God’s Children

Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17

This week’s reading contains an odd injunction: “You are children of the Lord your God,” it says, “You shall not gash yourselves or shave the front of your heads for the dead” (Deut 14:1). Ancient scholars of course knew that gashing the arms with knives or shaving off the hair at the front of the forehead were signs of mourning used by Israel’s neighbors; presumably, they were intended as a way of attracting God’s attention, just as the self-gashing prophets of Baal sought to do in 1 Kings 18:28. But what did this have to do with the opening assertion, “You are children of the Lord your God”?

One explanation held that Israelites, because of their close, daily connection to their God, did not need such acts of self-mortification to reach Him. As God’s own (metaphorical) children, they didn’t have to have recourse to such extremes. As it says elsewhere in Deuteronomy, “What other great nation is there whose gods are as close to it as the Lord our God is [close] whenever we call upon Him?” (Deut 4:7). Gashing and ritual head-shaving may be for other peoples, but not for Israel. For the same reason, when we turn to God to ask for forgiveness, we say, “Our father, our king,” since God is both a metaphorical father and a metaphorical sovereign.

Interestingly enough, however, the Rabbis offered a second interpretation of this law. The word for “gash yourselves” (titgoddedu) sounded as if it came from the same the Hebrew root as the word for “groups” (agudot). They therefore said on the basis of this verse, “Don’t form yourselves into different groups” (see b. Yebamot, 14a).

This explanation likewise works well with the first half of this verse. Since “You are [all] children of the Lord your God,” there is no basis for creating different groups among yourselves, each of them claiming its own, separate religious authority and often looking down on other Jews as “not really Jewish.”

The Dead Sea Scrolls give us a detailed picture of one such group. Its members did everything they could to distinguish themselves from other Jews. They wore special clothes, so that everyone could tell at a glance, “He’s a member of that group.” They had their own rules and standards—of ritual purity, the Sabbath, and other matters—and regarded anyone who did not observe these rules as fundamentally wrong and destined to disappear. At the same time, they purposely refrained from passing on their “true” interpretations of the Torah to non-members, lest they end up doing the right thing. They waited impatiently for what they called the great “Day of Revenge,” when all other Jews would be struck down and members of their group alone would survive as God’s chosen ones.

That group no longer exists, but the same mentality has reemerged again and again in Jewish history. Indeed, “I’m holier than thou” is a theme reenacted today in different contexts and milieus. There are good reasons to be suspicious of this claim.

Shabbat shalom!