Symbols

My family just helped my grandma (who we call "Babaloo") move into an old people's community. Most people call that kinda place an "assisted living facility," or and "old people's home." I think the former sounds too rigid and medically sterilized, while the latter sounds too fake. To me, a home isn't simply a structure - it is built with more abstract things like memories, etc. Thus, I call these places "old people's communities" because there are old people there, it probably won't feel like home, but it can definitely feel like a community.

The day she moved in, Babaloo had her rabbi come to affix a mezuzah to the doorpost of her new room. Though she is very aware that she is removed from the home her brother-in-law built for her and her new family over 60 years ago, this helped bring some sense of comfort to her in her new situation. I thought that was strange. This mezuzah isn't from her original home. It was bought for her very recently. It has no connection to her in any specifically personal way. It is just some mezuzah. Just this symbol of a mezuzah helps her feel some amount of home-ness. It's a declaration of "this is a Jewish place, and I am Jewish, so I can feel safe in this place." I kinda get that. Wherever we live, we want our living space to reflect who we are - maybe we put up posters of our favorite bands or movies, paint the walls a little crazy, put pictures up of friends and family, display trophies from tournaments of all kinds, you get what I'm sayin'. When I moved into a house with 4 friends my sophomore year at Indiana University, I found this really stupid poster of Bow Wow at a local mall. I wrote "NO PARENTS ALLOWED" in really bold black sharpie and posted it on my bedroom door. For the next 3 years, no matter where I lived in Indiana, that poster was on my bedroom door. In a weird way, this was my mezuzah in college. It didn't have the Shema and/or V'ahavta prayers on it, it looked really stupid, and only a couple people (including myself) found it humorous. When it comes to material things I feel that most of the time their value doesn't lie in what they are, but rather what they represent to you. Babaloo's brand new mezuzah represented her beliefs and values that travel with her wherever she goes, and this poster represented my sense of humor which travels with me wherever I go.

I feel the same concept can apply to tattoos. We affix a mezuzah to our doorpost, a poster to our wall, a picture to a frame, and a tattoo to our body. In each case, we choose to position these pictures, words, and symbols so that they are regularly visible to us and maybe the people whom we invite into our lives. However, the conflict with tattoos in Judaism doesn't relate to the symbol, but rather where you are putting it - on your body which God made. Doorposts, walls, and picture frames are built by humans, while our bodies are, in Judaism, are considered to be made by God. I totally understand this perspective of not altering the body.

The perspective I'm a bit uneasy with, however, is the school of thought that believes tattoos are immoral and evil because they are a reminder of the Holocaust and Hitler's tattooing of Jews in concentration camps. Someone in our class last week brought this up, explaining how she felt that just because a bad person does something doesn't mean that the thing they did is necessarily wrong. She explained how the context of these actions can sometimes carry much more weight than the actions themselves. This resonated with me. Of course you can oversimplify the other side of the argument (ie: Hitler loved grilled cheese sandwiches, so Jews shouldn't eat grilled cheese sandwiches), but I think it runs a little deeper than that. Hitler tattooed his victims as a symbolic stripping of their identities. Nowadays, tattoos are used as a symbolic enhancement or compliment to people's identities. The context and intent are precise opposites.

If the discussion about symbols begins with the notion that the symbols and their location are most important, it leads us down a completely different path of discussion than if we begin with the notion that what these symbols represent is most important. Regardless, I don't think Babaloo will be getting a tattoo anytime soon.