The Garden Tattoo (Thoughts on a Halakhic Prohibition)
In another life, between the thick oaks and repurposed warehouses of Brattleboro, Vermont, I saw a woman with a garden growing from her feet. In every particular she was dressed like me, or how I would have dressed had I not been confined to my compost-streaked farm clothes: the spaghetti-strap tank top and floppy flannel of a certain age and era, artfully ragged jean shorts, plastic glasses perched firmly on a pierced nose. And sprouting from the intersection between the top of her sandals and the round doorknob of her ankle-bones, twining up and around her two calves, she had planted a garden in blue ink. There was a carpet of helter-skelter grass, each blade identifiable; there were dandelions and purslane and sweet peas and what might have been a rabbit peering through the foliage.
For many years I carried that tattoo with me. I wondered what it must be like to transform your body into a canvas: for once in your life, to become the background on which something else takes shape. I thought about living things — wildflowers and vegetables and birds and flames — inscribed on the skin, at once static and dynamic, imbued like butterflies pinned behind glass with the ghost of their own motion. I imagined writing the story of my life on my limbs, instantly legible to others — signs and symbols to the world. This is who I am; who I have been; who I hope to be. I liked the permanence of it, assigning weight, concreteness, eternity to something as fleeting as memory.
So I weighed a few tattoos over the years: a kale plant, a quill pen mid-scribble, a hamsa for blessing, a line of poetry, a map of the US with my routes traced, an ankle-garden of snails and dandelions. Then I became religious, and day by day affirmed my fidelity to Jewish law, and the newfound force of the commandment against tattooing reached out and closed that door in the imagination.
The commandment itself has two sources in the Torah. The first is Vayikra (Leviticus) 19:28:
“You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the LORD…”*
(Incidentally, this verse provides the source for the Hebrew word for “tattoo”: קעקוע, ka’akua, a variation on “marks” in the verse. As with so many words in the Hebrew language, that time-traveling mashup of a tongue with its roots in the holy books and the study hall, the choice of word itself is a commentary on the verse: if we had any doubt that the original verse refers to something resembling our modern tattoo, the use of the term boldly deigns to settle the question for us.)
The second source, which the essential commentator Rashi understands as a restatement of the first, is found in Devarim (Deuteronomy) 14:1:
“You are children of the LORD your God. You shall not gash yourselves or shave the front of your heads because of the dead…”
When I read these verses, I am struck by the sheer unfamiliarity of the act — the infinite difference between this occult gashing and incising, marked by the heavy presence of the dead, and the defanged whirr of an electric needle wielded by an artist. Aesthetically, sociologically, the two kinds of tattoo could not feel more different: one belongs to the idolatrous and the pagan, to a cosmos of sacrificial altars and false gods demanding blood, while the other can (and does) comfortably exist in the gentle ecosystem of artisan espresso and AirBnB and sensitivity.
I am, of course, not the only person through the ages to react to the verses this way. In the Mishneh Torah, his monumental summary of and commentary on Jewish law, the Rambam (Maimonides) writes:
“The “incised marks” against which it is spoken of in the Torah is that one must not make a gash in one’s flesh and fill in the gash with paint, or ink, or any other dyes which inscribe. This was an idolatrous custom, to inscribe themselves to idolatry — that is, that every one of them is a sold slave to it, and indentured in its service.” (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Avodah Zarah, 12:11)
Although the Rambam describes a process well-known to the contemporary tattoo artist — a cut in the skin filled with dyes of all kinds — he ties the commandment to a custom of ages and societies no longer extant, as his use of the past tense indicates. We refrain from this custom even though it is no longer practiced, because the need to differentiate ourselves from the idolaters is at the very core of our religious life; the idolaters may fade away, but resistance to idolatry is permanent. In this way, like a great many other commentators on the verses (the Aderet Eliyahu and the Malbim, to name two), the Rambam understands the beginning of the verse in light of the end. When the verse concludes “I am the LORD,” it adds not only authority but context to the commandment: אני ה’ ולא אחר — I am the LORD, not the gods of the idolaters.
The simpler, more minimalistic way of interpreting this reading is as a more extreme version of the prohibition on idolaters’ wine or bread. (Rashi takes up this interpretation, ascribing the prohibition to darchei Emori, “the ways of the heathens,” as does the Sefer haChinuch.) In this interpretation, there may be nothing inherently objectionable about this custom, except that it is tied inextricably and identifiably to the daily social practices of idolaters. We do not do this, because — in this as in all things — we want to make it clear that we are not like them, that we do not perform their customs, that we belong to a different society with a different set of moral axioms. When read thus, the strangeness of the prohibition seems only to heighten: why should I forbid an act on the basis of a societal conflict that no longer exists? If the problem is not the act itself but the social context from which it springs, well, that social context has disappeared. I do not live amongst idol-worshipping fanatics or sacrificial cults; I live amongst vegans, pursuers of justice, people who by their own admission believe in no god but peace, love, and kindness.
Or, taking seriously the second half of the Rambam’s explanation, we can ascribe not only religious form but religious content to the prohibition. The practices of idolatry are worth resisting not only because they were performed by idolaters once, but because they have a fundamental ring of idolatry about them: “every one of them is a sold slave to [the idol], and indentured in its service.” When I brand myself, I affirm that I belong to another entity — that I have been bought, sold, paid for. One cannot help but recall the bondsman who chooses lifelong slavery, as cited in Shemot (Exodus) 21: “He shall be brought to the door or the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall then remain his slave for life.”
When I mutilate my body, or allow my body to be mutilated, in the name of something else, I have implicitly or explicitly transformed myself into a slave of that something-else. And this transformation is not only a social marker of servitude; it has innate significance. I have sacrificed something of myself, my own bodily integrity, my own desire for self-preservation, and yielded it up to — what? To an external force. To an idol.
The terms of this bondage are open-ended. That is, like the slave and the awl, I have taken something fleeting and made it permanent; I have sworn my allegiance not temporarily, not in a way that allows me to think and feel and choose otherwise, but in a way that will persist even after I die until my flesh decays. The very magic of the tattoo — its ability to ascribe eternity to the ephemeral, stasis to the dynamic, to take the choices and experiences of a moment and preserve them for all time — is its cruelty, its basic anti-humanity. There is no eternity but God; throughout my own, smaller-scale life, there is nothing consistent but my own soul. Circumstances pass, as do memories. Throughout it all I stay myself, free, ever-changing.
Perhaps this is the force of the recurring connection between tattoos and the dead, another connection that is not only a sociological fact but has real, innate content: When I tattoo myself, whether for the dead or for anything else, I make the impermanent permanent by force. I affirm immortality where there should be mortality, and in doing so I infringe not only on God’s lasting power but my own. God’s lasting power, because nothing but God is everlasting; my power, because the memories or passions or allegiances I ink on my skin should be dispensable, should be allowed to pass by in their time, and they are not. It may be no accident that the prohibition against tattoos comes only a verse or two before the prohibition on necromancy, because there is something similar between the two motions: an attempt to set dynamic things, things that should come and go through the world, in stifling amber.
Of course, this explanation cannot help but bring to mind that other form of physical mutilation in the service of something greater: circumcision. The commentator Seforno states the comparison outright, claiming that tattooing is prohibited in order to preserve the uniqueness of circumcision: “one should put no sign upon one’s body except for the sign of the Covenant.” The problem is not slavery per se, but slavery to two masters.
Call it apologetics; call it what you will — but I believe, I have to believe, that there is a difference between these masters. God is the God who created man in His image, the God of the Exodus from Egypt, the God who mandates the overturned hierarchies and proclaimed liberty of the sabbatical and jubilee years, and each of these descriptors is a different way of saying that God is the God of freedom. Maybe too much has been made of the midrashic statement in Mishna Avot that reads חירות על הלוחות — “freedom on the tablets,” the covenant with God as a covenant that sets man free — but it is useful as a general descriptor of a motion that recurs over and over throughout the Torah, throughout rabbinic literature, throughout the many historical generations of life under monotheism. I am free to eat the fruit of the tree or to refuse it; I am free to renew the covenant or to despise it; I am free to act on my own desires or restrain them; I am free to make myself a teacher and acquire for myself a friend, to agree or disagree, to love, to be fickle, to be curious. If the only constant thing is the highest thing, everything under it can change.
That garden on the girl’s ankles, like the Garden of Eden, held out a certain promise — that the moving and living could be frozen in time, that things could continue the same way forever. There is something luscious in that promise. My memories of Brattleboro, like my memories of so many other places and people and attitudes and things, are precious to me, and it is only natural that I would want to place them as a seal upon my heart.
But I am no longer the person who stood there, just as she is surely no longer the person who stood there. The garden on which her tattoo was based, or the archetypal garden in her imagination, has since sprouted and wilted and grown in other directions. This dynamism — the bright side of mortality — is a gift from God; put another way, it is the gift of being human.
*All translations are either my own or the standard translations provided by Sefaria; in the latter case, I have made minor changes to the language for the sake of clarity.
