Home › Forums › Simchas › the importance of a bris NOT being on time! › Reply To: the importance of a bris NOT being on time!
Firstly, Mazal Tov on the birth of your baby boy. May you both see much nachas from him as he grows up.
I’m not up on the latest medical literature, so I don’t know if the current medical consensus is that a bris is (medically) safe if the baby is yellow or not. That aside, however, I would imagine that this scenario is very much that of terifos — in the times of Chazal, an animal was a teraifah if it had a defect that would cause it to die in less than 12 months. Nowadays, however, we see that animals with these defects DO manage to live longer. Nonetheless, the definition of a teraifah does not change — so even though an animal will live longer than 12 months, such animals are still ruled non-kosher.
Same thing here. Even though the child might be medically fit for a bris if he’s yellow, halachically, we rule that he isn’t medically fit.
All this aside, I would be shocked if any mohel did a bris on a baby that he considered to be unready for it despite the protestations of the mother or father.
The Wolf