Rabbi Hannah Orden

You Shall Love the Lord your God

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and with all your might. (Deuteronomy 6:4)

Growing up in a Classical Reform congregation on the South Side of Chicago in the late 1950s and 1960s, I never once heard the word halakhah.  It was only much later that I learned this term for the elaborate system of Jewish Law that governs every aspect of the lives of observant Jews.  But even in our devoutly secular home, odd vestiges of halakhah remained.  My mother cooked bacon every morning, served shrimp cocktail to guests, and packed her children’s lunchboxes with sliced ham on white bread, but she would never under any circumstances cook pork.  That was her line in the sand.

The services at our temple included a choir, an organ, and very little Hebrew.  Huge sections of the traditional service had been removed.  And yet, this worship – sanitized, assimilated, and truncated as it was – moved me.  The words that touched my soul most deeply come right after the Shema.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.  This was and continues to be the commandment I am bound by.

How to express that love of God has been a lifelong search.  Each year or I strive to fulfill that mitzvah more fully – to treat every human being with dignity and respect because each of us is made in the image of God; to guard and tend the natural world, the Garden of Eden that is our home; to cherish the gift of life that I have been given; to try to live fully present in each moment; to keep an awareness that I am connected to every other human being and to all of creation, an awareness that permits me to share in the joy of others and also requires me to be with them in their sorrow and pain.

There is a Hasidic saying that every person should keep two notes in her pockets. In one pocket there is a note that says, “I am dust and ashes.”  In the other pocket is a note that says, “The world was created for me.”  And this too is part of how I attempt to fulfill the command: You shall love the Lord your God…  I try to remember how very small and insignificant I am – that I exist only for God’s glory, not for my own importance.  And at the same time I try to remember that my unique presence in this world has value and is an expression of something Divine.

Over time, as I have become more informed about the ways that our tradition has understood the concept of mitzvot or commandments, I have struggled with whether I am bound by these elaborate and restrictive laws.  The idea of being bound to something greater than my own needs and desires is appealing, but much of Jewish Law seems restrictive and designed to separate Jews from other people.  In that sense it conflicts with what I experience as my primary commandment to love God.  My relationship with commandments is further complicated by the fact that under Jewish law, as a woman, I am not bound by many of the mitzvot.  Women are exempt from time-bound positive commandments such as prayer or putting on tefillin.  Once I make the shift to include myself as a woman, I have already stretched the boundaries of the Rabbi’s worldview so much that everything seems open to question.

The following reflections are the experiences of one woman, raised in a liberal, secular Jewish home, who came of age in the era of the Vietnam War and the Second Wave of feminism, and somehow found her way to being ordained as a rabbi at the age of 57.  This woman, just two generations removed from the shtetl of Eastern Europe, had once been a girl who could twirl a hula hoop on any part of her body, could maneuver a small silver ball forward, backward, and forward again on a labyrinth board, had a world of experience laid open before her that her ancestors had only dreamed of, and yet never stopped yearning for something that had been lost when her grand parents across the ocean to America.

These essays are efforts to make sense of where I come from, where I stand now, and how I continue to search for ways to understand the commandment: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all you soul, and with all your might.

The Good Enough Sukkah

On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the produce of the land, you shall celebrate the feast of Adonai seven days…You shall dwell in booths for seven days. All native Israelites shall dwell in booths, that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am Adonai your God. (Leviticus 23:39-43)

When we lived in the city, I dreamed of building a sukkah, but we had no yard, no space big enough to make our own temporary booth.  We had friends who lived two blocks away who built a sukkah on the deck overlooking their back yard and invited us to help decorate it and eat a meal in it, and it seemed that would have to be good enough.  Then in May 1995 we bought our first home, a house with a wraparound porch and a big backyard, the perfect place to build a sukkah.

The possibility was tantalizing.  Neither my husband nor I is much good with tools, but how hard could it be?  The summer passed, both lazily and too quickly.  Our daughter returned to school, the High Holidays approached, and we had made no progress toward preparing to build a sukkah.  By late September, the only evidence of my intention was that I had bought some gourds at the farmer’s market.  On the eve of Sukkot, I hung the gourds on the porch and my daughter and I ate our dinner on the wicker couch beneath the gourds.  My husband was still at work.

At the time I knew nothing about the intricate Jewish laws that specify the parameters of what can legally be considered a sukkah.  Much later, I would study the tractate of the Talmud that assesses whether a sukkah can be built on top of a bed, on a roof, or in a tree.  The Talmud goes on to discuss whether the walls can be made of branches from a living tree and whether they can be made from a live animal.  Rabbi Meir says no, but that raises the question of whether it is because the animal might run away or whether it is because the animal might die and fall over, thereby no longer attaining the height required for the wall of a sukkah.  The Talmud actually discusses whether it would be acceptable to make the walls of a sukkah from a live elephant because, even if it fell over dead, its carcass would still be tall enough.  Although elephants were not indigenous to the land of Canaan, presumably Greek and Syrian conquerors came with elephants, though elephants don’t roam free in the Greek isles either.

That night in May 1995, I passed our dinner through the kitchen window to my young daughter and we ate under the gourds.  I had some notion that a sukkah could not be under a solid roof; I remembered something about being able to see the stars.  Our sukkah was under our tenant’s apartment.  But we ate outside with gourds over our   heads, and I was happy.  That was the only time during the eight days of Sukkot that we ate in our ‘sukkah,’ but it was a step, and I began to refer to it as ‘the good enough sukkah.’

The following summer my parents paid to have a small deck built off of our dining room. For this job I hired Mike, a man who lived across the street and knew how to fix or build just about anything.  As the end of summer drew near, I asked Mike if he could build the frame for a sukkah.  Mike was Irish Catholic, so I was surprised to discover that he had already learned how to build a sukkah when he worked for a Jewish family in Newton.  He took the task seriously, making sure he finished it in time for the holiday.  Our sukkah had no walls of any kind, no live trees, no donkeys, no elephants, not even lattice, or canvas or burlap.  I liked it the way, because we could see our yard, more like a meadow at the time, and the trees that surrounded it.

I laid branches over the roof so that we could have seen the stars if we had been further from the lights of the city, and friends came to help decorate with construction paper chains, apples and oranges nestled in colored pipe cleaners, and strings of popcorn and cranberries.  I thought it was the most beautiful sukkah I had ever seen.  In fact, I liked it so much I left it up all winter, even though I knew enough about Jewish practice to know that a sukkah is supposed to be temporary.  But there was the advantage, when autumn rolled around again, that the sukkah was already up and ready to go.  All we needed were fresh gourds and apples and the determination to eat outside on cold October evenings, bundled in our winter coats.  I made hot stews to keep us warm and only gave up when it began to rain steadily for the remainder of the eight-day holiday.

I took the sukkah down that year, or rather asked Mike to take it down.  I knew I should help him to get a sense of how it went together so I could do it myself next time, but the weather was nasty and Mike lived across the street.  I thought he would always be there to construct our sukkah.  I thought I had solved the sukkah problem.

The following summer Mike added a lattice wall to one side of our deck, shielding us from the view of our neighbor’s cement mixer.  He used some of the 2x4s under the deck that had been part of the sukkah, but that seemed okay since this would now be one wall of the sukkah.  At the end of the summer, I again asked Mike to put up the sukkah, but he was busy with another job and was not available.  My husband and I pulled out the remaining 2x4s from under the deck, but could not figure out how to turn them into a hut.  Sadly, I let go of the idea that we would have a sukkah that year.

The following year Mike and his family moved out of state, and I realized I was going to have to go it alone.  I went online to look for a prefab sukkah and discovered “The Sukkah Project,” the brainchild of a kind soul who has taken pity on all of us un-handy Jews who long to build a sukkah and don’t have the skills.  The Sukkah Project provides a kit which is an economical collection of metal fasteners and screws that can be shipped easily in a cardboard box.  All we had to do was go to Home Depot, buy more 2x4s, and assemble the whole thing using the enclosed klutz-proof instructions.

The instruction book assured us that the first year is the hardest because you have to permanently attach the metal braces to the wood.  In subsequent years, all you have to do is slide the 2x4s into the right spots.  Sitting in our sukkah that year, I had become a walking advertisement for the wonders of the Sukkah Project and its klutz-proof instructions.  We would now be able to reassemble our sukkah by ourselves each year. The wooded area behind our house would always provide plenty of branches for the roof, and the local farmers market would offer a fine selection of gourds, apples, and flowers.  We were all set.

Two years ago I spent the fall semester in Jerusalem as part of my rabbinical training.  My husband joined me for the High Holidays and Sukkot.  Yom Kippur was an amazing experience – 13 hours of intense, ecstatic praying, singing, and dancing with a group started by the family of one of my teachers.  I stayed all day, knowing I would never experience anything like this again.  It was unforgettable, by turns joyful and heartbreaking, a memory that I will carry with me into every Yom Kippur for the rest of my life.

By the end of the day, I was completely drained, and we fell into bed that night, longing for rest, drifting quickly into sleep.  Some time later, we were startled awake by the sounds of hammering and banging above our heads.  We wondered aloud what on earth was going on, and then as I came to full consciousness, I said, “They are building a sukkah.”  Sure enough, the religious family who lived in the apartment above mine was taking seriously the halakhic requirement to begin building a sukkah immediately after breaking the fast on Yom Kippur.  One of my teachers had suggested that on Yom Kippur we pre-enact our own death.   We wear white burial shrouds, and do not eat, drink, bathe or have sex.  In the safety of community, we face the terror of mortality, the awesome awareness that we are not in control of who will live and who will die, who by fire and who by water.  And when it is over, we break the fast, return to life, and begin to build.

It’s a beautiful idea, but that night, lying awake in Jerusalem, I wondered whether maybe it would be just as well to re-enter life and begin to build in the morning.

During the following days, small temporary huts sprouted up everywhere – in restaurants, on roofs, in backyards, front yards, side yards, parks and schools.  Anywhere there was a little bit of space.  We did not have space to build a sukkah, so we celebrated the holiday with my mother’s cousins in Tel Aviv.  I told everyone what I had learned about making the walls from donkeys and elephants.  The children were delighted and wanted to know if you could make a walls from stuffed animals.  We decided that should be fine, since they would not die and fall over.

There is a famous Reform response to the question of whether one can use a tent as a sukkah.  The answer is that a tent cannot be a sukkah because, although it is temporary, it is not open to the sky.  The irony is that the huts we build are supposed to represent the structures the Israelites lived in when they wandered in the wilderness, and those were surely tents, not huts.  But the reform movement, despite breaking with many long-standing Jewish laws and traditions, comes down on the side of thousands of years of huts, strong enough to withstand an ordinary wind, but able to be blown over by a strong wind.

I disagree.  If a family wants to leave the warmth and comfort of their home, with its solid walls and illusion of permanence, and pitch a tent in their yard, if they want to hang a few gourds and paper chains inside the tent and eat a meal or even sleep a night or two, I call that a “good enough” sukkah.

If It Be Your Will

The second day of Shavuot fell on Shabbat in 2009.  I was leading services at a senior residence where there had been no service for the first day of Shavuot, so I decided to chant the special Shavuot Torah reading for Shavuot on the second day.  The reading includes The Ten Commandments.  Usually when I chant Torah, I pass out books, so the residents can follow along, either in Hebrew or in English. But this time, I asked them to just listen to the sound of the words.

Shavuot, originally an agricultural festival celebrating the first fruits of the harvest, over time has transformed into a commemoration of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.  “Something astonishing happened there,” I told my congregation, the 10 -12 devoted souls who made the effort to get out of bed, get dressed and come downstairs to hear Torah every two weeks.  “According to Exodus 19:15, the Israelites heard lightning and saw thunder.  They stood at the foot of the mountain and experienced revelation.”  I asked my group to just listen, even if they didn’t understand Hebrew, to take in these words, like hearing lightning.

After I had chanted The Ten Commandments and we had put away the Torah, we talked about revelation.  Martin Buber asserts that revelation is not a historical event that happened once thousands of years ago, but rather is an ongoing potential. God’s voice is still speaking at every moment if only we are open to hear.

That evening my husband and I went to hear Leonard Cohen perform in concert.  Cohen, now in his 70s, had been one of the poets of my generation, the one who spoke most directly to my heart and soul.  He had not performed a concert for many years, and I was thrilled that I was able to procure two tickets in the second row of the mezzanine.  At my rabbinical school there were several other avid Cohen fans, but they could not attend the concert because it would mean traveling downtown before sundown, which would mark the end of Shabbat and the end of the holiday of Shavuot.  I do travel on Shabbat, and even if I didn’t, this is exactly the sort of rule I would be willing to bend for something I considered holy.

My experience of the concert felt more like prayer than entertainment.  Leonard Cohen began most of his songs kneeling with his head bent, as if he were singing to himself or to God, rather than to us.  Sometimes he sang directly to his musicians or his backup singers, eventually turning his attention to the audience almost as if he were surprised to find us there with him, a reluctant idol, communicating with posture and glance that he did not want to be worshiped.
At moments, I found myself sitting with my hands pressed together, barely breathing, feeling myself in the presence of revelation.  God speaks through this man, I am almost sure of that.  At the end of each song, I did not feel an urge to applaud so much as to whisper words of gratitude.

At intermission, I told my husband that I was still waiting for some of the songs I love best.  I spoke the names of the songs out loud, the names of early songs that evoked a time when I was young and our country sizzled with the tension of possibility, and the names of later songs that took on new meaning as I moved to toward becoming a rabbi, songs that tap into a well of spirit that does not belong to Leonard Cohen, nor to me, but touches something each person who hears – something that might be called revelation.

After intermission, Cohen sang Sisters of Mercy; he sang Suzanne; he sang Hallelujah, the song covered by so many artists that it has become woven into the fabric of our culture, so familiar and pervasive that most people don’t even know he wrote it.  The music was nourishing, satisfying as a table laid before me, but I was still waiting, holding my breath, wanting my cup to run over.  The concert was almost over.  Could it be that he would walk away without this last offering?

Then he stood on the nearly dark stage and spoke.  “This is more of a prayer than a song,” he said in that deep, gravelly voice, and I found myself wondering, again, how that voice, barely able to carry a tune, more chant than melody, continues to move me so.  “I’m going to say the first lines,” he continued, “and then the Webb sisters will sing the rest.

If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will

Cohen’s words faded out, and the two women began to sing, each voice beautiful in its own right; the harmony they created almost too exquisite to bear.  I began to cry.  How could there be such beauty, such a cry of the soul, without a God to hear it?

If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

Does every artist – singer, painter, actor, writer, poet – feel this humility?  This doubt?  This hope?  May it be God’s will to let me sing, paint, act, put words on paper.  May I be a vehicle for Gods’ expression in the world.  May it not be about me; not about fame or fortune, not even approval or love.  May it be revelation.

For about a week at the beginning of February 2008, my father disappeared.  I had not spoken to him for a while, but that was not unusual.  At the age of 91 he was a very busy man.  As an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, he had an office in a beautiful new building a block from the apartment where he had lived for fifty years.  His floor to ceiling windows looked out at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, and he went there nearly every day to check e-mail, connect with colleagues, and continue his research in linear programming and systems analysis.  He was also active in Israel-Palestine peace work and had a lady friend with whom he went out to the theater, movies, and his favorite jazz club – the Velvet Lounge.

I had tried to reach him a couple of times over the weekend, and when I had not heard back from him by Wednesday, I was concerned, but not really worried.  Driving home on Wednesday afternoon, I resolved to track him down that evening.  I tried his apartment one more time and discovered that his voice mailbox was full.  At that point I started to worry.  I called my brother to see if he had heard from Dad and learn that David had also been trying to reach him.  He had left a message with some exciting news, and had been sure that Dad would call back, but he had not.  With mounting apprehension, I called my father’s lady friend, who answered with good cheer, saying, “I have a friend of yours sitting in my kitchen.”

“Can I speak to him?” I asked.

When my father got on the phone, he said, “what’s up?” in a tone that suggested that he couldn’t understand why I was calling him at Petey’s house.

“David and I were a little worried,” I replied.  “We’ve both been trying to reach you and you haven’t returned our calls.”

“Oh.”  He sounded a bit like a little boy who was caught trying to get away with something.  “Well, actually, I’ve been in the hospital.”  Reluctantly, he doled out the details.  He had been diagnosed three years before with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, which he assured me was a very slow growing cancer that had not affected him until recently.  In the past six months it had become much more aggressive, and his doctors had recommended chemotherapy.  The risks of chemotherapy at the age of 91 are considerable; however, because my father had the strength and quality of life of a much younger man, the doctors believed it was worth taking the chance.

I listened to my father’s story with a mixture of anger and sorrow.  The anger was at being shut out.  How could he not have told us?  Was he trying to protect us from worry or was he trying to protect himself from being seen as ‘sick’?  Or both?  If I had known he had leukemia, I would have surely visited and called more often.  And maybe that was exactly what he wanted to avoid – solicitousness.  But how terrible, I thought, to have to make such a life and death decision alone.  And that was the sorrow.  I consoled myself with the idea that perhaps he had consulted with my aunt, his sister-in-law, who is a physician.  Perhaps it was only his children that he wanted to protect.

The evening that I reached him at Petey’s house, he had just returned home from six days of chemotherapy in the hospital. He assured me that he felt just fine and there was no need to be concerned.  That was Wednesday evening.  On Friday morning, my brother called.  He had just heard from my aunt who had informed him that my father had collapsed and had been taken by ambulance to the hospital.  He was conscious and would probably be fine, but my brother had decided to get on the next plane Chicago to see what was going on.

I decided to stay put and wait until my brother arrived and could give me more information.  My brother had told me that Dad had gone to his beloved Shakespeare Theater the night before to see Othello, and I was mostly feeling annoyed with him for doing too much after having chemotherapy.  Chemo is hard on anyone, and a 91-year-old surely should take it easy for a while.  I was hoping that he’d collapsed because he was weak from chemo and had done too much too quickly.  A few days rest would probably get him back on his feet.

By the afternoon, however, my fears were mounting and I had not heard from anyone.  My brother was still en route, so I called the hospital.  I reached a nurse in the ER who told me that my father had pneumonia and they were trying to control it with IV antibiotics.  There was serious concern due to his age, his recent treatment with chemotherapy, and the underlying leukemia, and it was not clear whether his body was responding to the antibiotics.  He was still conscious but was having trouble breathing.  They wanted to put in a breathing tube to give him a better chance to fight the infection, and he had agreed.  The breathing tube required that he be sedated.  I told the nurse that my brother was on his way and asked whether they could wait until David arrived so he could speak to my father.  At first she agreed but soon called back to say they felt the breathing tube was necessary and could not wait.

By the time my brother reached the hospital, the situation had become very serious.  My father had not responded to the antibiotics, and the infection had spread through his body in a condition called septic shock.  It was not clear whether he would live through the night.  I made plans to fly to Chicago early the next morning.  My brother called at 5 A.M.  He had been up all night, sitting by our father’s bedside.  Dad was still alive, but David wanted to prepare me for the possibility that he might die before I arrived in Chicago.

I took a taxi straight from the airport to the hospital where my father was still breathing with the help of the breathing tube.  His face was a frozen mask, as if he had already died, but when I held his hand, it was warm.  We spoke with doctors and nurses who asked whether we wanted to remove the breathing tube and let our father die.  There was nothing more they could do for him.  The antibiotics had not helped, and his body was simply too weak to fight off the infection.  One kind doctor said that if it were his father, he would want to wait a little longer.  Only afterwards did I realize that he wanted to give us time to adjust to the reality of our father’s death more than he was offering any actual hope for recovery.

My father’s vital signs were decreasing very slowly, so my brother decided to go back to the apartment to sleep.  I sat with my father, holding his hand, talking to him a little, but mostly just sitting with him.  I found the warmth of his hand comforting.  After a while, the doctors and nurse suggested that it might be time to remove the breathing tube and allow him to die.  I called my brother to tell him what was happening, and he said he was on his way back to the hospital, so we could decide when he arrived.  My father’s organs were shutting down, and he died just as my brother came into the room.

We called my aunt and my father’s woman friend, and they came over to say their goodbyes.  The hospital said the body could stay in the room for two hours before being taken to the morgue.  When the others are ready to leave, I decided to stay.  I needed some time alone to say goodbye.  I talked to my father.  I told him I loved him.  I said the things that I needed to say.  But every time I tried to leave the room, I started to sob and could not walk away.  What stopped me was knowing that in Jewish tradition a body is not supposed to be left alone until it is buried.  I could not bear the thought of my father’s body being taken to the morgue and left there alone.  I did not know what to do.  Most people in my family did not care about Jewish traditions, and we had not even discussed whether we would bury my father or cremate him.

There was no telephone in the room, and my cell phone had no charge left, so I couldn’t even call my husband.  I went out to talk to the nurse who had cared for my dad.  Her shift was ending, and she was about to go home, but when I explained how difficult it was for me to leave my father’s body, she offered to help me find a Jewish funeral home in Chicago that could pick up the body so it would not be taken to the hospital morgue.  She went online and found names and phone numbers for several Jewish funeral homes.  She brought a phone into the room and connected it for me.  She also told me that they could give me more time to figure out what I wanted to do before they removed my father’s body.  Her compassion was exactly what I needed at that moment.

By this time it was around eight o’clock on Saturday evening.  No one was in the offices of the funeral homes, but I left messages, and waited for someone to call me back.  While I waited, I considered the options.  For years before my mother died, she had made it known that she wanted to be cremated.  She knew that cremation was forbidden by Jewish tradition, but she loved sunlight and did not want to be buried under the ground.  My father, by contrast, had never wanted to talk about dying.  When my mother was discussing her wishes, I sometimes asked him “What about you, Dad?  And he’d answered with an edge of irritation in his voice, “I’ll be dead; it won’t matter to me, so it’s up to you.”

Now he was dead, and it was up to us.  In the five years since my mother had died, I had started rabbinical school, and now, in my third year, Jewish tradition held much more weight for me.  I also miss having a grave for my mother, a place to visit and talk to her and remember her.  On the other hand, our family was dispersed.  I lived in Boston, my brother in Maryland, and my sister in Israel.  There seemed no sense in burying Dad in Chicago, a place where none of us lived and now had little reason to visit.  The only place I could imagine burying him was in the cemetery in New Jersey where my husband’s father and my mother’s parents are buried.  Since my mother-in-law still lives in New Jersey, this was a place that we visited regularly.  However, I knew that if we buried him there, it would be difficult for my brother and sister to visit his grave.

When one of the funeral directors called back, I discussed various options with him.  One possibility was for them to pick up my father’s body and take it to the funeral home until my siblings and I could decide what we wished to do.  Another option was for the funeral home to ship the body to a funeral home in New Jersey for burial there.  I told the funeral director that I needed time to think and would call back.  I then called my brother and explained to him how I was feeling.  He said that he preferred cremation, but he would respect my wishes and go along with whatever I decided.  I also called my husband.  I explained to him that I was physically and emotionally exhausted and could not imagine shipping my father’s body to New Jersey; flying east for a funeral attended only by me, my husband and our daughter; then flying back to Chicago for a memorial service with the rest of our family and my father’s friends.

Burial made much more sense when people lived in the same village for generations.  In our complex, modern world I just couldn’t make sense of it.  In the end, I allowed the hospital to take my father’s body to the morgue, giving me time to get some rest and discuss all of this with my brother and sister.

Late the next day my sister arrived from Israel with two of her daughters.  My sister told me and my brother that she felt strongly that she wanted my father cremated.  She lived far away and would never visit his grave in New Jersey, and she wanted to take some of his ashes back to Israel with her.  Her daughters took me aside and wept as they explained how terrible it would be for them if their grandfather was cremated.  Because their grandparents on their father’s side were Holocaust survivors, they couldn’t bear the thought of burning Jewish bodies.  They had been upset when my mother was cremated, but it was what she had wanted, so they had felt they had to accept the decision.  Since my father had expressed no preference, they vehemently objected to cremation.  They went on to say that Jewish tradition forbids cremation, and no one in Israel cremated their loved ones, even if they were not religious.  I told them that I shared their feelings, but really did not know what to do under the circumstances.  While we were talking, my brother and sister joined us.  My sister was adamant in her opposition to burial, despite her daughters’ objections.  Cremation seemed to be the only option.   It felt completely selfish to insist on burial, given my sister’s feelings.   If my father was cremated, each of us would have some of his ashes, and I consoled myself with the idea that I could bury my father’s and mother’s ashes together at the cemetery in New Jersey.

When I returned to school, I began to research sources in Jewish tradition related to burial in the earth and the prohibition on burning bodies.  The primary proof text for Jews burying their dead quickly is in the Book of Deuteronomy.  If a man is guilty of a capital offense and is put to death and you impale him on a stake, you must not let his corpse remain on the stake overnight but bury, you shall surely bury him the same day.  For an impaled body is an affront to God. (Deuteronomy 21:22-23)  The verse does not specifically forbid cremation, and, in fact, burning is one of the forms of capital punishment in the Torah.

Another verse in the Book of Samuel offers a glimpse into the ancient practice of secondary burial.  King Saul and his sons have been killed by the Philistines and their corpses have been hung on a wall.  When the inhabitants heard about what the Philistines had done to Saul, all their stalwart men set out and marched all night; they removed the bodies of Saul and his sons… and burned them.  They then took the bones and buried them… (I Samuel 31:11-13)

Archaeological evidence also supports the custom of secondary burial.  In this practice, bodies were left in caves until they decomposed, at which point the bones were placed in ossuaries and buried in the ground.  Despite the fact that Jewish tradition has developed over the centuries to mandate immediate burial in the ground, I felt that there was enough support for the idea of secondary burial, that burying some of my father’s ashes might be a solution that would satisfy my need to have a grave.

One day, when my husband and I were visiting his mother in New Jersey, I drove over to the cemetery to explore the possibility of burying parents’ ashes.  I was directed to the sales department, where I sat in the sales director’s office and explained my situation.  He listened carefully and responded, “It would be much more cost effective and easier if you placed your parents’ ashes in a niche in the Wall of Memory.”

“The Wall of Memory?”  I felt disoriented, as though I had wandered into the wrong cemetery.  “Is this a Jewish cemetery?” I asked.

He smiled an indulgent salesman smile.  “People think that Jews have to be buried in the ground, but the Torah says, From dust did you come and to dust you shall return.  You don’t have to be buried underground to return to dust.  A body will also return to dust in a crypt.

I wasn’t quite sure what to say.  My impulse was to laugh. Was he serious?

“Actually,” I said, “the Torah also says, Bury, thou shalt surely bury.

He ignored me and went on with his sales pitch.  “Even if you are only burying ashes, you have to purchase two separate plots.  The cost of each plot is $3,500.  You’re not allowed to bury the ashes yourself, so you would need to hire gravediggers.  Plus you need to purchase a double gravestone which would cost about $5,000.  A double niche in the Wall of Memory would only cost between $3,750 and $4,500, depending on how high the niche is placed in the wall.  The only additional cost is a minimal fee for placing the ashes in the niche.

“I really want a grave that I can visit.”

“Yes.” He seized on this aspect which he had neglected to mention.  “That is another advantage of the Wall of Memory.  You can visit in any weather, cold or rain, and it is always clean and dry.”

“I don’t really think – ”

“Have you ever visited our Wall of Memory?” he interrupted.

“No.”

“Let me show it to you.  You’ll see for yourself.”

He led me out of his office, past the chapel where a funeral was in progress, until, without leaving the building or stepping outside, we came to the clean, dry, sterile Wall of Memory.  First, we passed the crypts where entire coffins were placed for all eternity, and where, presumably, the bodies inside were slowly returning to dust.  Then we came to the smaller niches, large enough to hold an urn.  I stared, in horrified fascination, at this marble wall, on which were etched in stone the names of loved ones who had died, some too high to read clearly – the bargains slots.

I thanked the sales manager and escaped outdoors.  I left the building with the offices and chapels and the Wall of Memory and found my way to my grandparents’ graves.  I have always loved the section of the cemetery where my grand parents are buried.  It feels like a community, crowded and friendly.  Clearly, they were part of burial society, one of the first things immigrants established when they arrived in this country.  The names and dates on the graves honor the memories of a generation that left homes and families for this new world, who lived squeezed together in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side and moved to suburban New Jersey only after death.

I sat down on the grass and talked to my grandparents as I always do when I visit their graves.  I told them about my father’s death and my daughter’s first year at college.  I searched for two stones to place on their graves and pulled out some weeds.  I dug my fingers into the ground, felt the sun on my face, and breathed in the smell of grass and damp earth.  It was a beautiful spring day, and I was grateful for the expanse of blue sky and the warmth of the sun after a long winter.  But I have been to graveside funerals on the bitterest days of winter and visited graves in the pouring rain and that too felt good and right.

When I left the cemetery that day, I still did not know what I would do with my father’s ashes, but I knew for certain that I would not be placing them in a niche in the Wall of Memory.  Despite the sales manager’s assurances, I believe that From dust did you come and to dust you shall return cannot be taken so literally.  Human beings are part of the natural world, part of God’s creation, as much as darkness and light, sun and moon, earth and air, birds and beasts, fish of the sea, and crawling, swarming things.  Sometimes we forget.  And that is why we bury our dead – to remember who we are.

The Unanticipated Future

There is a book of midrash called Sifrei, which is commentary on the fourth book of the Torah – B’Midbar.  B’Midbar means ‘in the wilderness,’ and the whole book is about the Israelites wandering in the wilderness.  One midrash in Sifrei addresses a question that puzzled the ancient Rabbis.  If the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, why did they need to learn the laws that only pertained to people who were living in the Promised Land?  One might think that they only needed to learn the laws that apply outside the Land of Israel – for example, laws pertaining to the sacrificial offerings or laws of purity.  Yet, Moses teaches the People all of the laws – laws about bringing first fruits of the harvest to Jerusalem and laws about letting the land lie fallow in the sabbatical year.  The midrash suggests that there is a beautiful lesson in this.  The Torah teaches us that we must always be open to the possibility of a different future.

At Adult Education during the month of August, we studied the Book of Deuteronomy or Devarim in Hebrew).  Devarim is written in Moses’ voice, as his last words to the Israelites before they enter the Promised Land.   I am guessing that most of us have never stopped to think about how odd this is as the culmination of the Torah.  The entire Torah has been a narrative arc leading toward entering the Land.  From God’s promise to Abraham, to the Exodus from Egypt to the punishment that the first generation who left Egypt will not be allowed to enter the Land, we are always looking toward that goal.  So, you would think that the logical place for the story to end, if you wanted a nice, satisfying Hollywood ending, would be with the Israelites happily settled in the Promised Land.

But that is not what happens.  Scholars believe that the Book of Deuteronomy was written much later than the rest of the Torah, at a time when the authors were already aware of the possibility of exile from the Land.  So, they create a vision of how to live and worship and be in relationship with God outside the Land.  Some scholars go so far as to say that this perspective is responsible for the survival of the Jewish People.

Professor Jeffrey Tigay, author of the Jewish Publication Society’s commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy says, “It is not too much to say that the survival of Judaism owes much to the perception that the Promised Land is ahead of us but our duties to God are now.”     So, we have a Torah that leaves us in what a limenal place.  The word limenal is from ‘limen,’ the Latin word for the doorframe that defines the threshold between one space and another.  At the end of the Torah we are poised at a threshold, looking across the Jordan, toward a brighter future.  And this hope, this belief in possibility, is what sustains us for thousands of years.  The image is so powerful, it has been picked up by others who have needed to believe in the possibility of a brighter future.  Think of spirituals like – the River Jordan is deep and wide, Hallelujah, milk and honey on the other side.  Hallelujah!  Or the words of MLK the night he died.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!

His beautiful, inspiring words are straight out of the imagery of Moses and the Israelites, poised on the threshold, on the edge of possibility.

This theme of looking toward a better future runs throughout our traditional liturgy.  It is expressed in a yearning for a return to Zion and faith in the coming of the Messiah when all will live in peace.  I do not believe that those prayers are meant to be taken literally.  If we took them literally, we would all pick up and make aliyah to Israel.  The yearning for the Promised Land and the days of the Messiah is an expression of our faith in the possibility of on un-anticipated, perhaps un-imagined future.

Sometimes, it is hard for us to hold onto that sense of hopeful possibility.  Last spring we studied the book of Ecclesiastes – Kohelet in Hebrew.  There is nothing new under the sun, Kohelet. says.  Nothing humans do you makes any difference.  All is futile.  Most people in our group dismissed the author’s pessimism and despair.  Yet, it’s not unusual to hear people say similar things:  There will always be war; there will always be hatred; there will always be greed; that’s just human nature.  It will never change.  How many of us can honestly say that we have never felt hopelessness or despair when we open the morning newspaper and read story after story about the terrible ways human beings treat each other and our world?

So, perhaps that is why we have the Torah ending as we look over Jordan toward the Promised Land, reminding us again and again to hope for a future that defies our despair and our pessimism.

This spring I started reading a book called Stars of David by Abigail Pogrebin.  The subtitle is: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish.  It is a collection of interviews with well-known people who happen to be Jewish.  I was particularly moved an interview with Leonard Nimoy, an actor who is best-known for his role as Mr. Spock on Star Trek.  He grew up in an Orthodox family in Boston and was taught to keep a low profile so as not to become a target.  “Jew bastard,” was something I heard a lot,” he says.  In the mid-1990s he was invited to speak at a Star Trek Convention in Germany.  He had been invited several times before but he had never gone.  He went to his rabbi to ask advice, saying that he had been in Germany ten years earlier and hated being there. The rabbi asked whether the audience knew that he was Jewish, and he said that some did and some didn’t.  The rabbi responded: I think you should go and identify yourself as a Jew and let all these people who admire you discover that you’re Jewish.  And let them examine their own feelings about liking someone who’s a Jew.

Nimoy took his rabbi’s advice and decided to go.  This is how he describes the experience:  I went with the intention of finding the appropriate moment to say to this audience  ‘I am a Jew; how do you feel about that?’  I went somewhat confrontationally.  I had two days of presentations to the same audience and I was looking for the appropriate way to time this thing so it would be a climactic moment.  I thought, ‘I’ll tell a lot of stories on Saturday, and on Sunday I’ll get to it.’  So, I get out there on Saturday, and I’m only maybe 10 minutes into it, when a hand goes up, and somebody says to me: ‘Mr. Nimoy, you did a television movie about a Holocaust survivor who went to court against some Holocaust deniers.  Would you tell us how you got involved with that and what was your interest?’  And I thought, ‘I have underestimated the awareness of this audience.’  I sensed that they knew more than I thought they knew, about me and who I was.  So I immediately went into the whole story about the Vulcan greeting, and how the hand sign came from my Jewish background, and so forth… When I finished, the place started applauding and they would not stop.  When I tell you they wouldn’t stop, I mean, they would not stop.  They went on and on and on.  I started crying.  They were on their feet, and they were cheering.  It was incredible.  And there was this message in it that I picked up, it has something to do with: we are a new generation.  We are a repairing generation.  We are a reconstituting, healing generation… it was extraordinary.’

I believe this is our challenge as human beings – to always be open to the possibility of an unanticipated future.  A few days before Rosh Ha Shana I was invited to participate in a conference call with President Obama.  The call was scheduled for the day before Rosh Ha Shanah and was open to all rabbis in the United States.  Of course, I was one of hundreds, perhaps thousands or rabbis who joined the call, but it was still thrilling to me that the President of the United States wanted to address the leaders of the American Jewish Community in honor of the new year.  Of course, the president spoke about the peace talks that had just begun between Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel and President Abbas of Palestine.  Obama spoke about the positive tone of the meetings, and that both sides believe that an agreement could be reached in one year, with meetings every 2 weeks.  He acknowledged that both sides have to make very difficult decisions and that the hard work is just beginning.  He also admitted that the possibility of failure is real.  He did not want to be overly optimistic, but he added, “we know the cause is just and possibility of peace is there.”

The president asked for our help as Jewish leaders.  He asked us to continue to speak in support of peace and not give in to predictions of failure.  As of this moment the peace talks are facing their first challenge.  Netanyahu has said he will not extend a moratorium on settlements in the West Bank beyond Sept. 26.  Abbas has said he will walk away from the talks if the moratorium is not extended.  It is easy to assume that the talks will break down over this issue, as they have broken down so many times before.  And this is where the challenge is.  It is in these moments that we need to remember who we are – a People who wander in the wilderness, but never lose sight of where we are heading, a People who are always looking toward the Promised Land, that future of un-anticipated, un-imagined possibility.  Perhaps this will be the time when leaders on both sides will take the courageous step toward peace.

Obama spoke about the power of the call of the Shofar.  He talked about hearing that sound because he lived across the street from a synagogue in Chicago.  I feel a particular connection to the image of the future President of the United States, a president who is the living embodiment of the possibility of an unanticipated future, listening to the call of the Shofar because the synagogue across the street was my parents’ synagogue, the synagogue I grew up in.

On Yom Kippur we ask ourselves to change; we pray for the strength and the will to renew our lives, to repair our relationships with others, to pursue a connection to something sacred and holy beyond ourselves.  Whether in our personal lives on in the unfolding of world events, even if we feel discouraged or hopeless, we approach the New Year as Israelites on the banks of the Jordan.  The river Jordan is deep and wide, milk and honey on the other side.  Hallelujah!  [Yes, there will be a break-fast at the end of the day!]  We approach the New Year with hope in the possibility of change.  We keep our faces turned toward the un-anticipated, un-imagined future.  And at the end of the day we blow one last blast of the Shofar, our call to renewal, to hope, to the possibility of new beginnings.