Why Cemeteries Matter

Increasingly, Americans are choosing post-mortem options other than traditional burial, including cremation and “body composting.” While, in 2010, 53 percent of the dead were interred, by 2015 the number was 45 percent, and is expected to be a mere 37 percent in 2021. Judaism is particularly insistent on burial in the earth as the sole correct way to honor the dead—this week’s Torah reading begins with a description of Abraham purchasing the plot in which to bury his wife Sarah—and both Christianity and Islam have traditionally preferred burial as well. Rachel K. Alexander describes what can be lost as a secularizing society abandons the practice:

For religious Jews, cemeteries evince respect for the human body. Burial rituals are, therefore, essential; they involve keeping watch over the body until burial, purifying the body, dressing it in a shroud and placing it in a casket, and reciting the kaddish—first at the gravesite, then daily for an eleven-month period, the end of which is marked by a return to the grave for the unveiling of a tombstone. Visits to the graves of loved ones are especially important in anticipation of the High Holy Days, and cemeteries bear further significance for Jews as historical memorials. When Nazis during the Holocaust, Arab armies after 1948, and anti-Semites in America and elsewhere today desecrate Jewish graves and cemeteries, they attempt to erase the history of an entire people.

A walk through the graves of our forebears not only reminds us that we will die (and should therefore use our limited time and resources well), but it also reminds us that the buried once lived. They worked and married and raised children and spent their lives on or nearby the very land where they now lie. To the extent that they lived well, they gave their lives to that land, and we benefit from that gift. As James Madison famously explained in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, “the improvements made by the dead form a charge against the living who take the benefit of them.” Burial grounds serve this purpose, too: to remind us to be good stewards of the benefits we’ve inherited, and to make gifts of our own lives, in turn.

Read more at Tablet

More about: American society, Death, James Madison, Jewish cemeteries, Judaism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society