Drash for Chayei Sarah

The Jewish Way of Mourning

Saturday, 10 November 2012

Rabbi Don Levy

Strange people, these Jews!  They don’t bury and mourn their dead like other people.  They don’t embalm their dead and dress them in their best clothes to make them presentable.  In fact, they don’t even look at their dead; once they are deceased, the Jews don’t view them at all.  That is, except for the squad of volunteers who wash the body…some practice call taharah.  Once the body is washed, they enclose it in a shroud and then nobody can visit with and view the dead person.  Even at the funeral, the casket is closed and you can’t get one last look.  And they hold the funeral and burial so quickly after death.  It barely gives the close relatives time to gather for the funeral!  This, not to mention preparing themselves emotionally for seeing their loved one lowered into the ground.  And then, once the dead person is in the ground, the close family sits around on low stools, and doesn’t bathe or leave the house, for a week.  They cover the mirrors, and when you go to visit them you don’t greet them.  You just walk in and sit down.  And then for a month they don’t shave or cut their hair.  Or listen to music or dance.  If it’s a parent they’ve lost, they don’t listen to music or dance for eleven months!

                And then when they place a headstone on the grave, it looks exactly the same as all the other headstones in the cemetery.  All the graves look the same; there’s no individuality.  They can’t express their love for their departed ones by organizing a particularly nice or ornate headstone.  And they don’t place flowers when they visit the grave.  No, they place small stones that they’ve picked up from the ground.  And then, every year on the anniversary of a person’s death, they hold a commemoration.  Imagine celebrating the person’s ‘death day’ instead of their birthday!  Yes, those Jews certainly have strange burial and mourning customs.  They’re just not like those of other people.

                Indeed, Jewish customs with regard to burial and mourning are markedly different from those of our neighbours.  This is especially true of our Christian neighbours.  Their customs often seem to be out of synch with the way we do things by 180 degrees.

                Many Jews, of course do not closely follow traditional burial and mourning customs as outlined in my simulated rant above.  For example, sitting Shiva is a practice that’s becoming more and more exceptional.  It doesn’t fit in with our ‘busy lifestyles.’  We bury our dead, perhaps host a reception for the funeral-goers, and then resume our busy lives.  We don’t find time for Shiva.  Most of us don’t even try.

                In my years as a rabbi, only one family whose dead I buried practiced Shiva.  Yes, it was a difficult imposition given the unique geography of the situation.  It was even a logistical nightmare.  But they did it.  They felt it was an important part of honouring their deceased relative.  I’ve never had another family in one of my congregations do it, even in a modified form.

                And my intent is not to throw guilt.  I’m personally no exception.  When I buried my father in Virginia, after the burial we gathered at my brother’s house nearby to eat, remember and visit with one another.  Then, in the afternoon my brother went back to work; he’s an accountant and this was just a few days before 15 April, the deadline to file income tax returns in the USA.  And me?  The next day Clara, the kids and I made for the airport to catch our overnight flight back to Germany, where we were living at the time.  We were back in Germany for the weekend, then on Monday I was winging my way to Kuwait to conduct Passover Seders for US troops in that country.  I guess my life then, epitomized the go-go lifestyle that many of us lead today.  I didn’t have time to stop and observe Shiva; I had places to go and people to see.

                Shiva is not the only Jewish funerary custom that, for many of us, has fallen on hard times.  In our heart of hearts, we seem to see mourning customs as relics of a time when life was much different.  They don’t fit in with the way we live today, with the sensibilities that guide our lives.

                Against this picture we read the account of Abraham burying Sarah.  The details of the narrative focus on the process, by which Abraham obtained the burial place and negotiated for its purchase.  But if we read between the lines, we can find that the story reflects the incredible sorrow and devotion of Abraham toward his partner.  Others, including some of the Rabbis, read into the account the guilt that Abraham must have been feeling upon his wife’s death.  It has been suggested that Sarah died spontaneously of a broken heart after hearing the news of Isaac’s binding and near-death on Moriah.  Abraham’s guilt is also reflected in his choice, after the events on Moriah, to go immediately to Beersheba.  That’s not where he and Sarah were living at the time.  It was as if he needed to hide from his wife.  This is the reason for the placement of today’s reading, the narrative of the events following Sarah’s death, immediately after the Akeidah narrative.  That is, according to this particular view.

                Others, upon reading the narrative, see hints of Near Eastern mercantile practices.  They see in the negotiations certain social realities concerning the way parcels of land changed ownership.  They see a playing out of the way two shrewd businessmen in the Canaanite culture would negotiate and close a sale.

                But I see a broken man, a resident alien who has no rights of land ownership, bargaining hard for the right to give his deceased wife a respectful burial.  The negotiations for the burial-plot reflect Abraham’s need for a choice spot despite his lack of land rights.  He agrees to pay an outlandish price for the cave at Machpelah out of desperation for the right to purchase it.  And then, although we have not read the following chapter this morning, he turns around and engages in extraordinary measures to acquire a wife for his son, Isaac.  The same son that he almost sacrificed immediately before Sarah’s death.  Surely Isaac has been traumatised by his experience on Moriah.  But after burying and mourning his Sarah, Abraham turns his attention to the need to ensure his – and his wife’s legacy.  He sends his trusted servant back to his country of origin.  The result, as we know, is that the servant happens upon Rebecca, the daughter of Abraham’s nephew, and prevails upon her to return to Canaan with him to marry Isaac.

                The elaborate mourning customs that have come to characterize the Jewish way in death and mourning were largely unknown to Abraham.  Yet we see him taking extraordinary measures to bury his wife respectfully, and to ensure her legacy.  He goes far out of his way to do these things.  And surely he experiences through his actions an uplifting from the sorrow of his loss.  He busies himself with the business of securing a respectful burial, and then with the pressing matter of securing a shidduch for his grown son.  Through his efforts, he surely manages to contextualize Sarah’s death and prepare himself for the final years of his own life.  Because Abraham, despite his advanced age, was not finished living.  Our text informs us that, after he secured a marriage for Isaac, he went on to marry again himself and produce five more children.  In taking extreme measures to honour Sarah, he enabled himself to go on living.

                At the end of the day, that’s the reason for our elaborate mourning practices.  I’ve heard certain of them criticized.  For example, I read an article once – in a Jewish magazine, if memory serves! – that criticized the closing of the shroud after taharah and the impossibility of viewing the deceased in repose.  ‘It denies the loved ones the closure they need.’  The author of the article where I read that gem interviewed a Jew who was unable to cope with a parent’s death after not getting to ‘visit’ with the body in an open casket.  He also interviewed a non-Jew who related that the experience of seeing her mother lying ‘at peace’ in her casket was a seminal moment in her process of working through her grief.  Again, this was in a Jewish magazine!

In addition to the article in question, I’ve also attended workshops on grieving for children who were stillborn or who died soon after birth.  The psychologists who wrote the materials for these workshops counseled letting the grieving family spend time with the infant before giving it up for disposal.  They showed video clips of families fondling the dead infant, singing to it, dressing it up like a little girl’s doll.

                I actually once witnessed this.  As the duty chaplain, I was summoned to labour and delivery at the base hospital.  There was an African-American family gathered around a dead infant, passing it around amongst them, wailing loudly and talking to the child, expressing regret about the aspirations they’d had for this child which would now go unfulfilled.  I was fascinated, and then appalled by the scene.

                I mean no criticism.  Perhaps in the display of raw emotion the family was girded to face life after burying the child and moving on with their lives.  I’ll never know.  I do know that, for a woman, there are few traumas more sorrowful than losing a child to miscarriage, stillbirth, or death soon after birth.  Any of these represents a tragic loss of the potential joy of raising a child and seeing it grow and become a joy to the family.  Perhaps in this custom of emoting so powerfully while handling the dead infant is a key to the catharsis necessary to go on.  I don’t have the answer.  I did not have the opportunity to work with this family afterward; I never saw them again.

                But I have had ample opportunity to later observe Jews who had earlier bridged their phases of traditional Jewish mourning, for whatever reason.  The Shiva, the week immediately following the burial, is the most intense period.  In contrast to the display I witnessed by the African-American family I mentioned, a Shiva is emotionally subdued.  But it’s also incredibly intense.

                Once, a rabbi who worked as a full-time chaplain in a behavioural health hospital was telling me of her work.  She told me of one patient who had been diagnosed as clinically depressed.  The patient was, among other things, listless to the point of dis-functional.  And she was obsessed with her father’s death several years earlier.  In her extensive talks with this patient, the rabbi learned that the patient hadn’t sat Shiva for her deceased father.  In consultation with the attending psychiatrist, the rabbi offered to help the patient sit Shiva retroactively.  And that experience helped launch the patient onto her road to recovery.

                I’ve never witnessed such a turnaround thanks to a belated Shiva.  But I’ve witnessed many individuals who, having not gone through the traditional Jewish mourning process, were unable to process and transcend their grief even years later.  My own processing of the loss of my father was protracted, and I attribute at least some of that to my not having taken the time to do the phases of grief, starting with Shiva.

My point is not that our mental health is going to be miraculously helped along if we only follow Jewish customs scrupulously.  Rather, I’m asserting that an incredible amount of wisdom went into the developing of these practices.  Their benefits far transcend just ‘ticking the box’ with regard to Jewish observance.

                I try hard not to be prescriptive in advising those who have suffered a loss.  We Jews don’t respond well to such prescriptions, and I no more than you!  Even so, I try to encourage Jews to take the time to go through as much of the traditional mourning process as possible.  There is a wisdom, and a genius, behind it that our own experiences and sensibilities cannot match.

                We should take our cue from Abraham.  Not in imitating his exact actions.  Rather in imitating the spirit in which he acted.  In imitating the extent, to which he extended himself to ensure Sarah’s dignified burial and ensuring her legacy through her son.  If we do, if we try to capture and express this spirit, then we will not want to quickly bury our dead and then quickly return to our busy lives.  We will not see funerary customs as an imposition.  We will want to pay proper homage to our dead.  And that homage may, just may, include incorporating more of the traditional Jewish practices into our process of mourning.  It’s something to think about.  Shabbat shalom.