Got ink?

A Columbian Catholic friend of mine, back in college, once asked me if I knew the Jewish one-line prayer that talked about God being one. I said, “Sure, that’s the Sh’ma.” “Would you be able to write it out in Hebrew?” “Why?” “My brother wants the text tattooed around his arm.”

Woah. First thing that comes to mind: some Catholics chant the Sh’ma? And after a bit more thought: something made me a little uncomfortable about helping to inscribe on her brother the closest thing I had to a religious creed. Tattoos in general made me uncomfortable. Jewish tattoos?

And yet, this is something more and more common in our community. If you’ve seen the most recent edition of Reform Judaism, you’ll know that the movement is engaging this once taboo topic in full force. Some Jews choose generic tattoos of the kind that we’ll see on anyone else. Others choose religious and cultural symbols — a magen david, a verse from Torah, their Hebrew name, sometimes even their grandparent’s number originally etched in by the Nazis. I once saw the words אמת ואמונה – truth and belief, which open our prayer of redemption in our morning and evening services – permanently written on the small of the back of a student with whom I was rafting on a birthright trip. So many thoughts, many conflicting, come to mind here. Beautiful words, but was that the best place to put them?

The Torah tells us that we may not make incisions for the dead nor may we make incised marks on ourselves (Leviticus 19:28). There are other cases however, right in our Torah, of making marks on our skin. Cain has a symbol put on him by God in Genesis, so that no one will hurt him. A divinely etched tattoo? And in Ezekiel, when dreaming of the execution of all guilty in the city of Jerusalem, an executioner is told to inscribe a ת on the foreheads of all who are righteous and therefore to be saved: a tattoo of redemption.

The rabbis of the Talmud later will point out that the biblical issue with tattoos is not the scarring; it is the intent. Idolatry is their issue. For whom was the etching directed?
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It seems that the Jewish attitude on tattooing is not as clear-cut as we may have thought.

It might be more accurate to say that Judaism has strict guidelines for what we ought to do with our bodies, including our skin. Our tradition teaches that we are made in the divine image— that each one of us is a reflection of God, and holy. When we write on ourselves, we write on sacred parchment. We mark up the divine image. Therefore, when we make any permanent changes to our bodies, may we be absolutely certain that they are worthy of our true value as human beings, and worthy of God.

Perhaps the Sh’ma was a better choice than I thought.

Printed in Temple Emanu-El’s Kolaynu, Summer 2014.