42 | AUGUST 10 • 2023 

Y

ou are children of the Lord your 
God. Do not cut yourselves or 
shave the front of your heads 
for the dead, for you are a people holy 
to the Lord your God. Out of all the 
peoples on the face of the 
earth, the Lord has chosen 
you to be His treasured 
possession.” (Deut. 14:1-2)
These words have had a 
considerable history within 
Judaism. The first inspired 
the famous statement of 
Rabbi Akiva: “Beloved 
is man because he was created in the 
image [of God]. Beloved are Israel for 
they are called children of the All-
present” (Avot 3:14). The phrase, “Do 
not cut yourselves”, was imaginatively 
applied by the sages to divisions within 
the community (Yevamot 14a). A single 
town should not have two or more 
religious courts giving different rulings.
The plain sense of these two verses, 
though, is about behavior at a time 
of bereavement. We are commanded 
not to engage in excessive rituals of 
grief. To lose a close member of one’s 
family is a shattering experience. It is 
as if something of ourselves has died, 
too. Not to grieve is wrong, inhuman: 

Judaism does not command stoic 
indifference in the face of death. But 
to give way to wild expressions of 
sorrow — lacerating one’s flesh, tearing 
out one’s hair — is also wrong. It is, 
the Torah suggests, not fitting to a 
holy people; it is the kind of behavior 
associated with idolatrous cults. How 
so, and why so?
Elsewhere in Tanach we are given 
a glimpse of the kind of behavior the 
Torah has in mind. It occurs in the 
course of the encounter between Elijah 
and the prophets of Baal on Mount 
Carmel. Elijah had challenged them to 
a test: Let us each make a sacrifice and 
see which of us can bring down fire 
from heaven. The Baal prophets accept 
the challenge:
Then they called on the name of 
Baal from morning till noon. “O Baal, 
answer us!” they shouted. But there 
was no response; no one answered. 
And they danced around the altar they 
had made. At noon, Elijah began to 
taunt them. “Shout louder!” he said. 
“Surely, he is a god! Perhaps he is deep 
in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe 
he is sleeping and must be awakened.” 
So, they shouted louder and slashed 
themselves with swords and spears, 

as was their custom, until their blood 
flowed. (I Kings 18:26-28)
This was, of course, not a mourning 
ritual, but it gives us a graphic 
sense of the rite of self-laceration. 
Emil Durkheim provides us with a 
description of mourning customs 
among the aborigines of Australia. 
When a death is announced, men 
and women begin to run around 
wildly, howling and weeping, cutting 
themselves with knives and pointed 
sticks.
Despite the apparent frenzy, there 
is a precise set of rules governing this 
behavior, depending on whether the 
mourner is a man or woman, and on 
his or her kinship relationship with the 
deceased. “Among the Warramunga, 
those who slashed their thighs were the 
maternal grandfather, maternal uncle 
and wife’s brother of the deceased. 
Others are required to cut their 
whiskers and hair and then cover their 
scalps with pipe clay,” according to 
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. 
Women lacerate their heads and then 
apply red-hot sticks to the wounds in 
order to aggravate them.
(A similar ritual is performed by 
some Shia Muslims on Ashura, the 

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

The
Limits 
of Grief

