IT MATTERS HOW THE DEAD ARE BURIED

Kanigel, Robert

IT MATTERS HOW THE DEAD ARE BURIED ROBERT KANIGEL It matters how the dead are buried. And it matters how they're mourned. A state funeral full of pomp and ceremony stirs in us one set of feelings,...

...And that was, says Weinstein, uttering the words as if they truly were in italics, "to make funerals for members and their legal dependents a congregational responsibility...
...Lip reading...
...Similarly, the imperative of a plain wood casket and simple white shroud relieves the bereaved of any potential embarrassment for insufficiently lavish caskets or burial garb...
...And the surprising thing is, in attending to these sometimes grubby details, there's been a hidden payoff for the Congregation as a whole...
...The living weep, or shudder, or remain numbly unmoved...
...but then, when it arrived, he couldn't eat it...
...about half the bereaved families have opted for the Congregation's package...
...Potential legal hassles...
...The day before, he'd been well enough to get around the house on his own...
...What are the obligations and responsibilities of a community to its members...
...That's how it went on for month after month...
...Over and over, traditional Jewish burial and bereavement practice seems to work this way—that the observance, whatever its theological basis, is fairly drenched in psychologically sound and spiritually rewarding significance for the living...
...The closed casket...
...Only cuddling the children—especially their year-and-a-half-old girl—seemed to give him any pleasure...
...It was," he says, "one of the most touching expressions of loving kindness I've ever experienced...
...Thus, the traditional practices toward which Tifereth Israel has returned, far from a retreat into ritualistic mumbo-jumbo, amount to an exercise in profound realism...
...People like to spend money," on the funerals for their loved ones, is how Rabbi Abramowitz characterizes the rationale of funeral home owners...
...First indications were that, to cross state lines, it would have to be embalmed—in violation of Jewish law...
...Indeed, bereaved families tell him, he reports, of their "enormous relief and appreciation" for it...
...they knew only they wanted to make whatever time he had left as comfortable as possible...
...The Talmud speaks of the rich being brought for burial "on a tall state bed, ornamented and covered with coverlets," while the poor were reduced to a plain bier...
...But in so squarely assuming responsibility for the funerals of its members—including, formally, financial responsibility—Tifereth Israel has also helped fashion a genuine community out of a northwest Washington district more than usually torn up by residential root-lessness...
...An elaborately choreographed graveside service of "dignity and simple beauty...
...They went into the economics of the business, determined the wholesale and retail costs of caskets and shrouds, studied the merits of, and need for, embalming, even pinned down figures on overhead expenses...
...But do the dead really care...
...Unless a bereaved family specifically identified itself as Orthodox, he says, it was invariably led into extravagant funerals...
...A state funeral full of pomp and ceremony stirs in us one set of feelings, the sight of naked bodies piled atop mass graves another...
...It was, he goes so far as to say, "the petty thievery of the funeral homes that caused us," in part, "to seek alternatives" to them...
...It was early Friday morning, maybe two or three a.m., when the call went out...
...And the equipment for taharah'1...
...Is there an adequate supply of yarmulkes on hand...
...but it certainly matters to the living left behind...
...At casket selection time, the bereaved family would be "led into one room after another, each bigger and more luxurious than the next...
...Now all at once she became aware of a silence in the house...
...Neither, in any professional sense, qualified as a "bereavement counselor" or any such thing...
...And if, after all, it's "community recognition" the bereaved want, how better to get it than via a copper-lined casket stuffed with fluffy satin pillows...
...There was something that happened in all that," says Pearl Schainker, reliving the days and weeks after her father's death...
...And people need that feeling of extended family...
...on top of everything else, he had a cold...
...But their apparent unwillingness to grant the Congregation any role in setting funeral practices for its members was, he claims, the sticking point in the negotiations...
...After I touched him the first time, all concern and fear just vanished," he says...
...That night when we put him to bed," says Pearl, "I think I knew what was going on...
...Pearl Schainker and her husband didn't know how long her father might live...
...His work last appeared in moment ("The Moving Story of the Jews") in December 1979...
...communicating with him meant writing notes...
...How should it come in, and go out...
...It had also left him deaf...
...Mentally, he was as sharp as ever...
...Relatives must be summoned...
...He claims an accountant with whom the Tifereth Israel group worked told him he'd "never seen a bill for less than $2000...
...The religion is fully aware of the implications for the living...
...Those attending, including Weinstein and Hausman, decided to set up a committee through which to educate themselves and perhaps formulate a policy...
...Not only was this a Spartan funeral, lacking in all frills...
...In a real sense, one of the most fundamental lessons from the self-sufficiency movement of the Sixties, its co-ops and community organizations and collective child care centers, has been relearned: That somehow, when people do for themselves instead of relying on the impersonal money system to do for them, a sense of community can most organically emerge...
...A sense of community "doesn't happen so readily when you're spread out geographically," Lawrence points out...
...There was none of that 'We've arranged everything, and you can't change it' kind of attitude...
...The first thing Pearl Schainker did when her father died was call her sister in Boston...
...The death of a loved one poses an array of common problems for those left behind to mourn—and to cope...
...In fact it was relatively exhilarating when it was all done...
...But Carol Hausman didn't wait until "business hours" to show up at the Schainker house in Chevy Chase, nor even until dawn...
...It will not be here for long, but while it's here, respect it enough not to pump it full of eosin dye to give it the false pretense of life...
...They have dusted off religious practices centuries of Jewish tradition deem a good and decent way to deal with death but which, among American Jews, have been forsaken by all but the Orthodox...
...The ticklish issue of price was scarcely even broached...
...It was hell," says her husband...
...But "we had someone here to take care of it for us," and discovered that it was not required after all...
...By having to move the body in certain ways, you almost embrace it...
...He states this baldly, categorically...
...And by the spring of the following year, they were able to report to the congregation that they were ready, at the least, to offer bereavement counseling to Congregation members...
...What about the black ribbon for kriah...
...The period just before his father-in-law's death, says her husband, was one of "a lot of mixed feelings, including those of intense anger...
...When the wife of one man who attended minyans for them died, they were present at the services during the shiva period...
...In this respect, says Harris Weinstein, "the congregation fulfills the role that in other communities and other times would have been filled by relatives and family...
...she couldn't hear the coughing...
...The period that followed, eased by the aid and comfort granted by the Tifereth Israel approach, gave it, he says, "a format for mending...
...At the least—for they were not yet through...
...Here, midst the most emotionally wrought of life's events, in an area shrouded in mystery, cloaked in superstition, and grist for grade B horror movies, Jewish tradition steps in with the most mundanely unemotional prescription: This life is gone, these practices collectively say...
...But the stroke had impaired his sense of balance...
...We had trained ourselves...
...A clue: In the three years since adoption of its reformed funeral practices, the Congregation has suffered about a dozen deaths...
...It would pick up the body, obtain death certificates...
...It is not, says the Rabbi, something done by "hired hands, mechanically, but carefully and personally, by human beings reciting prayers...
...Weinstein called the funeral home...
...The man his daughter remembers as "a very outgoing kind of guy" had become, in short, profoundly depressed...
...Somehow, it comforts the living to know that the body of his loved one is not stuck off alone somewhere, but1 is being "guarded" by shomrim...
...He'd even asked someone to fetch him a corned beef sandwich...
...He'd lost a lot of weight...
...Or should the body already be gone from the house by the time they were up...
...Shomrim, or guards to watch over the body until interment...
...We live on a street, in a town, but it often feels as though we're not part of a community there...
...We've never," Harris Weinstein reports, "had a problem with too few people...
...There are so many little things you have to do," says Harris Weinstein, who ought to know...
...Rabbi Abramowitz, for his part, is content to point to "the broad absence of traditional practices in what Jews had thought were 'Jewish' funeral homes," and to how Jews were being routinely misled to think they were being offered "one of several acceptable Jewish practices...
...At Tifereth Israel, the dreary and mundane details of death have been almost alchemically transmuted into community bonds that bring the living closer together...
...The next thing she did I was call Carol Hausman, whose name was listed in the Congregation's bulletin, along with several others, as one to be notified in the event of a death...
...The simple pine box...
...Who has and who hasn't...
...There is no hint of a veiled snigger in the observation, no suggestion of character weakness on the part of the bereaved...
...As they take turns recalling the events of two years past, Pearl and Lawrence Schainker make no effort to mask the warmth and gratitude they feel toward all those who helped them...
...Weinstein and Hausman helped the family say the appropriate prayers, in Hebrew and English...
...A bereaved family is very conscious of wanting the community's recognition of the respect and affection they had for the deceased," declares Harris Weinstein...
...Weinstein also called the man who would, with another, perform the taharah, or ritual cleansing of the body, before it left Washington...
...Taking potshots at funeral homes, of course, hardly rates as sport anymore...
...Still, he says, "It isn't as though we walked in cold...
...And the Schainkers reciprocate...
...All at a time when those best equipped by their relationship to the deceased to deal with them may be least equipped emotionally...
...But through their ties to the synagogue after her father's death, they "sort of precipitously established relationships with other congregation members...
...In Washington, D.C., the members of a Conservative congregation, Tifereth Israel, have joined to change the way their dead are buried and mourned...
...But what route ought the coffin take through the synagogue...
...Grieve for your loved ones— but only so much and only for so long---What a marvelous piece of hidden wisdom in this seemingly unexceptional set of practices—that these ritualized limitations on grief, this demystification of death, should give so much comfort to the living...
...Robert Kanigel is a writer living in Baltimore...
...Feeling spurned by the Jewish-owned homes, the Committee turned to a Gentile one, named Chambers...
...It works," says a woman whose father's burial was handled in this new, old way...
...Recent FTC hearings into the industry...
...He moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., to live with his daughter, her husband, and their two small children...
...It was into this emotion-wrought setting, the product of a year of growing frustration, filled with every sort of confused and unresolved feeling, of grief and loss and anger and desperate, grim fatigue, that the Jewish community of Congregation Tifereth Israel of Washington, in the person of two representatives of its funeral practices committee, stepped into the lives of Pearl and Lawrence Schainker...
...was the theme as it evolved...
...At first blush, these must seem merely tiresome chores, demeaning to a lawyer, or a physician, or high government worker—and so, yes, maybe better left to hired hands...
...Everything in the traditional Jewish approach to death, burial, and bereavement speaks to the same principles of simplicity and respect for the deceased...
...They asked if the Schainkers were going to want minyans at the house for saying kaddish during shivah, the seven-day mourning period following burial...
...Such things had to be decided...
...As we sat and talked in the large conference room of the Washington medical center at which her husband works, Pearl is the more voluble of the two...
...It had all started at a Congregational retreat in 1975...
...He wouldn't, or couldn't...
...The fact that the law states it that way"—as done out of respect for the dead—"doesn't mean the law is blind to the circumstances in which it is used...
...Once, in the cities and shtetls of Europe, every Jewish community had its chevra kadis ha—literally, "sacred society"—whose workings collide brutally, in almost every respect, with their modern American counterparts...
...The committee looked into how Jewish funeral homes in Washington worked...
...No, he states it as if he were a scientist who, after years of research, were reporting a universal law of nature...
...It's all well and good to speak of simple funerals and congregational responsibility for them...
...he needed a walker to get around the house...
...It's an awesome experience...
...He didn't...
...Place the body into the simplest of shrouds and thence into the plainest of coffins, one that least pretends it is destined for anything but dust...
...Thus taharah, in this sense, becomes "a way for the bereaved to feel he is personally attending to the loved one...
...in that instance, they hadn't been—and so had to be settled right on the spot...
...The body was to be taken to New York for burial...
...Pearl, raised in a generally observant home, recalled the tradition of shomrim—people to remain with the body, chanting psalms, until it was interred...
...By design...
...Before long, it was zeroing in on death and bereavement...
...The dead are dead...
...They re-opened the long-closed book on traditional Jewish funeral practices, and began to study it with fresh eyes...
...Weinstein and Hausman were there to lend an ear and offer advice...
...If he and his wife didn't have it before Louis Charnow's death, they've come far toward it since...
...It does what it's supposed to do...
...And to perform these larger tasks, a thousand dreary details need tending...
...Recalls Pearl Schainker: "They kind of organized us...
...Nor was he overly interested in people visiting him, nor in visiting others, nor in physical therapy...
...But it is Lawrence, a calm, precise-spoken 39-year-old physician, who says it straight out...
...Most of the time today, the details of death are handled by commercial funeral homes, which function more or less efficiently, with more or less sensitivity to their customers, and with more or less fevered preoccupation with their profit-and-loss statements...
...Along with Harris Weinstein—like her, a key figure in the evolution of the Congregation's funeral practices—she was there in less than an hour, and immediately set to work...
...Death is no exception...
...Instead, merely wash it—carefully, consciously, lovingly...
...Part of Tifereth Israel's avowed purpose, says Harris Weinstein, is to "try to make socially acceptable [once again] this traditional and simple funeral...
...It was, in effect, a take-it-or-leave-it funeral...
...People took time out from work to help them, to pray with them...
...Weinstein, plainly bitter, won't talk for the record at all...
...What they settled on was to let the children sleep, then tell them the moment they awoke...
...She rushed downstairs...
...Hausman arranged to call and explain why Mrs...
...Taharah, the ritual cleansing of the body...
...And this, she admits, "produced some anger in me...
...What of simply getting into the synagogue for, say, a late Sunday afternoon funeral service...
...The halachic or traditional justifications for each, says Rabbi Abramowitz, are normally couched in terms of the needs of the deceased...
...He never got out of mourning for his own lost health," is the way Pearl's husband Lawrence sums it up...
...That's not really the point, Rabbi Abramowitz broadly hints...
...Yet Tifereth Israel relies on its own hands—to serve as shomrim, to counsel the bereaved, to perform taharah, to make sure there are enough yarmulkes...
...All in all, he says, "it was not a bad experience...
...The kids—they were Pearl's first concern...
...Kriah, the rending of the garment, and shivah, the strict seven-day mourning period, though formulated as commandments, are really, says Rabbi Abramowitz, "not obligations, but limitations, because people often want to punish themselves out of guilt, or feelings of abandonment...
...What was more, that stroke had caused a condition known as tinnitis, a persistent roaring sensation in the ears which left him almost unable to concentrate...
...And yet, the blind, take-charge authoritarianism that sometimes replaces impotent passivity at times of stress, says Pearl, was wholly absent...
...Whether it matters to the dead themselves may be a theological question...
...Tifereth Israel's Jack Zeller, one of those who performed the taharah for Louis Charnow, says much the same...
...When they sensed it appropriate, they broached the burial options available, including the synagogue's own traditional one...
...Well, reports Rabbi Abramowitz, those who, through old family ties, sentimentally "belong" to one of the Jewish-owned funeral homes, by and large stick with them...
...There, a Jewish burial was handled according to Jewish law, and was seen as the responsibility of the entire Jewish community...
...And it is this apparent "truth"— whether rooted in human nature, cultural conditioning, whatever— that has made the funeral industry what it is...
...Pearl had dimly hoped that, as an example for the children, her father would "set a model for one with declining powers...
...The idea behind taharah, for example, is that "the deceased is entitled to personal honor and concern...
...And out of the ensuing negotiations came a "letter of understanding" by which Chambers agreed to provide at a fixed cost— recently, about $500—a specified basic funeral...
...They'd hoped he might learn sign language...
...She is a therapist, he is a greying, 44-year-old lawyer with a large Washington firm...
...The speedy burial...
...Schainker wouldn't be able to keep an appointment...
...Pearl was at first resigned...
...It has not always been thus, especially among Jews...
...An Irish wake...
...We used up reams of paper," recalls Pearl, a 36-year-old social worker...
...For years Louis Charnow had lived in Hollywood, Florida, running his own real estate agency—busy, active, vital...
...At the very first funeral for which the Congregation took responsibility, the service was held in the synagogue itself...
...One funeral home boasted a salesman "so smooth he could sell you down the river and have you shake hands with him for it...
...For all the people involved," she says, "I still have a special feeling...
...It required a tremendous amount of emotional energy...
...Neither Weinstein nor Tifereth Israel Rabbi A. Nathan Abramowitz feels overly comfortable talking about the impasse they reached with Washington's Jewish funeral Establishment...
...It's an extremely touching thing...
...In part it was to negotiate with the established Jewish-owned funeral homes in the area to make simple, traditional Jewish funerals available, at a fair price, to all who sought them...
...It's an intimate relationship, and you're confronted with the ulti- ; mate reality [that] you yourself will be there sometime...
...People did not know us, yet they did all that for us," says Pearl Schainker, still in wonder of it all two years later...
...A burial at sea...
...The living live...
...In an ABC documentary about Adath Jeshurun Congregation's similar program in Minneapolis, one man tells about performing his first taharah...
...A body remains...
...They asked which family members should be notified...
...But how, she wondered, do you get a shomert Weinstein and Hausman knew...
...And yet the deceased must be buried, the mourning and recovery process must be set on its way, and much needs doing...
...Then came the series of strokes and heart attack that left him no longer able to live on his own...
...Jack Zeller, a Washington pathologist and chairman of the Congregation committee responsible for ritual cleansings of the body, is not so shy...
...where are the keys...
...And now, in the early hours of a Friday morning as Pearl lay in bed half asleep, she could hear his racked coughing...
...it closed the door to frills...
...Should they be awakened and told their grandfather was dead...
...There's nothing spooky, nothing squeamish, nothing superstitious about it," he says...
...They'd been immersing themselves in the whole subject for two years...
...it's quite another to attend to the welter of details that goes with that responsibility...
...It was a starting point...
...When it comes right down to it, Harris Weinstein, for one, says he has no qualms with the principle of making a fair profit from providing funeral services...
...They have reclaimed for themselves an area of communal life for decades the almost exclusive province of commercial funeral homes...
...By October 1977, a year after moving from Florida, Louis Char-now had virtually stopped eating...
...Those "implications for th6 living" don't stop with the bereaved themselves...
...The body must be prepared for burial, and brought to the cemetery...
...No, he wasn't interested...
...Everything was taken care of," says Pearl, "usually before we'd even thought of it...
...There was one other stipulation in that standard agreement: Chambers would not try to "sell the bereaved any goods or services not included above without approval of the designated congregational contact or Rabbi...
...It was difficult," says Pearl...
...A Jewish Funeral Practices Committee of Greater Washington was set up with representatives from Tifereth Israel along with those from other Washington congregations...
...provide a plain, all-wood coffin, furnish facilities for ritual washing of bodies, transport the body to the cemetery, and so on...
...Typically, the bereaved are intensely vulnerable—perhaps overcome with grief, or racked with guilt for emotional "business" left unresolved, or divided, one from the other, by internal family tensions...
...He and his wife tend to be home-bodies...
...It was a defusing, a kind of winding down of pent-up emotions...
...And is there a place to store each...
...Tachrichim, the simplest of white shrouds...
...He took a few more gasps," she says, and died...
...This agreement in no way limited Congregation "members to the simple funeral...
...Lawrence now works on synagogue committees, has helped research traditional Jewish views on autopsy...
...Shades of an earlier time and a distant place, of shtetls and the chevra kadisha...
...It was the recognition of this apparent human tendency that led, the Talmud tells us, to the insistence on democratically equal funerals in the first place...
...Their research, their knowledge of the Congregation and its members, their evolving sense of Jewish tradition, and their preoccupation with that original retreat topic—the responsibility of a community to its members—were all drawing them to a radical conclusion...
...Plainly, its funeral program is a boon for those it directly serves...
...It was continually frustrating...
...There's nothing new in this of course...
...At synagogue, people still ask about her sister, who'd come from Boston after her father's death...
...When Harris Weinstein and Carol Hausman drove up to the Schainker house early that October morning in 1977, they did not do so unprepared...
...What Tifereth Israel has done, making it among the first non-Orthodox congregations in the nation to do so, is to take on that ancient responsibility as its own, to make the death of one of its members the "business" of all of them...
...And the change they've made has made a difference...
...The congregation maintained a registry of volunteers, and Weinstein saw to it that the first shomer was at the funeral home by the time the body arrived there...
...Indeed, it was to the city's Jewish-owned funeral homes that the synagogue's funeral practices group first turned...
...while Congregation members new to Washington, or otherwise less firmly rooted in the city's soil, tend "to go with synagogue...
...A ceremony to mark the occasion must be held...
...If someone tells you it's state law, well...
...It was, through the congregation's rediscovery of old values and old ways, his farewell gift to them both...
...That wasn't easy...
...Let the bereaved rest assured that it is not alone...
...Is that briefcase stuffed with prayer shawls and prayer books readily available...
...But somehow the dead must be buried and the living must mark their passing...
...but it did make one easily and routinely available to them...
...In the American system, human needs inevitably find profit-making enterprises ready to step in and meet them...
...Its aim...

Vol. 5 • April 1980 • No. 4


 
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