Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17
Don’t Form Groups
This week’s reading contains an odd interdiction: “You are children of the Lord your God,” God 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, these gestures 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 the people of Israel, as God’s own (metaphorical) children, have no need of such acts of self-mortification to gain God’s attention. As it says elsewhere in Deuteronomy, “What other great nation is there whose gods are as close to them as the Lord our God is close (to us) whenever we call upon Him?” (Deut 4:7). In other words, gashing and ritual head-shaving may be fine 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, however much He is like a heavenly ruler, is also a metaphorical father to us.
A somewhat different explanation of this verse focused on the disfigurement caused by gashing oneself with knives. The Torah teaches that humanity was created in the likeness and image of God, and many ancient interpreters took this assertion quite literally: disfiguring oneself is like disfiguring the image or likeness of God. Along the same lines, Hillel the Elder is said to have frequented the public baths, an act that he considered a sacred duty. Some of his students were skeptical; “Is that really a mitzvah?” they asked. He answered: “You have seen how kings order that their statues to be cleansed and bathed as a sign of respect, and they pay good money to have this done. Should we take care any less for cleansing the human image of the heavenly king?”
But a third interpretation of this verse is of particular interest nowadays. The word for “gash yourselves” (titgoddedu) sounded as if it came from the same the Hebrew root as the word for “groups” (agudot). The Rabbis 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. The message of this week’s Torah reading is thus as relevant as ever: “Don’t form yourselves into different groups,” taking pride in your very differentness—this can’t be the message of Torah-true Judaism, since you are all “children of the Lord your God.”