Torah on the Body
by Lauren Tuchman
One of the things that draws me somatically to Jewish ritual is how multisensory it is. I was not initially trained to think of our ritual objects in this way, instead relating to them as sacred items whose foundational purpose is to enable us to do mitzvot, those sacred acts of connection to the divine and to our tradition. Mitzvot are those sacred pauses and actions available to us to give us space—even for a moment—to ground and find our connection to the vastness of which we are integrally a part.
Parashat V’etchanan is known, amongst many things, for the introduction of the Shma and v’Ahavta, found in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. As I write, I can hear the familiar, comforting cantillation of this passage, recited daily by Jews around the world with love and devotion, a passage so central to who we are and who we are yearning to be that it accompanies us throughout our day, framing our morning and evening prayers.
This passage is also one of four passages written on parchment by a specially trained scribe and placed with great care into the batim or boxes of tefillin worn by some Jews during morning prayers.
As I became more observant in my early 20’s, tefillin was a mitzvah I gravitated towards for reasons that remained inexplicable to me. I knew in my bones that laying tefillin (wearing tefillin every day) would become integral to my Jewish practice, yet I also knew that every time I tried putting them on, I felt I was hitting a brick wall I couldn’t get through. It was so, so hard and I felt like I was never going to get it right, just as I never got so much right about how sighted people did things. The odds were stacked against me and I’d be lucky if I somehow got the hang of it.
This internal self-recriminating monologue—intimately familiar to so many disabled folks—made it infinitely more difficult for me to also hold the truth that at the time I took on the mitzvah of tefillin, I was in a community of women who also were taking on the mitzvah and doing so with incredible devotion, joy and gratitude. I often found others to help me, as needed, learn to get the hang of it. Muscle memory was created and now lives deep in my bones. This does not mean that frustration doesn’t arise when my retzuot (tefillin straps) get twisted, for example. What I have learned, though, is that frustration can arise and be here and that is both okay and something I can approach with a lot more kindness and a lot less harshness. This doesn’t mean that this happens for me all the time—far from it. What it can mean is that it is an available option when I can touch into it.
It wasn’t until much later that I learned just how significant a skill laying tefillin on another person is. It takes great practice, adeptness and care. It’s not only about helping the person with the sacred act. It’s also about potentially navigating a multi-layered emotional and somatic response to a mitzvah that has a real felt-sense of the potential for radical openness and possibility as well as contraction, distance and inaccessibility. This felt deeply true for me both as a woman and as a disabled person. Wrapping tefillin is profound. It connects me not only to all others who engage in this sacred act every day but is also, and perhaps more importantly for me at this point along my journey, a reminder to myself that my body belongs. My body belongs as it is, and the Torah can hold that. The tradition is big enough—innovative enough, loving enough, trusting enough, to allow each of us our portion in Torah. As the V’Ahavta reminds us from it's opening, we are to love the Holy One of Blessing with all of our hearts, souls and strength. These words of love and connection we are invited to carry with us internally and place as reminders and signposts externally. Tefillin—like the mezuzah—are one of those signposts.
Conceptualizing tefillin as a physical signpost reminding us of the vastness and incomprehensible field of divine love with which we are loved collectively and individually is rather new for me. I am intending my heart and mind in this direction as an active choice to skillfully work with the decades of conditioning I have from society and my own self-recrimination to think of myself as anything but beloved. The more I practice and honor who I am here and now, the more resourced I am to meet the continual reality of a lack of being met by others as I understand myself to be. When the world does not reflect back to us the truth of our deepest nature, we must find ways to cultivate a felt sense of that for ourselves. This is a life-long practice with many starts, stops, shifts and moments of profound skepticism as to whether orienting myself in this way is actually supportive or just placing a bandaid on a wound.
As a blind woman, I am reminded daily that too many of us are caught in places of fear and delusion when encountering bodies unlike our own. I know that we don’t live an ethic of honoring the sacred in every being. And so we use ritual objects as touchpoints to return ourselves to this foundational truth.
Yet, I also know that as our tradition insists (and as we must continuously insist until this teaching moves from an aspirational to an actualized place) that we are all created b’Tzelem Elokim—in the image of the Divine. Every body is beloved, just as it is, just as we are.
Laying tefillin is not only a devotional act. It is an act that tactually reminds me that I, too, am a sacred part of this complex, wise and ever-unfolding path of practice and mitzvot. As the Torah reminds us this week, no one is undeserving of loving and being beloved. No one is left out, not good enough, broken, wrong. Though too many of us have internalized these as core beliefs, and though too many of us—myself included—will be working to unlearn this for the rest of our lives, disability Torah comes to remind us, and ritual objects may help reify this, that we are all a part of this sacred brit—covenant. No exceptions! However you do or do not engage with ritual mitzvot and actions, may we find blessing in Torah this week. May we approach ourselves with abundant ahavah, holding ourselves with tenderness. May we find comfort, in some way this Shabbat—which is also known as Shabbat Nachamu. And may we explore the possibilities that emerge for us as we contemplate the deepest truth that no one is left out of the divine vastness of which we all are a part.
Rabbi Lauren Tuchman is based in the Washington, DC area. She teaches and practices at the intersection of disability wisdom and transformative contemplative practice for personal and collective change.
