A gift to Mayor de Blasio is how we’d describe the decision of the Second United States Circuit Court of Appeals in respect of New York’s campaign to regulate ritual circumcision. Three judges of the circuit, in an exceptionally sage opinion, essentially rebuked Mayor Bloomberg and his commissioner of mental hygiene for putting restrictions on the practice of the some religious Jews of using oral suction by the mohel to draw blood from the circumcision wound. They said the city’s restrictions might be rational but, because they are not generally applicable, must be subjected to strict scrutiny. They sent the matter back to the district court for more work.

We have opposed these restrictions from the get-go as Bloomberg nanny-statism taken to an unconstitutional extreme. Mr. Bloomberg and his mental hygiene commissioner, Dr. Thos. Farley, based their regulatory effort on a few cases of herpes, two of which were fatal and none of which can be proven to have been contracted during circumcision. Their regulations, involving getting parents to sign waivers, cast a chill over a practice that is, for those who follow it, an essential feature of a defining covenant, originally made between God and Abraham. There are Jews who would give their own lives for the freedom to keep this covenant. The idea that they should be deterred by government regulation from risking an infection is nonsensical.

It also turns out to be unconstitutional, absent a process that subjects the need for the regulation to strict scrutiny. The court didn’t decide whether the Bloomberg-Farley scheme would survive strict scrutiny. But it pointedly said that strict scrutiny would be required. That was a brushback of Mr. Bloomberg for the way he and Dr. Farley rammed their regulation through. It’s a gift to Mr. de Blasio because, during his winning campaign, he stood apart from the pack of candidates who were prepared to support Messrs. Bloomberg and Farley. We’d like to think that Mr. de Blasio’s caution reflects an understanding of the religious communities that he represented in the City Council. He would be wise to drop this regulation altogether and let the rabbis freely exercise their religion the way they have done for centuries.