For years, the small havurah that is my community had taken care of its members throughout the lifecycle. We thought we were pretty good at supporting each other. Then, Marian got sick. In her 80s, she was a longtime member who had no children of her own. The community rallied around her in myriad ways, finally singing to her the day before she died. After her funeral, we joined with her extended family and friends for the meal of consolation. We wondered, dumbstruck, where we had been between her death and her burial. Shouldn’t a Jewish community also be able to perform those final acts of care, the rituals of washing and dressing the body known collectively as “taharah,” or purification?
When we heard that a new chevra kadisha, the “holy fellowship” that cares for the dead between death and burial, was in formation, several of us dove into the organizing. We had one big problem. Only a couple of us had any real experience with the practical tasks of taharah.
I had plenty of personal experience with death. Family members had died. I’m a physician. Patients had died in my hands, despite my efforts to keep them alive. Even when I was a medical student, while handling a dead body in the anatomy lab, I had thought that I might someday join a chevra kadisha. So why was I so nervous about per-forming my first taharah?
None of my earlier encounters with death provided comfort or a map for navigating a meeting with a dead stranger (or the four living strangers sharing the tasks of taharah). Even putting on the requisite gown, gloves, and face shield, which I’d done countless times during medical procedures, felt awkwardly disturbing.
Ritual has the power to make the difficult meaningful.
We began with the traditional prayers that those performing taharah say, asking for divine mercy for the deceased and strength for ourselves. Reciting these words together, I felt us gel as the chevra. The first step, an ordinary washing of the body, seemed as familiar as bathing my children when they were infants. But reciting verses from the Song of Songs
during the bathing felt unfamiliar: “His head is finest gold; his locks are curled and black as a raven….” Even in death, the intricacies of the human body are awe-inspiring. “Everything about him is delightful,” we said, recalling this man’s relationship with the loving God.
The next step was the purification washing that gives the taharah its name: “Tahor hu!” “He is pure,” we declared. Though a dead body can never be ritually “pure,” our acts were pure.
We dressed him in simple white garments, mirroring the dressing of the Kohen Gadol — the High Priest. Before closing the casket, we asked his soul for forgiveness for any indignity we might have inadvertently caused.
The Hebrew word for “casket,” aron, is the same word used for a storage closet and the box that held the tablets of the Ten Commandments (both the broken and the whole), and the same word for where we keep a Torah scroll.
Saying the phrase, “vayehi bin’soa ha’aron” while moving the casket, the same phrase we use when we take the Torah out of the ark, transported me from the funeral home to my seat in the synagogue, and then to a vision of shimmering desert as the Levites lifted the aron so the camp could follow the pillar of smoke.
We cleaned the taharah roomand headed to the parking lot. Our group had completed a task with sacred purpose. Death and the ordinary had been transformed through liturgy. None of us, living or dead, left the funeral home unchanged. That mood remained with me for days. Joining with others to meet death with caring hands and kavvanah (spiritual intention) continues to be one of my most intense spiritual experiences.
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