Keruv: Reflections on Dying, Death and the Hereafter

The Uniqueness of Judaism - Lecture IV

1998

by Harold M. Schulweis

Following of the death of his son, Absalom, King David arose to rend his garment. When Jacob saw his son Joseph's coat of many colors drenched in blood, he presumed that he was killed and he rent his garment. When David learned of the death of King Saul, he rose and rent his garment. When Job, who knew so much grief and of the death of his children, he stood up and rent his garment.

I call this a curious ritual,  because it is so contrary to the aversion to destruction that is found in the Bible, the prohibition against wanton destruction anything useful to man:  "When you shall besiege a city a long time in making war against it, you shall not destroy the trees thereof by wielding an axe against them. For you may eat of them but you shall not cut them down. For is the tree of the field that it should be besieged of thee?" In the code of Maimonides we read how this prohibition against destruction is elaborated: "Whoever breaks utensils or tears garments or demolishes a building or stops a well or willfully destroys food violates the prohibition 'Thou shalt not destroy'." In the Talmud Shabbat 105b, "He who in anger tears garments shall be accounted as though he worshipped idols. For such is the way of idolatry."

And yet, despite all of these admonitions, kriah  is not only allowed but mandated. Some scholars believe that this act of tearing clothes is an expression of rage. It is anger at the loss that so often accompanies death: blame, accusation against others, against God, against the self. Soloveitchik, for one, argues that because death is such an obscenity, this tearing ritual allows people to express rather than repress their anger. This reflects the reality principle in Judaism. We wear no blinders. Death is cruel, mean and unfair. Other scholars believe that this tearing of the cloth may be a substitute for the pagan custom of tearing flesh and hair out of the head or the arm of the mourner. The kriah  act is a kind of sublimation of self-mutilation. We recall in Deuteronomy 14:1 the verse that says, "You shall not cut yourself nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead." It was a heathen custom to bury the plucked out hair of the mourner with the corpse.

There is in the tradition a great respect and empathy for the mourner. The "onen" refers to the mourner who mourns his loss before the burial. He is exempt indeed prohibited from reciting the Sh'ma, from studying Torah, from the obligation of prayer, from the recitation of the motzi or from the grace after meals. The onen is not to be counted into the minyan, into the quorum ,and on the day of the burial the mourner is not to place the tefillin phylacteries on his arm or head. I think this recognizes the anger, resentment and profound melancholy that frees the mourner from any religious obligations. How can one recite a benediction without an embittered heart, or place the great pride of the phylacteries at a time when one is in no mood to praise God, or to recite “Amen” when one is speechless and dumbstruck?  Better not to perform the ritual than to do so with bitterness, sadness, anger and disappointment in one's heart. Tear the cloth, shut tight the lips, acknowledge the defeat that death brings and respect the integrity of your emotions.

But it is noteworthy that this rite of tearing is done while standing. It is an important posture which expresses the courage of acceptance. The Kaddish, the mourner's prayer for the deceased, is also recited standing. To accept death not in a supine position, not by lying down, but by standing on one's own two feet, is a spiritual body language. Before such an act there is no blessing, because an act of destruction is not celebrated with a blessing. This kriah act is an act of letting go. It is an external sign of an internal tearing of the heart.

There is yet another act of cutting, but this one not on the mourner's clothes but on the clothes of the deceased. When the deceased is placed in the casket a tallith prayer shawl is draped over his shoulders. One of the four fringes is cut making the prayer shawl ritually unfit. What does this cutting signify? It recognizes that the deceased has no mitzvoth, no religious obligations to perform. It is a form of closure. It expresses a deep seated realism about the reality of death.

One of the biblical Psalms (115) declares, "The heavens are the heavens of the Lord but the earth has He given to the children of men. The dead cannot praise you nor any who go down into silence. But we will bless the Lord now and forever, Halleluiah." Here is a psalm of unequivocal this-worldliness. It is this world that is the place to praise God and to act out Godliness. As we read in the great Ethics of the Fathers, chapter 4, verse 17, "Better is one hour of Torah and the practice of good deeds than the whole life of the world to come." Why? Because it is here in this world that you can create, work, repair, construct, help, accomplish. Let go of your fantasies. The deceased is powerless to change anything at all.

This brings to mind Soloveitchik (in his Halachic Man) who contrasts the Jewish religious personality with the homo-religiosus, that is, the romantic who chafes against reality. The Jewish religious personality as Soloveitchik understands him wants to purify the world, not to escape it. The goal is not flight to another world but to fight in this world against life's evil. The goal is not flight to another world that is wholly good but to bring down the eternal word into our midst.

Soloveitchik is critical of those religious seekers who intoxicate themselves with dreams of an exalted, supernal existence to such an extent that they fail to hear the cries of those that dwell in houses of clay, the sighs of orphans, the groans of destruction. Nothing is so spiritually destructive as "diverting one's attention from this world.”The Jewishly religious man seeks to bring transcendence down to the earth. His face is turned toward people. So there is a reserve toward a lopsided other-worldliness in Soloveitchik because it tends toward spiritual narcissism. He seeks what I would call a horizontalization of the vertical.

"The ideal of eternal life is not the private domain of a small spiritual elite but it is the public domain of all Israel."

The entire romantic aspiration, much of what is called "new age," is to escape from spiritual struggle, to free oneself from the bonds of culture and the duties to community and to jump into nirvana and to find a short cut to tranquility in a single moment, and to avoid struggling for peace and harmony.

ECHAD

There is an ethics of burial for the dead. It flows from what we spoke about in the second lecture that deals with oneness. For the way you die is not unrelated to the way you live.  Death is part of life and burial is part of the rites of passage.

Life and death are not either/or. This world and the world to come are not split apart. I think of that discussion in which the disciple said to the rabbi, "How are we different? After all, they believe in this world and in the world to come." The rabbi answered, "They differ from us because they believe that this world and the other world are two worlds. We believe in two worlds which are one."

Perhaps I can make that clearer by another story, when a pious man ascended to paradise to heaven. He looked around and was disappointed that he saw no saints, no holy men in heaven. He concluded that “Once I thought that the holy men and the righteous are in heaven. Now I know that heaven is in the righteous men.”

Let me continue with the notion of  “oneness.”  The body and the soul in Judaism are one. While we let go of the body, we hold onto its purity. That respect for the human body helps explain the rabbinic belief not only in spiritual immortality but in physical resurrection. Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman emperor and stoic philosopher, addressed Rabbi Judah Ha-nassi (Talmud Sanhedrin 91 a,b):  "On the great Day of Judgment, the soul and the body will each plead excuse for their sins. The body will say 'It's not my fault; it is the fault of the soul.' And the soul will plead 'It's not my fault but that of the body.'”  Rabbi Judah Hanassi answers him with a parable: “A king had a beautiful garden stocked with fruits. He set two laborers to guard it. One was blind, the other lame. Once, when the king visited the garden, he noticed that the fruits were missing and he reproached the laborers for negligence. The lame man said: 'How could it be me? I cannot walk.' The blind man said: 'How could it be me? I cannot even see.' Then the king placed the lame man on the shoulders of the blind man and disciplined them both." The soul and the body are interdependent. And this interrelationship may explain the rabbinic belief in the resurrection of body and soul after death.

Clearly, great respect is paid to the body in Judaism after death. The body of the deceased is washed with care and reverence. During the cleansing and purification of the body, not less than two persons are present, who are prohibited by ritual law from smoking, eating or drinking or idle conversation. While they cleanse the body, prayers based on the Song of Songs are recited that speak of the beauty of the body. To remind those who wash and dress the deceased of the respect due the deceased, a candle is placed at the head of the deceased. In the Sephardic tradition a Shofar, ram's horn is sounded during the ritual purification.

The image of God is respected in death as in life. This explains why the casket is closed, so that at a Jewish funeral there is no public viewing of the body and no wake for the deceased. The casket is closed because we recall him as a “tselem,” as an image of God free to act and free to choose, free to turn away from us or to face us. But now reality has set in and we must acknowledge that the deceased is a  “nireh v'ain roch," one who is seen but cannot see. The casket is closed and the body is not for viewing because the deceased is not a cosmeticized object, a thing, an it; and we are not voyeurs, spectators. So we respect the deceased and remember the tselem, the image of God with which he was created. What happens to that image,  we will discuss later.

But I would turn to the ethics of burial, the relationship between the way we die and the way we live. In Judaism, there is a modesty in life and in death to be pursued. The deceased is clothed in shrouds called tachrichim, made of muslin, cotton or linen, simple, clean and white. "Shrouds have no pockets," is a proverb and fact. The shrouds carry no material wealth. Not a man's possessions but his soul is important.

It is not only a question of modesty and lack of ostentation that explains the shrouds, but a profoundly moving ethical passage found in the Talmud Moed Katan 27b. Formerly the expense of the burial fell hard on the next of kin, and many abandoned and fled the deceased. Until Rabbi Gamaliel came forward and, disregarding his own dignity, wore flaxen vestments, that is linen vestments instead of woolen expensive garments, and the people followed his practice. He did so because the poor felt ashamed, and out of respect for the poor all deceased wore the same clothes.

Formerly, they would bring out the rich for burial on ornamental tall state beds covered with rich coverlets and the poor were placed on a plain bier, a box. And the poor felt ashamed. And out of respect for the poor, the rabbis insisted that all the deceased should be buried in a plain box.

Formerly, the face of the rich deceased was left uncovered and the face of the poor were covered, because the face of the poor who lived in years of drought turned livid and the poor were embarrassed. Therefore, the rabbis declared that henceforth all deceased would have their faces covered.

In former times, food was brought to the home of mourning; for the rich in silver and gold baskets, for the poor, baskets of pealed willow twigs. But the poor felt ashamed. Therefore the rabbis instituted a tradition that all baskets made of willow twigs would be the vessels that would carry the food into the house of the mourners.

In former times, they would give the drink of wine in the house of the mourners; for the rich were served in white glass, for the poor in colored glass. But the poor felt ashamed, and in deference to the poor, all glass in the house of mourning was served in colored glasses.

Mourning ritual has a strong ethical component. For that reason, it is wrong, according to the Jewish tradition, to have an ostentatious funeral. One should not succumb to the morticians salesmanship. The casket should be simple, and there is a general tradition against the display of expensive flowers. It is not because Jews lack an aesthetic sensibility. It is because a true respect is paid to the deceased by using one's monies to help those who are in need. Let the poor smell the fresh baked dough of bread rather than we smell the fragrance of the flowers. There is a Latin proverb ,"Wisdom is often hidden under a ragged cloth." Jewish ritual of mourning links the communal ethic and our emotional life. I remember when my grandmother died a day before Sukkoth, the festival of the community, the festival of tabernacles. I recall according to the Jewish ritual tradition that the festival suspended the mourning period for the entire seven days. I saw in my grandfather the heroism wherein the personal grief was muted in order to rejoice with the community in the festival. The community joy must not be denied because of personal grief. My grandmother's immortality was tied to the eternity of the Jewish people.

I was deeply impressed by the heroism of this ritual tradition which hurled defiance at death and respected the community. The ritual law commanded a mastery not only of one's deeds but of one's emotions. Again, Soloveitchik commenting on the law that counsels mourning, writes that the halachah commands "Rise up from your mourning, cast the ashes from your head, change your clothes, light the festival lights, recite over a cup of wine the Kiddush extolling God for giving us the festival of gladness, pronounce the Shehecheyanu in praise of God who has kept us in life." What impressed me was the insistence that we can control our depression, that death must not plunge us into morbidity and immobility. As the Talmud says, the divine spirit does not rest in a state of indolence, laziness or sadness, but only in the imperatives of joy.

Hold on and let go. Balance the reality of death and its sting with the elevation of the human being. Without denying on the one hand that man is like unto dust, Jews recite at the conclusion of Yom Kippur, at Neilah, the prayer, "Thou hast distinguished man from the beginning and hath considered him worthy of communicating with Thee.” This is the both/and that we spoke of in the first lecture, which overcame the split thinking of either/or.

In the prayer book, we see the search for balance expressed in the daily prayer book. We read: "What are we? What is our life? What is our goodness? What is our righteousness? What is our help? What is our strength? What is our might? What can we pray before Thee, O Lord our God and God of our fathers? Are not the mightiest as naught before Thee, and men of renown as though they were not. The preeminence of man over beast are as naught." And that side is followed by a great “but” -- "But we are Thy people. We are the children of the covenant. And yet Thou hast man but little lower than the angels and crowned with glory and love." This both/and expresses itself ritually and psychologically in the transformation from the mood of self-negation to the mood of self-affirmation.

The mood of men can be controlled by the self, by the ethics and the moral reason with which we are endowed. I illustrate this with the way in which the tradition deals with the shiva, the seven days of mourning. Seven days, because it was in seven days that the world was created, and with the loss of one of God's creations it requires seven days to regenerate ourselves to recuperate. Seven days of mourning, but interestingly, not more than seven days. For there is a limit to mourning which is self-imposed. The Kaddish – the mourners prayer which makes no reference to death or dying or to paradise or hell but speaks only of the sanctification of life in this world –is recited for a period of eleven months, short one day. While it is an act of piety, one is to recite it for “eleven months short one day,” but not beyond that. The rabbis point out "He who mourns excessively does not mourn for the deceased but for someone else."  Perhaps one's own self.

HOLD ON AND LET GO

There is breaking and there is repair. And even in the breaking, even in the tearing, there is holiness. When Moses descended from Sinai with the Tablets of the Law in his hand, and saw the prancing around of the Israelites extolling the golden calf, he allowed the Tablets to slip from his hand and they broke. That act expressed Moses' sadness and his anger. But what is important is what was done with those broken Tablets. They were not discarded, they were not thrown away. Those smashed Tablets Moses placed into the Ark of Holiness. The broken Tablets have something to teach us. What happened after the first reactive stage of mourning, the anger, the breaking, the tearing. The Bible tells us that Moses went up the mountain a second time and listened to the voice that called out,  "Carve out for yourself two tablets of stone like the first.” The broken Tablets are not the end. He rose up early in the morning from his anger and his sadness. And he took in his hand two tables of stone like the first, and God descended in the cloud and stood with him and proclaimed His name: "The Lord God merciful, gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth."

How do you hold on? How do you continue the respect for the tzelem? We hold on during the shiva and during the thirty days in which we reflect about the deceased and evaluate the deceased's relationship to us. This kind of reflection and meditation is important. For as the philosopher Kierkegaard put it, "Life can only be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards." Mourning is both an understanding backwards and a resolution to live forwards.

THE HEREAFTER

I am asked to answer the question about the holding on which means about the hereafter, about the afterlife. It is here I must tell you that to answer that question is complicated and yet unavoidably so. To ask a question about a tradition that is over three and a half millennia, the answer has to be given in accordance with the time and the chronology. Add to that the fact that Judaism is not a dogmatic tradition, that there are no dogmas in Judaism to the point that if you do not believe in them that you will be prevented from salvation. And even here I must make amends, for this dogma of dogmalessness is also questionable. If you ask me what does Judaism believe about resurrection, about the afterlife, about the reincarnation, I can only answer it in terms of history and in terms of the diversity of belief. Surely, if one turns to the period of the Talmud which ended in 500 CE, surely if one turns to the Prayer Book and reads it literally, there is a repeated emphasis upon resurrection of the dead. And so it is written in the second benediction of the daily prayer, the Amidah:  "You sustain the living with loving kindness and in great mercy You revive the dead." And in an earlier part of the Prayer Book, a prayer, "Blessed be You who restores life to the dead." And in the El Moleh prayer, a reference to the Garden of Eden, to Paradise: "May He lie under Thine divine wings among the holy and the pure. May his place of rest be in Paradise." There is a statement that he who denies that the resurrection of the dead comes from the Torah will forfeit the reward of being resurrected from the dead. If there is question as to whether or not Judaism believes in the resurrection of the dead, it is clear that the rabbis in the Talmudic era believed it.

On the other hand, if you ask whether or not the Bible, the five books of Moses for example, believes in Paradise or hell, or in resurrection of the dead or of the reincarnation of souls, it is for me abundantly clear that there are no such references. One does not read that Abraham ascended to the heavens or that Cain descended to hell. What one reads about the patriarchs is that when they died they were gathered unto their people, or they were gathered unto their ancestors.

There is a deep yearning for a life beyond this one. And many Jews and many rabbis believe in life eternal and in the immortality of the soul. In this they may have been influenced by the thinking of Maimonides himself, who in his Guide to the Perplexed doesn't refer at all to resurrection of the dead but concentrates on the immortality of the soul. Let me put it in my own words. I believe that the last word of life is not death itself. Death is not final.

The tzelem elohim, the divine image, lives on in the memory of our children, in the memory of those whom we have effected, whose lives we have influenced. I believe in the immortality of influence. In the life we teach, transmit to our family, friends, community in our conscience, our sensibilities, our acts. I know how much my ancestors, my grandparents and my parents live through me. This connects my life with the future. There are intimations of immortality in my life, in my inordinate joy when I participate in the Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah of my children and grandchildren. Why am I so uplifted when I watch my grandchildren recite a blessing over the light, or over the challah, or over the Kiddush, or ask the four questions? I am not rejoicing only in the fact that they have good memories, for they are bright. But there is a continuity of values and therein lies my own immortality. One thing is clear to me. The hereafter is profoundly related to the here-now. And you cannot separate the hereafter and the here-now. I prepare my after-life here and now. My future is not unrelated to my past and my present.

The end of life is death. But death is not the end of life. There are multiple meanings to the term “end.”  It is the point where something ceases to exist. But “end” means as well the goal, for the sake of which I live. "Death, Heschel writes, "is not sensed as a defeat but as a summation.” The after-life is prepared for in this life. In dying, there is hope that I may become a seed. Death is the end of the journey, in one sense of the term end, but it is not its meaning, its aim. Death is the end of doing but not the end of meaning. I am frightened not of dying, but of not having lived.

The Sabbath, the rabbis declared, was one sixteenth of the world to come. The Sabbath is a foretaste of the hereafter. We have to experience that foretaste while on earth, to experience the tranquility, goodness, joy and love of the Sabbath here or else we will be unable to appreciate the blessings of heaven. Listen to the benediction we recite before the Torah: "Blessed art Thou who has planted everlasting life within us." The pleasures of hereafter have to be tasted here. The most lasting pleasures are those which rejoice others, those which serve God's world, those which elevate God through the elevation of my own tzelem.  Don't postpone the world to come. Live with meaning now. "For if a person has a ‘why’ to live for, he can bear any ‘how.’” (Frankl)

My comfort and consolation begins here and now, and it derives from faith in Godliness that stiffens my spine when the winds howl. One of the most moving Midrashim which I have quoted often speaks in imaginative terms of the first day in which Adam was created. All alone, he did not know the way of the world but he noted that at the end of the first day the sun sank and the shadows fell and spread all over the earth. And there was a wind, and he was cold and frightened. He sensed that this was ominous, that it may be the end of his short life. And he threw himself down upon the earth and his hands reached out and touched upon two stones. One stone was called "afelah," which means darkness and the other "maveth," which means death. Darkness and death are hardly instruments of comfort. He raised them up and rubbed them one against the other and out of the friction there was emitted a spark with which he lit a torch. That torch was a light which we still use on the end of Saturday night,  and it is called "havdalah.” He was comforted by the light and he slept. In the morning he arose and looked up and saw that the sun was rising, and came to the conclusion that this is the way of the world, that the sun sets and it rises and that both must be accepted. The darkness, the death and the promise of life and of brightness. There was darkness and there was void and emptiness in the universe. There was confusion and chaos. A voice of God came out and said, "Let there be light. And there was light."

And we who live must be on the side of light. In the day time we must remember the night. But in the night time we must remember the day. Both belong to each other. And it was evening and it was morning, one day, one life, one God.

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