By: Michael Kaminer
As the subway pulled into Times Square, I exhaled; the tall young Orthodox guy who'd been staring at the Hebrew letters on my arm finally got up to leave. With one foot off the train, he turned, narrowed his eyes at me, and hissed, "They used to tattoo us too."
Tell me about it. My grandparents are Holocaust survivors. I grew up in Montreal surrounded by Jews who had emigrated from Poland and Russia after World War II, including my parents. Though my family wasn't religious, I had a traditional upbringing deeply connected to Yiddishkeit.
So when I first got tattooed fifteen years ago – a tiny scorpion on my right shoulder, an egg-size skull below it – I felt the thrill of doing something perverse, but also dread. Didn't the Torah prohibit desecrating the body? Am I insulting Holocaust survivors, and the memory of my own relatives, by submitting to a tattooist's needle? Are tattoos just plain goyish? And worst of all, isn't burial in a Jewish cemetery forbidden once you're tattooed?
My contact with clergy is limited these days. But I'd just met a pragmatic-sounding rabbi at the bris for my sister's new baby. So I called Rabbi Alan W. Bright of Congregation Shaare Zedek in Montreal to see if my options for interment were, in fact, limited.
"The burial thing is a bubbe maise," says Bright, who was ordained Orthodox in the UK, leads a Conservative congregation, and has written about Jewish burial issues. "But the concern about desecrating the body is real. A tattoo is permanent, which means it's prohibited in Rabbinic and Torah law as a desecration."
Even over the phone, Bright must have sensed my spine stiffening. "But a tattoo doesn't make someone any less Jewish," he added cheerfully. "Many Jews commit other questionable acts banned by the Torah. It's not for us to judge. The violation is between them and God."
Good thing. A Google search for "tattooed Jews" returns two million search results. There's a www.tribe.net clique of tattooed Jews with 150 members (and growing – I'm the newest inductee). There's a site showcasing Star-of-David tattoos, and there's www.hebrewtattoo.com, "Your Best Source for Hebrew Tattoo Translations."
On The Learning Channel's hit show "Miami Ink", the lead tattoo artist was bullet-headed Ami James, a former Israeli Army officer whose South Florida shop inspired the program. A MySpace page touts "TattooJew", a yet-to-be-produced movie about Jews with tattoos. If a cultural ban on tattooing ever reinforced the religious prohibitions, it seems to have fallen by the wayside.
"I never read the exact quote about burial in the Torah, but I figured it had to do with marking our bodies," says Jonathan Krimstock, 36, a New York-based guitarist who tours and records with superstars like Lauryn Hill and Paul Simon, and sports an elaborate dragon on his left shoulder and a Native American-inspired feather on his right. "If you think of nose jobs and boob jobs, we've all altered our bodies. The cemeteries should just take us all."
Krimstock grew up Reform in Manhattan, celebrating the big holidays. Maybe because of my family's Holocaust background, I was never able to completely let go of my associations with tattooing that easily. But my history also motivated me to keep adding body art. Getting tattooed, especially with Jewish symbols, let me feel like I was reclaiming something from its own desecration.
I'm up to 17 tattoos now. Some of them symbolize protection, like my Shadai and hamsa – an upturned palm with an eye in the center predominant believed to ward off the evil eye in Sephardic (and Muslim) custom. Some connected with me aesthetically, like a Star of David composed of two interlocking hearts, based on a drawing I saw by the poet Leonard Cohen, a fellow Montreal Jew.
Some represent duality and dichotomy, which I see as an essential element of the human experience, and I think, an essentially Jewish way of seeing the world. A snake eating its own tail (left forearm) represents the human capacity for self-destruction, but also regeneration. Kali (right arm) is the Hindu deity of destruction who annihilates in order to create. Icarus (left shoulder) tried to soar, but flew too high (the version I have also represents Led Zeppelin). The initials on my left wrist (JSZ, 1970-2006) memorialize a partner of mine who died young – it's the pain of loss literally made flesh.
I make it a point to look at each of them every day, and I'm grateful to have them. No matter how comfortable I am with myself, though, it can still feel awkward to walk around in short sleeves among other Jews, who treat it either as a novelty or a shonde. I spend a few weekends a year in Miami Beach; the apartment where I usually stay is in Surfside, home to a large and growing frum population. At the Publix supermarket on Collins Ave., with the beach a block away, they're probably used to physical variety and various states of public undress. But I've seen Orthodox mothers pull their children closer as we pass each other in the produce aisle, their eyes widened in shock as they scan the Hebrew characters.
Others are more good-humored about it; in Bloomingdales, of all places, a gruff-voiced Israeli stop me at the Polo counter, demanded to read my arm, and then joked that he didn't know tattoo artists could write Hebrew. I retorted that tattoo artists will write whatever you pay them to write.
But it was a reaction I least expected that finally brought me peace about marking myself up. My impeccably elegant, 86-year-old maternal grandmother is a Russian-born survivor who lost her entire family in the Holocaust. When I first got tattooed, my mother insisted her parents couldn't handle seeing the art on my arms. I dutifully wore long sleeves to family gatherings in Montreal or Florida, even in 90-degree heat.
One evening, my grandparents surprised us at a restaurant. I'd worn short sleeves, not knowing they'd be there. There was a ripple of shock and a stagy "Oy!" when they saw my arms.
Then my grandmother smiled and said the most eloquent and empathetic thing I've ever heard about my tattoos or anyone else's. Without knowing, she also distilled to its essence what all the rabbis I interviewed tried to articulate.
"You needed to do it," she said. "So you did it."
