When the Lord lays down the sign of the covenant, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 17:10 catches a case the Hebrew leaves implicit. Every male among you shall be circumcised — though he have not a father to circumcise him.
That last clause is the Targum's halakhic fingerprint. The paraphrast is already worrying about the boy whose father has died before the eighth day. Or the boy whose father has fled. Or the boy whose mother is now a widow with no one to fulfill the obligation. The commandment does not pause for any of those situations. If a Jewish boy has no father to cut the covenant into his skin, a father-substitute must be found, and the covenant proceeds.
The Maggid pauses on this. A covenant that depends on a biological father would have been a covenant designed to leak. People die. Families break. Generations scatter in exiles. The Targum's small insertion hardens the circle: the covenant is bigger than any one household's tragedy (Genesis 17:10). If the father is missing, the community steps in. If the lineage is fractured, the community steps in. The boy is still covenanted.
This is quietly one of the most important sentences in Pseudo-Jonathan. It protects the fatherless. It says: our deepest sign of belonging will not be suspended because of your losses. It will be carried out for you, by those who stand where your father would have stood. In Jewish law, the covenant catches the orphan before he even knows he has fallen.