פקוח נפש
pikuach nefesh

Late last year, I was reading unthemed works that had come in and discovered that many were revisits to (and defamiliarizations of) scriptures stories. I started collecting them with the intention of putting together a full issue. But when it came time to actually create the issue, I discovered that I had—while intentionally avoiding doing so—collected a bunch of stuff about Nephi. Nephi the First. The I will-go-and-do guy. The guy Latter-day Saints cannot get out of our minds. The guy we (arguably) need a break from.

Since I had already lost that argument with myself, I went and unrejected a fifth excellent bit of Nephiness, making five of the nine pieces in this issue being either Nephicentric or Nephiadjacent.

That’s a lot of Nephi.

My next task was titling the issue. The four that aren’t Nephi come well before him (either from the Torah or the Jaredites). I was tempted to do something dumb like Nephi and His Influences but it’s hard to argue that a Jaredite king (who, though we all think of the Jaredites being “well before” Nephi, actually died after Nephi did) was an “influence.” So I dug deeper.

Nephi is so woven throughout this issue, I felt I should put his name on the issue. But not too directly! That’s a potential turnoff. Having made the decision to Think Nephi, I then narrowed nameplate-art choices down to Gary Ernest Smith and J. Kirk Richards, and had even begun reaching out to one of them. But what would the issue be called?

There are a few techniques that the desperate titleless can always turn to. Shakespeare phrases didn’t seen right in this case. And Nephi is hard to pun on. But that notion did bring me to the theories behind his name. And that opened new doors.

I’ve written and spoken many times about how Latter-day Saints fantasize we are the modern Jews (which is nonsense: modern Jews are the modern Jews) and how we long for the sort of peoplehood we see in them, and how we see ourselves as a continuation of God’s desire for covenant peoples—if Mormons were a tattoo-getting people, we would have so much bad-grammar Hebrew on our bodies—and I’m still behind all those Mormon/Jew parallels. The Jews got the stuff and we want in.

A bad thing, of course, is that we tend to think we know all about them and just need them to learn more about us. But we have little understanding of Jewish thought outside the Bible (and just a fraction of that) and, frankly, that’s a shame.

These different searchings eventually did lead me to the title: Pikuach Nefesh. You can get a good primer on the concept via Wikipedia and I hope you will, because pikuach nefesh is one of those excellent concepts the Saints should borrow from the Jews. In our discourse, we sometimes get a bit absolutish, and pikuach nefesh could provide a brake on that tendency. Certainly, it ties right into Nephi’s story—in particular his greatest sin / act of obedience, the slaying of Laban, that core moment that defines his life, that he can never escape. That core moment that leads off latter-day scripture and that gets read over and over and over as we start our devotion anew.

It’s not at all surprising that so many of our writers and artists want to write about Nephi generally and that moment specifically. That tendency is why I was trying to avoid an all-Nephi issue.

But it happened anyway.

We’re stuck with him.

So I hope that reading this issue through a lens of pikuach nefesh (seriously: go read this first) will deepen your experience of each poem and tale, will tie them each to the other, will deepen your engagement with both God and your neighbor.

We, after all, only obey the first great commandment by obeying the second.

And we all long to be people of the Word.