This past week we studied Parashat Re’eh—the Torah portion known as Re’eh, which literally means, “See!” as in Moses telling the Israelites to see the choice that has been presented before them between blessing and curse.
The parashah (Torah portion) picks up in the middle of a speech Moses is delivering to the Israelites on the eve of their crossing into the promised land without him. (The final book of the Torah, Devarim, or Deuteronomy, consists almost exclusively of Moses’ final speech to the Israelites.)
After Moses lays out this stark choice before the Israelites, he proceeds to lay out the series of laws and practices they are to follow once they enter the Promised Land that will help facilitate and manifest this blessing.
The particular law that he mentioned that we studied this past Shabbat was as follows: “You are children of Adonai your God. You shall not gash yourselves or make baldness in the front of your heads because of the dead” (Deuteronomy 14:1).
Now, to even make sense of this law—why would we need to be told not to gash ourselves or make “baldness on the front of our heads”?—one needs to know some historical context. As scholar Jefferey Tigay observes, “Gashing the flesh until the blood runs and removing hair are known as mourning rites the world over. They were practiced by Israel’s neighbors and by some Israelites… Some scholars think that they were believed to have an effect on the ghost of the dead person, either as offerings of blood and hair to strengthen the ghost in the nether world or to assuage the ghosts’s jealousy of the living by showing it how grief-stricken they are. These rites could also be acts of self-punishment expressing feelings of guilt, which are often experienced by survivors after a death.”
So there was a context to which the Mosaic law was reacting. More importantly to my mind, however, is the underlying message implied by the connection that as “children of Adonai [our] God” we are not to mutilate ourselves even in response to the grievous death of a loved one.
There are two important Jewish implications of this teaching. One is how central a tenet the affirmation of life is in Jewish tradition. Even when we are absolutely wrecked by the loss of a loved one, we are directed towards a structured and dedicated but ultimately gentle form of mourning, consisting of shiva (the first seven days), shloshim (the first 30), and up until the first yahrtzeit (anniversary of the passing), depending on the relation to the deceased. As Rabbi Harold Kushner puts it, “We diminish the worth of the individual, bearer of the image of a single God, when we become so attached to someone else that we would harm or destroy ourselves when that person is taken from us.”
And second, I read in this the idea that God deeply cares about how we treat ourselves. It’s both an obvious and not-so-frequently-mentioned notion of Jewish theology: as “children of Adonai [our] God,” (a metaphor that exists in Jewish tradition; see, for example, the popular Avinu Malkeinu prayer of the High Holidays, which means, “Our Parent; Our Sovereign,” but which is rarely invoked) God cares whether or not we harm ourselves. Not in a judgmental way, but in a compassionate way. It is a statement, in a way, of sweetness; of the fact that our relationship to our tradition need not always be about pressure and guilt, or fire and brimstone and awe, but can also be about care and love and familial sweetness.
It’s a sentiment that is present in our tradition and can hopefully be a helpful salve as we approach the Days of Awe in this challenging time.
