I shared the following story a year ago, but I thought of it again when reading a stunning piece in the Forward by my GetReligion colleague Ira Rifkin. The headline there is simple, but unforgettable: “The day my son’s ashes arrived in the mail.”
Journalists who cover the religion beat know that it includes everything from national politics to local-church politics, from sports to the arts, from fights over ancient doctrines to the latest trends in digital worship. But it’s important to remember the degree to which religious rites, traditions, doubts and questions help define many of the gateway moments in human life.
Before I share a few passages from Ira’s must-read essay, let me return to something that happened in the early 1980s when I was working for the now-deceased Charlotte News. I was writing a story about the last local church that was resisting the use of a hymnal prepared for the merger that created the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
It was a battle between the “red book” and the modernized “green book.” Here is a flashback:
At this Charlotte church, I met with an older man who led the fight to retain the “red book.” He had a long list of reasons — historical and theological — for why the old hymnal and prayer book was superior to the new. …
When the interview was over, we walked the center aisle toward the foyer and main exit. At the last pew, he stopped and picked up a battered red hymnal. Tears began running down his cheeks.
“I married my wife with this book,” he said. “Our children were baptized with this book. I buried my wife with this book. … They are not going to take it away from me.”
This man was wrestling with issues that transcended logic. He was dealing with the basic building blocks of his life and faith, his past and his present. This was an issue that involved both head and heart.
This brings us to overture of Ira’s piece for the Forward:
The ashes came to my home in Maryland from Southern California, shipped via special delivery by the aptly named funeral home Ashes to Ashes. They arrived encased in a rectangular, polished, dark wood box about the size of a loaf of artisan bread. I immediately opened it to make sure it was not empty. It was not.
The child I loved, worried about and cried over for more than 54 years was physically reduced to a powdery dark gray substance. I was reminded of a fine black sand beach.
How could this be my Brady? But it was.
Brady had died three weeks earlier. Cancer killed him following a three-year struggle. In accordance with his request, he was cremated rather than buried, the customary bodily disposal route for Jews, even secular ones.
This is a cancer story, but it is also a COVID-19 story — since the pandemic has affected everything linked to hospitals, funerals, burials and, yes, delayed cremations.
But that isn’t what Rifkin is facing, in this essay.
This is a personal story, but there are moments in it that point to larger issues that touch life in specific religious communities. There are links to valid religion-beat stories about the major gateways in life. Read the following carefully:
Handling your child’s ashes stirs the ultimate parental pain. For me it also triggered an exploration of my feelings about death and cremation. In short, it stirred a clash between my Jewish DNA and the non-traditional Jewish views to which I’m now drawn. …
Jews have always been the burying kind, stretching back, we’re taught, to Abraham and his purchase of the Cave of the Patriarchs burial ground in modern-day Hebron. Burial is ingrained in our cultural make up. I still plan on ending up in a hole in the ground next to my wife, because that’s what I’ve been bred to expect and revere.
Cemeteries exude a spiritual quality for me. I sense a heightened energy when visiting one, a transpersonal connection to life’s continuum. The cemetery need not be a Jewish one for me to feel this way. A large military cemetery will do.
However the energy in a Jewish cemetery, particularly a historic one, connects me to my history, my family, my people, the very core of my being. I luxuriate in this feeling of awe.
Like many Americans, Ira is looking through a personal lens that includes the religious rites and beliefs of his past as well as his exploration of new beliefs in another tradition.
This is not rare. [A personal note: I was raised Southern Baptist, but 23 years ago my wife and I converted, with our children, to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. For several years in Baltimore, I stood in our Orthodox parish choir between a convert raised as an Orthodox Jew (he is now a sub-deacon) and a lawyer (now a priest) who was once in the Assemblies of God and worked with Pat Robertson.]
Readers should not how Ira — even in telling his own story — includes information about modern trends and ancient roots. All of this factors into his own thoughts and emotions as he wrestles with his pain and loss.
Here is one additional passage.
There are no reliable figures on the numbers of American Jews currently choosing cremation over burial. Overall, though, just under 50% of all Americans chose to be cremated rather than buried in 2019, according to the Cremation Association of North America.
Nor, it seems, are there explicit Hebrew Bible prohibitions against cremation. Respect for the bodies of the dead, is, of course engrained in the tradition. I learned this through my participation in a synagogue chevra kadisha ritually preparing male bodies for burial.
But a clear prohibition is missing. Apparently burial is more a strongly recommended minhag, or custom, than a firm biblical commandment. Some historians say the custom likely stem’s from our tribe’s ancient desire to preserve our ways by distancing ourselves from non-Jewish practices, cremation being one of them.
I don’t believe in any form of bodily resurrection, so in this regard cremation is not an issue for me. Still, as I’ve said, my cultural Jewish bonds remain strong; I won’t eat pork or shellfish, for example.
And I’m a pushover for ritual. Religious bells and whistles move me, regardless of the faith involved. A Jewish funeral can be high ritual. Commercial cremation from which all mourners are excluded is decidedly not.
But here’s what enabled me to embrace Brady’s decision.
Please, click here and read it all.
MAIN IMAGE: Photo by Ira Rifkin, from the essay at the Forward.
FIRST IMAGE: From the Neptune Society page entitled “Judaism and Cremation — No Longer So Taboo.”