Death in Jewish Life

Stefan C. Reif, Andreas Lehnardt, Avriel Bar-Levav

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110377484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie juive

Jewish customs and traditions about death, burial and mourning are numerous, diverse and intriguing. They are considered by many to have a respectable pedigree that goes back to the earliest rabbinic period. In order to examine the accurate historical origins of many of them, an international conference was held at Tel Aviv University in 2010 and experts dealt with many aspects of the topic. This volume includes most of the papers given then, as well as a few added later. What emerges are a wealth of fresh material and perspectives, as well as the realization that the high Middle Ages saw a set of exceptional innovations, some of which later became central to traditional Judaism while others were gradually abandoned. Were these innovations influenced by Christian practice? Which prayers and poems reflect these innovations? What do the sources tell us about changing attitudes to death and life-after death? Are tombstones an important guide to historical developments? Answers to these questions are to be found in this unusual, illuminating and readable collection of essays that have been well documented, carefully edited and well indexed.

Section 1: On Death in Life

Avriel Bar-Levav

Jewish Attitudes towards Death: A Society between Time, Space and Texts

The aim of this paper is to present a framework for depicting and understanding the varied Jewish attitudes towards death, mainly (but not only) since the medieval period; or, in other words, to suggest an initial map and coordinates for this topic. The basic map for western attitudes towards death was supplied by Philipes Ariès, who, as Frederick Paxton wrote in the Macmillian Encyclopedia of Death and Dying, almost single-handedly established attitude to death as a field of historical study.¹ Ariès proposed a model of four attitudes: ‘tamed death’, in which death is perceived as a natural part of life; ‘death of the self’, in which final judgement motifs emerge; ‘wild death’, in which death is seen as terrifying; and the ‘forbidden death’, in which death is considered to be a failure, with the dead removed from society.² Ariès suggested that the interaction between four factors causes the transitions between the different attitudes: human awareness of the self, social defences against wild nature, belief in an afterlife, and belief in the existence of evil. It is a wonderful story, said Robert Darnton, but is it true? Darnton, along with other critics, called Ariès’s system ‘historical impressionism’.³ In any case, it seems that, as beautiful as this model is and as fruitful as it was for the historical study of attitudes to death, it is of little if any relevance for the Jewish approaches to this topic. Moreover, no attempt has yet been made to present an overview of the Jewish attitudes to death, and I would now like to rectify this. I am not, however, aiming at presenting here a comprehensive bibliography of the topic.⁴

What I am offering, as an initial proposal, are the coordinates for what, some fifty years ago, Joseph Weiss termed ‘the evolutions of the death-sensation in the Jewish spirit and religion’.⁵ The imagery of coordinates is especially apt for this topic, since it reflects a broad view of a map with different regions, and not of rigid and one-dimensional focal points or definitions. The rich and diverse Jewish culture, which has existed in some sort of continuity for many centuries, contains a broad diversity of approaches to death.⁶ As I will show, the coordinates that I will suggest function as axes at different points along which the phenomena are to be examined. The conception of axes is necessary because of the great diversity of sources, regions, and periods that this culture encompasses, and because of its links with neighbouring cultures, primarily the pagan, Christian, and Muslim. These ties are expressed in the conceptions of death and accompanying customs. I will present several conceptions, some theoretical, and others anchored in the historical context.

1 Death as a reality and as an idea

The main distinction that we should make is the one between death as an idea and death as a reality. Needless to say, reading about death and related issues such as the afterlife, is something totally different than experiencing the death of someone near or dear. This distinction is relevant also for Jewish literature about death. Death as an idea appears almost everywhere. The following are the main types of sources in which shared or singular conceptions of death can be characterized: the Bible, rabbinic literature (while noting the distinction between the Land of Israel and Babylonia),⁷ geonic literature, ethical teaching and homiletic literature (philosophical, rabbinical, kabbalistic, and that of the Ashkenazi pietists), Jewish philosophy, kabbala,⁸ halakha, custom, piyyuṭ (liturgical hymns) and poetry,⁹ popular literature in Jewish languages,¹⁰ and material culture.¹¹ Wherever Jews lived we find texts on death, the most prominent among these being the specific conceptions of death found in the Land of Israel and Babylonia, Philo, Byzantium, Ashkenaz in the period of the Ashkenaz pietists, Spain, Italy, Poland, and the Islamic lands. Most of these belong to the realm of death as an idea. Yet there are also texts that belong to the realm of death as a reality, or combining both aspects. These are mainly the genre that comprises books for the sick and the dying which I will discuss below.

2 Presence and absence

There is an occupation with death in all the centres just listed, which include almost all the spheres of Jewish culture and its literary corpus (possibly similar to the standing of this topic in human culture as a whole). Notwithstanding this, such an occupation co-exists with a significant Jewish cultural choice, concerning the marginality of death. This marginality finds expression in the fact that in almost every realm of Jewish creativity the occupation with death is partial and generally brief. As well phrased by Meir Benayahu, in his important study of death customs, ‘everyone is present in times of joy and no one is present in times of sorrow or grief’.¹² This is not necessarily true for some of the public Jewish mourning customs, such as the shiv‘a, which is sometimes crowded,¹³ but it is certainly true for the study of death in Judaism, which is still in its initial stages, especially in comparison with the study of death in other cultures, mainly western.

3 A society between time, space and texts

Jewish attitudes towards death are delineated by four parameters: society, time, space and texts. In Jewish culture (as well as in other cultures) death is a social phenomenon.¹⁴ It is forbidden, for example, to leave a dying person alone. Moreover, the ritual of saying the qaddish, which is central among the Jewish mourning rituals, can be said only in a minyan, that is a group of ten men. One needs to have a community in order to mourn properly or to mark properly days of remembrance (by reciting the qaddish), such as the yearly yahrzeit. Time is another factor – mourning rituals being timed for seven days (shiv‘a), thirty days, a year and then the annual day of remembrance. The dead are mentioned (by saying texts in synagogue) at certain times of the year – Yom Kippur and the three festivals. Again this can be done, according to the Jewish law, only when there is a minyan. The space of the dead is the cemetery, which is the most minor factor of the four. The space of the mourners is the home (during the shiv‘a) and then the synagogue, where the qaddish is recited.

4 Marginality and centrality

Jewish culture’s basic position regarding death and the dead is in various respects to accord them a marginal standing. The occupation with death is marginal, and in some ways so are the dead themselves. Using the four parameters given above, death is marginal in time – mourning is structured and restricted to certain times and therefore is not supposed to be expressed in other times; regarding space – the dead are put in the cemetery which is almost always isolated and marginal; and, in the matter of society, death is also socially marginal, and has only a limited place in the Jewish community. These are different categories, but they share this marginality.

In the Garden of Eden narrative, death is presented as a punishment for the primordial sin. The central expression of this marginality is the impurity of the corpse, which is the deepest form of impurity: the corpse is the progenitor of impurity, from which all ritual impurity is derived. And (since the time of the talmudic rabbis) cemeteries have been located on the outskirts of settlements, as a marginal quarter whose inhabitants are marginal.¹⁵ The Bible mentions other burial possibilities, including family burial, in which the situation is different, but beginning in the talmudic period, and especially since the medieval period, Jewish cemeteries acquired a nature similar to what we now know.

Jewish mourning practices restrict the possibility of expressing any connection with the dead, and they are limited to fixed and delineated times and modes. Nonetheless, there are periods and places in which death has a more noticeable presence. The main (and almost sole) day in which the presence of death is palpable is Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), in the liturgical context and ancillary philosophical conceptions of which much attention is paid to death. This is because of its perception as a day of judgement, and because the prayer includes the Yizkor ceremony of mentioning the dead. The Yom Kippur prayer service is perceived as encompassing both the living and the dead, in which the living pray and can be of avail to the dead, and the dead, too, come to the synagogue. R. Moshe Isserles cites R. Ya‘aqov Weil: ‘Therefore Yom Ha-Kippurim is in the plural – for the living and for the dead.’¹⁶

The High Holy Days, of which Yom Kippur is part, are also the period in which the cemetery has a more central place than the rest of the year, and it is customary to visit the cemetery and conduct various rites, such as that of encompassing the cemetery with a string that is afterwards used as wicks for the Sabbath candles. Elsewhere I have set forth eight cultural functions of the Jewish cemetery: neighbourhood, gate or portal, communication centre, stage, setting or backdrop, refuge, trap, and centre of identity¹⁷. Each of these roles reflects a different aspect of the cemetery’s cultural significance.¹⁸ The cemetery is what Michel Foucalt called ‘heterotopia’, that is, ‘another space’, one that is beyond any place, but nevertheless possible, specifically because it is one that encompasses all places. As such, the cemetery reflects social values in a complex fashion.

5 Punishment or desideratum

Most Jewish conceptions view death as something daunting and disheartening, which is to be avoided or delayed, if possible. Thus, it is related that Moses and King David sought to defer their deaths, to the extent that the Angel of Death, who executes the divine sentence, had to outwit them in order to fulfill his mission. At the other end of this scale is the notion that death (to be precise, mystical death) can be the culmination of a theurgic or unio-mystical process. Such, for example, was the death of R. Simeon bar Yoḥai, as related in the Zohar. The death of Moses, too, at least according to some conceptions, possessed such a dimension, but more prominent in his case is the legitimization – rare in the Jewish sources – of expressing fear of one’s own death.

A phenomenon of another sort, namely, choosing death, also exists in instances of Qiddush ha-Shem (martyrdom), both in practice – for example, during the time of the Crusades, as we learn from the important book by Shmuel Shepkaru¹⁹ – and as a matter of principle, as in the spiritual aspiration to die a martyr’s death for the ‘Sanctification of the Name of God’ that appears in the mystical diary of R. Joseph Caro, Maggid Mesharim.²⁰

6 Disintegration and combination

Death is perceived as the disintegration of an integral wholeness: ‘And the dust returns to the ground as it was, and the lifebreath returns to God who bestowed it’ (Eccl 12:7). This dismantling is not total, and according to most understandings, a certain connection remains between the material part that is consumed after death and interred in the grave, and the spirit or soul, and this bond turns the grave into the address of the deceased’s personality. When people desire to address a deceased person, they usually go to his or her grave. For example, the book Ma‘ane Lashon, that was printed in scores of editions and with textual variations in Central Europe beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, includes personal prayers to be recited at the grave of relatives, teachers, rabbis, and the like. This is a point of connection between the dead and a certain space, their space, which becomes also a partial space for the people who come to visit them.

This disintegration is not only between the body and the soul, but also between the different parts of the soul. Thus, for example, Sefer Ḥasidim explains what enables the deceased to appear in a dream:

324. If two good people took an oath or pledged together during their lifetime, that if one were to die he would tell his fellow how it is in that world, whether in a dream or awake – if in a dream, the spirit will come and whisper in the ear of the living, or in his mind, as the angel of dreams does. And if they took an oath to speak with the other while awake, the dead will ask of the appointed angel to represent him as a garbed figure, and the dissipated spirit will come together, until he speaks with his fellow whom he promised to inform. How can he check that what appears to him is not a demon and a destructive agent? He is to adjure him, which would not be a case of uttering the name of Heaven in vain. Furthermore, the dead cannot mention [the name of God] Yah, because by it this world and the world to come were created, for he [the deceased] is beyond these worlds. And it is written [Ps 115...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Editors’ Foreword
• List of Acknowledgements
• The Contributors and Summaries of their Essays
• Section 1: Death in Life
• Section 2: Texts in Society
• Section 3: Re-Placing the Dead
• Indexes