The Man with the Christian Tattoo (Part 1)
I never wanted my children to get a tattoo. Now that they are all in their 30’s, “bonuks” as my granddaughter says, they can do what they want. But as teenagers, I didn’t want them to decorate their bodies with something permanent that they might later come to regret. My first inclination to deter teenage impulsivity was to threaten, “If you get a tattoo Mom and I will not pay for your college.” But that would be stupid, and I knew that my kids were smarter than that.
So instead I told them something more plausible. “If you get a tattoo, you will have to pay for your own ski trip.” That limited threat, perhaps a lobbed hand grenade into their future as opposed to a nuclear warhead, that seemed to do the trick. To my knowledge, no tattoos yet. And these days, my bonuk kids have to pay for their own ski trips anyway. Chalk up a victory for Dad!
As the sun blazed hot, I sat next to a man roughly my age lined up on a cushioned chaise lounge with a distinctive set of tattoos. I asked him if I could take a picture of his markings and he was proud that I wanted a memory of his body art.
Here are my Jewish reflections on my five-minute friend’s Christian tattoo from the bottom up:
The artistic rendition of the bottom of the tattoo would be, I guess, the crown of thorns that was thrust on Jesus on the road to Calvary. But I am not sure. It could be dancing snakes. To my Jewish eyes, it looked like barbed wire which reminded me of some of the cruelest and ugliest places I have visited in Europe. In good art, we can see more than what the artist intended.
The two Hebrew words are impossible to translate without context. The first word, the Name of God, is clear. The second word is ambiguous. It can mean either “yireh--will see” (transitive verb) or “y’ra’eh--will appear” (intransitive verb). It may refer to the epiphany of Christ after his death on the cross, or it may refer to God’s blessing Abraham on Mt. Moriah after he bound Isaac for a sacrifice. From Genesis 22:
וַיִּקְרָ֧א אַבְרָהָ֛ם שֵֽׁם־הַמָּק֥וֹם הַה֖וּא יְהֹוָ֣ה ׀ יִרְאֶ֑ה אֲשֶׁר֙ יֵאָמֵ֣ר הַיּ֔וֹם בְּהַ֥ר יְהֹוָ֖ה יֵרָאֶֽה׃
And Abraham named that site Adonai-yireh, whence the present saying, “On the mount of יהוה there is vision y’ra’eh.”
And finally, the quote from Galatians 2:20. Well, for that you will have to wait two weeks and I will delve into that one.
As I took my picture of my friend’s tattoo, three thoughts came to mind in quick succession.
First: Politically He probably doesn’t vote for the same candidates I support. That assumption was confirmed when he told me he lives in Canada.
Second: I kind of admired that fact that he put the mark of his faith on his flesh. But when I read Galatians, Paul engages in a polemic against the circumcision of the gentiles. I found that curious. We Jewish males put the mark of our relationship with God on the procreative organ of our bodies as incontrovertible evidence of our faithfulness. My friend with the tattoo did just the same. Although the inscription of his faith—that everyone could see on his beach chair is out there for all to see. My inscription is, hopefully, less visible to the public.
Third: I am glad that my beach mates did not think to ask me about my interest in the tattoo. I have learned not to mention to people I don’t know and will never see again that I am a rabbi. It is not that I am ashamed of my religion, my education or my service to God and the Jewish people. I just prefer not to get into it. The only words I say on an airplane are, “Tomato juice, no ice.” Because there is no escape, I never talk to my seatmates. And if I have to, I kind of lie. I say, “I sell insurance.” Can’t religion be considered a kind of insurance? Or, “I teach history.” Well, rabbis do that too.
Once on the ski lift, I broke my rule. I was sitting next to a woman of undetermined age. You can never tell how old someone is sitting next to someone all bundled up with helmets and ski clothes. “What do you do for a living?” she asked. We were three towers away from the end of the lift. “What the hell, what harm could there be?” I thought to myself.
“I am a rabbi.”
“No, you are not!”
“Yes I am. I am most certainly the only rabbi from Alabama on this lift.”
Two towers away.
The lift stops for ten minutes and we swing together on the freezing cold chairlift. The harangue begins.
“What is wrong with you people? My ex-husband is Jewish. His family hated me. They were rude. They disliked me from the beginning. Why do Jewish people not like anybody not Jewish?” And on and on it went, seemingly forever until the chair started moving again. She couldn’t wait to express her bile and what an opportunity this was for her! Here I was, a real rabbi, the vicar of the Jewish people. I was unable to escape, and she could vent all the pain and distrust and venom she experienced during her ill-fated marriage to some hapless Jewish guy who, like me should have known better and kept his mouth shut.
I felt that I was wearing a helmet of thorns on the chair lift to Calvary.
More on the man’s tattoo in my next Backwards and Forwards.
When northerners, AKA Yankees, think of the American South, they are often condescending. One of the first people Judi and I met when we were considering our move to Alabama more than three decades ago decried this Yankee attitude. She complained in her southern drawl, “People up north, when they hear our accent, they think that we are stooopid. But we are not stooopid, we just speak the way we speak.”
As we were packing up and ready to leave Los Angeles, one of my friends shared with me, “Hey, I have been doing business for years in Tennessee. They say, ‘Oh, y’all are so smart and so good at numbers.’ And then when I get on the plane, I have to count my fingers to make sure they are all there.” There is something beguiling about the southern accent and southern culture. But one thing I will assure you, agree with them or not, they are not stooopid.
In my unpublished novel, Take My Dog, the Meet America reporter, Dave Lager, on ABN, the American Broadcast Network at six o’clock Sunday evenings, derides the southerners he reports on. But despite his outward success, Lager is the one who ultimately looks stooopid. Mean and stooopid.
Please enjoy and stay tuned. Backwards and Forwards will appear, again, magically in your inbox in a few weeks. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a note at backwardsforwards.newsletter@gmail.com.
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Until next time, shalom,
Jonathan