I’m a Rabbi With a Tattoo
By: Rabbi Nikki Deblosi, She Her
Tags: Planet Soul, Tattoo, Spirituality, Judaism, Body Image

I’m a Rabbi With a Tattoo

One reading of the Bible contends that we are engraved on God’s hand. How could tattoos be against our faith?

Photo: da-kuk/Getty Images

Jews who don’t follow Jewish law or custom have zero qualms about criticizing my tattoos, whether or not they know I’m an ordained rabbi. A person who was literally eating pork ribs pointed to my arm and said, “Isn’t that technically not allowed?”

Sure, it’s technically not allowed, depending on your definition of “technically” (and, for that matter, your definition of “not allowed”).

Long, complex story short and oversimplified: Modern movements of Judaism continue to condemn tattooing as a violation of a commandment in the Torah (Judaism’s central sacred text), but the consequences of that violation, at least in most non-Orthodox communities, do not amount to complete ostracization. You may still be buried in a Jewish cemetery, for example.

Many Reform Jews embrace the concept of “informed choice” when it comes to following traditional Jewish law and have no qualms about things like driving on the Sabbath (though some “Jews in the pew” do hold different standards for rabbis than for themselves). Yet the ingrained condemnation of tattoos among otherwise nonobservant “lay people” in the Jewish community reflects deep-seated cultural assumptions, often touching on issues of transgenerational trauma and memory, as millions of Jews were tattooed forcibly by the Nazis. These ingrained, understandable, and often emotional responses are not usually what people like to throw in my face when they’re expressing their disgust and disapproval; usually, they say something like “Isn’t that against Judaism?” It’s complex terrain to navigate.

I always knew I would be challenged for having them — as a rabbi, as a Jew, as a person. I never expected to hear that God might be able to relate.

My tattoos each have a motivation, and a meaning, and I studied applicable, contemporary Jewish legal writing about this Torah prohibition before embarking on them. I made an informed choice (one that was also informed, frankly, by a classist judgment against tattoos in many of the social circles I occupy that clearly lurks below the surface of most folks’ outrage). I always knew I would be challenged for having them — as a rabbi, as a Jew, as a person. I never expected to hear that God might be able to relate.

Imagine my surprise when a colleague recently translated in vernacular English a passage from an excerpt of Isaiah’s “Consolation” passages that Jews in synagogues around the world will read this Shabbat (Sabbath):

הֵ֥ן עַל־כַּפַּ֖יִם חַקֹּתִ֑יךְ חֽוֹמֹתַ֥יִךְ נֶגְדִּ֖י תָּמִֽיד:

“Look! I tattooed you on my palms; your walls are before Me always” (Isaiah 49:16).

Artwork by Sergio Luis Mesa, Three Kings Tattoo, NYC (@sergioluismesa)

Normally the word “tattooed” here is translated as “engraved,” which parallels the weekly Torah reading from Devarim (Deuteronomy) nicely, in which Moses gives a speech about how the people rebelled in fashioning the golden calf as a false idol, how he responded in anger by smashing the tablets of the covenant into sand, and how God then told Moses, “Carve out two tablets of stone, like the first […]” (Devarim 10:1), though Moses and Isaiah use two different Hebrew roots for “carve”: פ-ס-ל and ח-ק-ק, respectively.

The shades of meaning differ, but the sentiment is the same: carving, cutting into, engraving, for the purpose of preserving something for posterity and remembrance. God asks Moses to carve the lessons known widely as the Ten Commandments into stone, and to preserve those tablets in a wooden ark that will be transported with the people in perpetuity. Isaiah enjoins the people to remember their commitments by encouraging, “[…] look at the rock from which you were hewn, and at the hole of the pit from which you were dug” (Isaiah 51:1).

Digging, engraving — this is hard work. It takes time, precision, and persistence. And apparently it’s necessary, as a physical reminder of our spiritual experiences.

Throughout his speech to the people, Moses keeps reminding them (us) that, yes, the past actually happened! After enduring 400 years enslaved in Egypt, witnessing the Pharoah’s soldiers murdering infants to prevent an uprising against our taskmasters, this beleaguered people, understandably, has a hard time internalizing our freedom. We saw a sea become dry land, and food fall from the sky to feed us in a desert! But, realizing that freedom is going to become our everyday existence: that’s gonna take us a minute. What seemed like the blink of an eye, the Exodus from Egypt, will be our new reality, and the enslaved labor of carving Pharaoh’s image into stone will be replaced by a sacred contract with God that will never, ever expire, even if we eff it up (because, forgiveness! mercy!).

You’d think, after all the miracles these people have witnessed, that Moses wouldn’t need to prod, “Know this day that it was not your children, no neither experienced nor witnessed the lesson of the Eternal your God […] but that it was your eyes that saw all the great deeds that the Eternal did” (Devarim/Deuteronomy 11:2,7). Like any great teacher, Moses (through God) is going to give us many chances to internalize this radical lesson, the lesson of freedom and peoplehood. He’ll carve it into tablets, preserve it in a Torah, pass it along to our new leaders, and give us holidays on which we will remember, through embodied rituals like eating certain foods or building certain structures, precisely what happened to us. We will make memory into practice. Remembering what we saw with our eyes will not be enough; we need to carve it into stone, too.

But God is different:

הֲתִשְׁכַּ֚ח אִשָּׁה֙ עוּלָ֔הּ מֵֽרַחֵ֖ם בֶּן־בִּטְנָ֑הּ גַּם־אֵ֣לֶּה תִשְׁכַּ֔חְנָה וְאָֽנֹכִ֖י לֹ֥א אֶשְׁכָּחֵֽךְ:

“Shall a woman forget her nursling, [forsake] mercy on the child of her loins? These too shall forget, but I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15).

God can even imagine a parent who used their very body to nourish a child forgetting that same child. But God cannot imagine forgetting us.

But on God’s hands, etched there, hollowed out, a space for us.

God has us tattooed on the palm of God’s hands.

I didn’t get a tattoo to be like God. That would be a ridiculous and facetious argument. And I’m not saying getting a tattoo is “a Jewish thing to do,” either. I made informed choices, I stand by my choices. But I totally dig the notion that God has tattooed us, and it has nothing to do with aesthetics or the difficulty of remembering because that’s not what God’s tattoo is for.

God has tattooed, engraved, hewn us on the palms of God’s hands because God loves us enough to make space in God’s body (metaphorical, but metaphors matter).

“Look! I engraved you on my palms; your walls are before Me always” (Isaiah 49:16). I engraved. I tattooed. I hollowed out a space for you.

Sounds like a womb to me.

God has our walls in mind, in sight: the words of our hands, those tools we use to take action in the world, in imitation of a Creator who asks us to be a partner. But on God’s hands, etched there, hollowed out, a space for us.

As for me, when I look at my tattoos, I am reminded of the spaces in which I was nurtured. I am reminded of safety and protection and love. And I am reminded, too, of the narrowness of some of those metaphorical wombs. I think about the verse that midwives, according to Jewish folk custom, recite in the laboring room: “From the narrow place I called out to the Eternal; [God] answered me with the Eternal wide expanse” (Tehillim/Psalms 118:5).

God’s tattoo is a womb, a hollow in the body that accepts us and the “ink” with which we write: our deeds, our actions. A place for past to grow into future and vice versa, where memory is assured because it is both intellectual and emotional, spiritual and embodied. It’s nice to know it’s there.