Judging a “Holy Work”
By RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER
What happens to a person after he or she dies? I am not talking about competing theologies of life after death, heaven or hell. I’m referring to the mundane issue of what happens to a person’s body. How does one accomplish the practical task of preparing a corpse, who was until recently a cherished, living human being, for burial while at the same time maintaining Judaism’s emphasis on the dignity of every human being, even after death? In Judaism, that task is delegated to a committee known as the Hevra Kadisha.
Dignity Beyond Death: The Jewish Preparation for Burial, our selection as the book of the year in the category of Jewish Life and Living, is Rochel Berman’s account of her involvement in her community’s Hevra Kadisha, their burial society. Her book is simultaneously informative and deeply moving. The term Hevra Kadisha literally means “the holy committee,” “the holy society,” and as with so many dimensions of Jewish life, the laws and customs of Judaism take something that could be done in a perfunctory manner and elevate it to the level of mitzvah, an encounter with the presence of God and the will of God. One of the judges called it “a holy work” (the book, not just the subject), going on to say, “Rochel Berman teaches the reader about the beauty, sensitivity and dignity of Jewish burial practices and the fellowship of the Hevra Kadisha, Jews who perform a mitzvah for which they can never be thanked by the recipient.” Rochel Berman cites the words of Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman: “All ritual expresses the deepest human yearning for order, meaning and structure in what would otherwise be chaos.”
Ours is a society that goes to great lengths to deny the reality of death. We invent euphemisms to avoid saying the word “dead.” We employ cosmetics to beautify the corpse and deem it a success if we can move people to say, “He looks like he’s sleeping peacefully.” All too often, that denial makes it harder for people to accept and come to terms with the fact that someone they loved has permanently gone from their lives. But death is real and death is messy, and traditional Judaism, to its credit, does not shy away from that reality. We have all seen newsreel clips of the work of ZAKA in Israel whenever there has been a terrorist bombing with loss of life. We have seen the almost unbelievable lengths to which they go to ensure that every scrap of human flesh is retrieved and brought to a proper Jewish burial. Berman’s discussion of the dignity of the deceased is not a book of theology, though there is an implicit theological statement in the scrupulous adherence to halacha (Jewish law) by the members of the “holy society.” Neither is it a book about the psychology of grieving, though we learn much about how people deal with grief in this book. It is a book about blood and wounds and the messiness of death. The first bit of advice given to the neophyte member of the Hevra Kadisha is “don’t wear your good shoes to the tahara (the ritual cleansing of the body).” And yet it is a gentle and often beautiful book.
In Dignity Beyond Death, we vicariously encounter the problems of dealing with dead bodies in all their varieties—the grossly obese woman whose remains represented a physical challenge to the women performing her tahara, the young man who committed suicide by jumping from an upper story and whose remains were marked by grotesquely mangled bones. One of the Hevra caregivers wrote of that last experience, “In the process of tahara, I felt as if we had managed to wash away the suffering and provide some comfort for his soul. When he was dressed in the shrouds and placed in the casket, [I felt] now at last he was at peace.”
The reader cannot help but be moved by accounts of Jewish prisoners in the Nazi extermination camps, where death was an everyday presence, and of the lengths they went to, to afford a traditional Jewish burial where possible and to provide as close an equivalent as they could where burial was not possible. It was not only a matter of obeying Jewish law. It was a maximum effort to restore some measure of dignity in circumstances designed to rob people of their dignity.
As one who comes from a more liberal approach to Jewish law, I confess that I was occasionally put off by some of the Orthodox practices adhered to by Rochel Berman and her colleagues. I would have permitted the parents of the young child who died suddenly to say one last goodbye to their child. I am not sure that the dignity of the deceased is compromised if the requisite amount of water is not poured over the body in one continuous flow. I sometimes found the members of the Hevra Kadisha coming across as a bit too credulous about the deceased’s ability to know what was being done to him or her, and being comforted by that knowledge. And I would have welcomed a discussion of the permissibility of organ donation. But despite those quibbles, I and many other readers responded to the compassion, the sensitivity, the unselfish devotion of those men and women who perform this final mitzvah for a deceased Jew, without regard to how prominent or ritually observant he or she may have been. No wonder they are called “the holy committee.”