, the Tree of Being).

What a man perceives as his absolute edge—his peak achievements, his ego, his individuality—is actually an expression of divinity. The circumcision reflects this simply: you are a mirror of the Higher Worlds. You are created “in the image of God” (B’tzelem Elohim), a physical structure reflecting a spiritual blueprint, traditionally mirrored in the 248 spiritual channels and physical limbs developing in the womb. This entire physical expression belongs to the Divine, and its permanent signature in this world is the Brit Milah.

Man is the living expression of the Divine in this world.

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