At first, burying the dead was more difficult for families than the death itself—because of the enormous expense. Family members even abandoned the bodies and ran away.
That changed when Rabban Gamliel adopted a simple style, and the people carried him to his grave in plain linen garments. Subsequently, everyone followed his example.
—Talmud, Ketubot 8b
Today I stood by an open grave as we lay to rest a certain Mr. Cohen, with the honor of Jewish rite and ritual to which every Jew is entitled.
With me at the graveside were the gentile funeral director and four members of the staff of the Jewish Cemetery Association of Massachusetts (JCAM). And that’s it. There were no mourners; no family to say the Kaddish, no friends or acquaintances to pay their respects.
I was invited to be there, because for the past few months I’ve been part of a quiet but important conversation here in Greater Boston: How our community can create a policy for burying indigent Jews—for people who have nothing; no assets, no money to pay for funeral costs or burial plots, and often no family.
You may think that it’s rather astounding that a Jewish community like this one does not have a strategy in place to bury extremely poor Jews. And you’d be right.
For decades, the burden of burying Jews without money here has fallen on the shoulders of whoever happened to be there. Sometimes that’s the funeral homes; other times, it’s the fine people at Jewish Family Services, or Yad Chessed, the important Boston-area Tzedakah collective.
More often than not, the burden of providing a dignified burial falls upon JCAM, a non-profit organization which owns and manages 124 Jewish cemeteries throughout Massachusetts. My friend and colleague Jamie Cotel, the Executive Director of JCAM, estimates that they are called upon to provide approximately thirty to forty burials a year for people who have little or no funds. JCAM’s already thin budget is stretched to provide a free grave, to pay the facilities crew to open and administer the burial plot, to arrange for the ritual, to provide a gravestone, and more.
That’s thirty-to-forty times a year. And that’s just the cases that come into JCAM’s domain. It doesn’t include those desperate poor who simply disappear beneath the communal radar screen. Our Mr. Cohen’s body, for instance, was alone in a local hospital for a distressingly long time before being turned over to a local Christian funeral home. They were prepared to bury his body in a pauper’s field in a Christian cemetery—until JCAM became aware of the situation, and advocated to bury him in one of their Jewish cemeteries, with full Jewish ritual and honor.
But JCAM has limited funds and staff. This crisis—and it is a crisis, if you believe that Jewish burials aren’t just for the rich—demands a systematic, community-wide effort to share the responsibility and the cost. I’m glad we’re working on it, even while I’m ashamed that it hasn’t happened until now.
We buried Mr. Cohen, but we knew almost nothing about him. The only family Jamie could identify was a distant and estranged cousin in another state, who could provide her with no further family information and certainly wasn’t offering to share the cost of a funeral.
Here’s a part of the eulogy I gave:
Our tradition says that the day of death is like the Day of Atonement, and optimally we go to our Final Reward in the spirit of humility, purity, and atonement for all the sins we committed in our lifetime. I pray today that his passing does indeed bring atonement for his sins, and peace to his soul, and comfort to those whose lives he touched during his years on earth.
….There’s another dimension of atonement that I’m thinking of today as well. We, too, need atonement. We, too, must ask for forgiveness—of Mr. Cohen, for our sins. We have sinned by living in a self-absorbed society where he found himself so alone at the end of his life; where he lingered so long in the hospital morgue.
Chattanu – we have sinned. Please forgive us, sir. You, and all of G-d’s children, deserve better.
I believe that the measure of a community’s integrity is the degree to which it cares for the most desperate, hurting, and defenseless members in it. The enormity of its bank accounts, the hugeness of its homes and synagogue buildings, and the grotesque assemblage of automobiles in its parking lots are not signs of moral grandeur—and they just may indicate the exact opposite.
May Mr. Cohen rest in peace. And may his memory, such as it is, give us no peace, until we are able to do far better for those like him, the living and the dead.