Shabbat Emor: Mourning
The Torah contains no specific rules about death and mourning for ordinary people.
It does mention crying, mourning, and eulogies. Regarding Sarah (Genesis 23:1&2), Jacob (Genesis 50: 1.2.3.10), Miriam (Numbers 20:1), Aaron (Numbers 20:29), and Moses (Deuteronomy 34.5.). But only in the cases of Moses and Aaron does it refer to a specific time of official national mourning, thirty days. When Jacob is given an Egyptian burial, it involves forty days of embalming, seventy days of mourning, and then seven additional days when they arrive at Transjordan before going over to the Cave of Machpelah. But none of this is specified as Torah Law.
It could be that the Torah does not explicitly mention life after death or indeed go into detail about the rules of burial because the Torah is essentially a document about how to live. So that all the customs and laws prevalent today in Jewish communities to do with mourning are post-Biblical.
But first the question of death itself. Is it something to be feared, embraced, or accepted? The Bible accepts it as something natural. The story of the Garden of Eden shows a process of evolution in human creation in which death is a response to disobeying the Divine Will. But death is a natural phenomenon, as Kohelet says in Ecclesiastes (3:1-2)
“There is a time for everything, for every experience under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die.” And “Dust (the body) returns to the ground from where it came from, but Spirit returns to God who gave it” ( Ibid 12:7).
Kohelet goes on to stress what really matters by posing a question about death and what happens afterward.
“ For what happens to humans happens to animals, they share the same fate, as one dies so dies, so does the other, both have the same life breath and humans are not more than animals, everything is vanity. Everything goes to the same place, both came from dust and both return to dust. And who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if an animal goes down to the earth?”
And then Kohelet asks concludes
“I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy his possessions now on earth since that is his fate. For who can enable him to see what will happen afterward?” ( 3:19-22). For someone alive has something to look forward to. A live dog is better than a dead lion. The living know that the loves, hates, and jealousies of the dead have long since perished and they have no more share till the end of time in all that goes on under the sun. This is why one should eat one’s bread and drink one’s wine with joy (live positively) because that is what God wants”(Ibid 9:4-7).
There you have optimism as well as pain. Over the years many different attitudes, customs, and theories about what happens when we die and how to mourn have proliferated. Everyone finds a way to deal with the pain after someone whom one loves dies, but of course, it is our pain, our loss. The Dead have long ceased to worry about it.
This week we read about the only actual law in the Torah about death when it deals only with priests who were forbidden to come into contact with dead bodies as part of the symbolic purity system, which created different levels of aspiration and detachment from mundane life.
“Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them: None shall defile himself for any [dead] person except for the relatives that are closest to him: his mother, his father, his son, his daughter, his brother, and his unmarried sister; but to no one else”(Leviticus 21:1-5).
The very fact of making an exception for the loss of those closest to us is the recognition that personal loss is fundamental and that it overrides official rules and public formality. But also that each of us mourns and remembers in our own way.
Rabbi Jeremy Rosen lives in New York. He was born in Manchester. His writings are concerned with religion, culture, history and current affairs – anything he finds interesting or relevant. They are designed to entertain and to stimulate. Disagreement is always welcome.`
Leviticus 21-25
