Banim atem Lashem Elokeichem. “You are children of Hashem your God. “ (Deuteronomy 14:1)
Our Noble Inheritance
You are God’s child. This is a statement of legacy and inheritance, almost a kind of blood claim. Your substance is related to God’s substance the way a child is related to her parents, fundamentally made of the same stuff. You emerge from God as a birth, as a longed for child emerges from her mother’s womb. You are of God. What would it be like to inhabit that reality in your body and soul, to treat yourself with the dignity and honor appropriate to this noble lineage?
Don’t Attack Yourself
You are so much more than you thought.
How often do we denigrate ourselves, shame and belittle ourselves, beat ourselves up, see ourselves as low, pathetic, worthless? Right after it says banim atem Lashem Elokeikhem, that you are God’s children, the verse goes on to say – lo titgodedu – don’t cut yourselves. This root gud or gadad means to cut, to invade or attack. Here in our verse it is used in the reflexive form – lo titgodedu – don’t do this to yourself, don’t cut or attack yourself. The natural corollary to our being God’s children is that we not attack ourselves. We are too sacred, too precious, too noble for such devaluation and denigration.
Sometimes our self aggression feels like internal fists punching at our own cowering small child self. But if you take in the message of banim atem – you are God’s child – then you can go over to that small trembling uncertain child and lift her up, see her – see yourself – as God’s own child, offering her a hand to help her stand up and take her full height. At the same time, you can turn towards the attacking parts and help them become aware of her stature — of your own true divine essence – so that maybe, slowly, they can soften, putting down their fists and their weapons, their critical voices quieting in the face of your own sense of your essential sacredness and dignity.
Your Status is Unconditional
But perhaps your inner critics feel that they have good reason to beat you up. They say – but you didn’t do this and that well, you made this mistake and you failed at that endeavor, you are so flawed. And maybe there is truth to some of their statements. We aren’t perfect. The gemara (Kiddushin 36a) in fact addresses this question, asking: Is our status as God’s children conditional upon our acting a certain way? What happens if we don’t behave well? According to Rabbi Yehudah, being God’s child is in fact conditional upon our good behavior, but according to Rabbi Meir, who gets the last word and has verses to bolster his claim, according to Rabbi Meir – no, our status as the children of God is absolutely unconditional; as he puts it, beyn kakh ubeyn kakh, this way or that way, good or bad, whatever we do, whether we act well or poorly, beyn kakh ubeyn kakh, either way, still banim atem Lashem Elokeikhem. Still we remain children of God.
We do not – we cannot – ever lose this status. It is a bond beyond reason, unbreakable. No matter what, still God loves us and accepts us and claims us as children. You may distance yourself and not feel that connection, but God holds steady; the cord is always there. Maybe you can let yourself rest in that unconditional holding, like a net that supports you, leaning into it, letting go for the moment of the need to do things right, and knowing that it will be there, this cord, this holding net, no matter what you do, really resting in that knowledge, in that holding, letting it support you and become your ground. You are forever and immutably God’s beloved child.
Especially Don’t Attack When You Are Low
In the verse, the cutting that is prohibited, along with a full shaving of the front of your head, is prohibited as a mourning practice: lamet, “for the dead”; don’t do these cutting practices to yourself as a response to a loved one’s death. Perhaps death here can be understood to include the suffering and lowness of all the griefs and disappointments, all the losses and failures of our daily lives, each one a small death. In the face of these great and little deaths, the Torah says, don’t add to your troubles by attacking yourself; remember that, even when you are low, you are still God’s beloved child.
Because we do have a tendency – precisely in those moments of suffering and grief and failure – to turn against ourselves, to add insult to injury, so that there is a pile-up of tangled difficult emotions, the initial wound plus a host of clamoring shaming other voices. It is like a gedud, a crowd or troop, a word from the same root as titgodedu. In the face of the normal suffering of life and death, all the usual griefs and failures, lo titgodedu, the Torah says, don’t pile a crowd of attackers on top of the initial trouble. The alternative to this self aggressive pile-on is – banim atem Lashem Elokeikhem. Instead of attacking, remember who you are in your essence, remember that you are still God’s beloved child, letting yourself in your grief and struggle be gathered up by God and held gently like a small child, loved through your tears and woes.
Loving Yourself Through The Lows
This is, after all, on some deep level, what love is for. Not just for the high moments, when we are strong and on top of the world, but for our lowest moments of grief and despair and self doubt, when we are closest to death, when we are small and fragile and vulnerable. It is then we need love most, not to beat ourselves up in times of difficulty, but to rest like a child in the loving embrace of God’s steady unconditional holding, to love ourselves through our suffering and our failures and our losses.
God’s Love Messages
In Pirke Avot, this verse, banim atem Lashem Elokeikhem, is used to prove not just that God loves us, but also that God wants us to know about this love, this hibah (Pirke Avot 3:14). That’s why God tells us: You are My children. So we’ll know of that love. It is one thing for God to stand from afar and feel the love with no impact on us. But it is another for God to want us to know, to send it out and share it, to continually send messages that say: I love you.
Now most of us, most of the time, are not aware of these constant divine messages of love sent our way. Our hearts are blocked from recognizing and receiving them. Maybe you can visualize a continual stream of love letters pouring down from God and piling up, unseen and unopened, in a mailbox outside your closed heart. These many stockpiled love messages are also a kind of gedud, a crowd or troop, an antidote to that other crowd of attackers.
Can you think of a moment when you have sensed God’s love being communicated to you? Maybe it was in the form of a butterfly or flower or rainbow that appeared in your lowest moment, as if to accompany you, or maybe in the form of a person-angel that came at just the right moment into your life, or a smile from a stranger, or a moment of sudden insight or grace or unbidden creative flow or a sense of your own love for another. All of these are subtle messages from beyond of your great belovedness as God’s child, inklings of God’s love in your life. They enter the world in code form, indirectly, and we have the task of noticing, recognizing and taking them in.
Maybe, too, each breath that we breathe is itself a sign of love, sent into our bodies like a soft caress or like the gentle rocking of a baby’s cradle. We are rocked and caressed by our breath, this breath that God continually breathes into us at every moment. We check our phones frequently, looking for a message, a sign, something to fill our hunger, that hole inside us. Each time we have that urge to reach for our phones, perhaps instead we can check in with our breath and realize we are already receiving the love messages we need at every moment.
Each of Us a New Manifestation of God
The ability to recognize and receive God’s love is important, but I believe that to be a child of God involves something more active as well. If our relationship to God is truly like a child to a parent, then we are both a continuation of God and also, in some way, a new and unique divine creature, a precious never before seen iteration of the divine legacy. God is born anew in each one of us. Like a newborn baby in relation to her ancestry, we are each a dear, incomparable, utterly new manifestation of the divine in the world. Our role is to live into that unique aspect of the divine, to allow God to be born in us, to manifest that essence in as full a way as possible. There is both continuity as well as creativity, some new aspect of the divine that wants to come alive in the world through each one of us, like a vast array of colored crayons, each a slightly different and essential shade. Can you feel into your own unique divine essence, the aliveness and creativity that wants to be born through you as a child of God? Maybe this is how the world is redeemed, one soul at a time, as God is born anew in each one of us.
Photo by Josh Willink at Pexels
