Why I Joined a Chevra Kadisha

“The highest act of gemilut chesed is that which is done for the dead, for there can never be any thought of repayment”–Tanhuma Vayehi 107A

by Elliot Zashin (Merrillville, IN)

When I was invited by a longtime friend, a retired doctor and medical maverick, to join a non-orthodox chevra kadisha that was being organized in our area, I had little idea of what it entailed except that the chevra prepared bodies for burial. I felt that I should go to the meeting and find out—should because this was a service to our community and a serious mitzvah; should because I didn’t think I was afraid to see dead bodies close up and perhaps others would shy away.

I’d begun working as a Hillel student center director at this time (c. 1984) and I was more interested in all aspects of Jewish thought and practice than ever before. My work was not likely to involve funerals—my students were all young—but I wanted to be informed. Hillel directors often were rabbis and, not being a rabbi, I didn’t want to seem ignorant. I even considered taking chaplaincy training, and since there was no Jewish chaplain at our university-affiliated hospital, I offered to be available. So Jewish burial practices were not outside my purview. I also was aware that I had relatives whose lives might be ending in the coming years and thought this knowledge might be useful.

Prior to our first taharah (purifying ritual), my friend provided me with a booklet to review, as the procedure is fairly involved. I probably had some qualms after reading it —fear of the unknown, lack of familiarity with the texts—but the gathering was led by one of my friend’s colleagues, also a doctor who was Jewishly pretty knowledgeable, and one of the other “founders” of this group. They both seemed to have studied the rituals and presumably had already participated in several taharot.

Our team of five men was serious and methodical as we began the ritual. The “met” (pronounced “mate”), an elderly man, was naked—he seemed serene. At the outset, we read a number of blessings, then carefully washed his body, very reverentially, and patted it dry. We didn’t ask questions as we did the ritual ablutions and said the prayers, which my friend’s colleague instructed us to repeat, because this might have interfered with the solemnity of the taharah. There was a very specific order to the ablutions— with three whole buckets—and it is not to be interrupted, or the procedure must be repeated. This was the actual purification, or taharah.

Next, using various slipknots, we dressed the met in the ritual garments: a rough white cloth shirt, jacket and trousers, plus a sash, face cover, and kippah. These were supposed to recall the garments of the High Priest when he prepared to enter the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctuary of the Temple, on the Day of Atonement. 

I was already impressed with the seriousness of the ritual, but this feature added something more significant. I had no idea who this elderly man was or what kind of life he had led, but here he was being prepared as if he were the High Priest. I thought I was learning the Jewish way of death and I was very moved. In death, we are all equal and precious—even us ordinary Jews—and we can all be intermediaries for our fellow Jews. There was nothing to fear about the transition from life into the unknown; the met had a role to play and we had our assigned tasks. We were a team working together, helping each other perform the taharah correctly. After the dressing, we read a few more brief excerpts from Numbers, Psalms, and Exodus, then placed the met in the aron (casket), along with a tallit.

I don’t remember how long the whole procedure took, but it seemed far more than an hour, perhaps because three of us were novices. I had felt some tension – it was important that we do the ritual correctly. Yet at the same time, I felt a camaraderie with the other participants as we prepared a fellow Jew to make the final transition from life to death. As l relaxed at the end, I realized that Jewish death rituals are (or can be) communal and reflective, even ennobling.

Another aspect of the taharah appealed to me: we were informed that this was perhaps the only mitzvah for which one could not receive thanks from the recipient. Presumably the only motivation could be the satisfaction of helping a fellow Jew, any Jew—not because of who he was or any personal connection. Perhaps therein lies another bit of Jewish wisdom: Who are we to judge the worth of another human being on this most solemn occasions?

Elliot Zashin was a Hillel director for 13 years at 2 different campuses, after being an academic (political science) for almost 13 years (without tenure). While working for Hillel, he took an MA at the Jewish Theological Seminary during summer breaks.  (That is where he learned about the title Rabbi Ploni, and much else.)  He comes by his sense of Jewishness through his father, who was a self-taught Bible interpreter, leading sessions at the Jewish Home for the Aged in Tucson after he retired from a business in NYC, and who wrote a lot about current events, political issues, and essays usually imbued with Mosaic ethics.

Zayda’s Kiddush Cup

by Janice Alper (San Diego, CA)

The small silver cup was stowed
in steerage, it sailed across
an ocean to a new home. It
overflowed with red wine
every Friday night. Zayda’s
hand never trembled as he
mumbled the blessing to usher
in Shabbat. Now I hold it in my
hand carefully, as the wine spills
over to the sixth generation.

Janice Alper writes poems, personal essays, and memoirs. Her work has appeared in the San Diego Poetry Annual, Bristlecone, and California Bards, and other places. She is the author of Sitting on the Stoop: A Girl Grows in Brooklyn, 1944-1957. Janice is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry, from San Diego State University. Follow her at www.janicesjottings1.com

Editor’s note: “Zayda’s Kiddush Cup” was originally published on OftheBook (https://ofthebookpress.com) and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

Crown Heights (1955 – 1960): Through the eyes of a daughter of Holocaust survivors

By Sandra Hurtes (New York, NY)

Crown Heights was a world my mother and I explored together. The effects of Hitler’s war revealed themselves from St. John’s Place to Montgomery Street, from Utica Avenue to Albany Avenue. On our way to the doctor or the grocery or the park, my mother whispered stories about the greena (greenhorns from Eastern Europe who came to America after the Holocaust).

There was Esther who lived on President Street and had three children. My mother pulled me close and said, “Zug gurnish, mámala, [say nothing, sweetheart], Esther screams every night about Auschwitz.” With each walk, the story took on different tones. Soon it became, “Esther is in the hospital. Her psychiatrist is giving her shock treatments.” Then my mother, nodding in understanding, pursing her lips, sighing.

I wondered who was home watching Esther’s children, and if her husband, Murray, was cooking supper. I tried picturing her getting shocked, but didn’t know how that looked. I wondered if the shocks singed, like electrified barbed wire.

When my mother and I visited her friend Margie who lived on Lincoln Place, my mother reminded me, “Don’t stare at Margie’s hand.” On her right hand were four and half fingers. She sawed her middle finger in half while working in the munitions factory she was transferred to from Auschwitz. When Margie’s hand was steady, it appeared as if her finger was bent at the knuckle. Then she moved, and the finger wiggled like it had no bones.

There was Sylvia who once lived on Carroll Street. I recalled her only through my mother’s stories. One afternoon Sylvia was vacuuming. As she pushed the long hose along the floor, she fished in her pocket for a sucking candy. When she began choking on the button she’d accidentally slipped in her mouth, her son David frantically called the police. By then she was blue. The police held her upside down but the button was lodged too deeply.

 Each time my mother told me the story she said, “Sylvia survived Hitler to choke on a button in Brooklyn. God bless America!”  And all I could think about was that the police and David saw Sylvia’s underwear when her duster fell over her head.

There was Mrs. Steinberg who we often passed on Schenectady Avenue, pushing her shopping cart. While hiding in Siberia, Mrs. Steinberg had two miscarriages. Each time we passed her in the street, my mother admonished me, “Quick, mein scheina kint [my beautiful child], smile, say hello to Mrs. Steinberg before she gives you the evil eye.”

My mother lived in fear of the evil eye, a superstition she brought with her from home. This belief—that a curse would be cast upon us when someone was jealous of something we had—was one way in which she would remain old-fashioned, regardless of how glamorous she became. And so, since my mother had two children and no miscarriages, she worried she’d be cursed by Mrs. Steinberg.

To ward off the evil eye, my mother protected herself by making her hand into a fist and pushing her thumb through her index and middle finger. Whenever we saw anyone else who might curse us, we reflexively made the fist and held it behind our backs. If asked how we were, we said, “Fine,” and squeezed our fists tight.

There was Manny on Montgomery Street. He was my story, and a secret I kept from my mother. He came from Poland and struck it rich in a shoe business on Orchard Street. Manny was tall and lanky, with hair falling across his forehead hitting close to his right eye. Every afternoon I played pretend games with his daughter in their apartment. Just before I left for supper, Manny came home, undressed and stood naked in the bathtub, the water from the shower sliding down his body. The shower curtain was pulled apart, the door wide open.  

I never told my parents about Manny. I knew innately that what he did was wrong, and I wanted to protect him. And I was ashamed too, of the excitement I felt running past the bathroom, once, twice, three times, stealing looks as he rubbed a soapy washcloth in circles on his chest.

Ironic. Impossible. Ordinary. That was our Crown Heights.

Girls played double dutch, the jump ropes crisscrossing in the air like lines on a globe. There were hopscotch games chalked in yellow and pink, girls hopping in this box and that one, their ponytails flying back and forth or frizzy hair like mine a powder puff around their heads. Boys played Johnny on the Pony on the corner of Union Street and Schenectady. In the street, they kicked the can; gangly boys ran and hid as the metal cylinder rolled beneath parked Chevys and Desotos.

There was the varoooom of motorcycles speeding down Eastern Parkway. The soft rapid murmur of prayer trailing the Hasidic men in black as they hurried in and out of the subway. The high-pitched whine of alley cats crawling through garbage cans. Taunts like shake it don’t break it and your momma followed me and my friends, all of us barely aware of who we were.

When my mother and I walked together, she looped her arm through mine. We maneuvered between the stories of the greena and the everyday. We thanked God for our ability to hold a glass firm with all ten fingers, to not need shock treatments, not be the ones whose evil gaze was feared.

At home, my mother sang Que Sera Sera in a wistful tone as she cleaned the bathtub, a rusty can of Ajax in her hand. She scrubbed until the tub was spotless, singing all the while, what will be will be. When she bencht lecht (lit candles)for Shabbos, a tichal (kerchief) over her head, she prayed she would one day see all her siblings, as one family at a time, they emigrated to Crown Heights.

We believed we kept our stories to ourselves. We told each other we were lucky. The complications of war belonged to the others. When my mother and I strolled the promenade of Eastern Parkway, tree branches canopied over us, and birds flew from their nests. In those times, Auschwitz seemed so far away.

Sandra Hurtes’ work has appeared in The New York Times, The Jewish Week, Poets & Writers and many other publications. This essay is excerpted from a collection that she’s working on tentatively titled “Halfway Home.”

 

My Name is Chaim — Life!

By Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

We were Jewish when I was growing up,

American-style, New York-style Jewish,

the way our nearby kosher deli was kosher

but not kosher enough to be patronized by

the more religious Chasidim.

We patronized our local Temple Beth-El annually

on the High Holy days and smiled at all the strangers

in the fully seated congregation, pretended to

listen to the Hebrew prayers, imitated davening

with the others and nodded greetings of the day

when we all left to comfortably return to our

secular homes and apartments.

We knew that we were Jewish by the way we rooted

for the new-born state of Israel to survive the cold-

blooded attacks on its inchoate survival, by the way 

our friends celebrated holidays that others didn’t recognize, 

by the pride we felt when we noted the success of Uncle Miltie, 

the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers and Danny Kaye, 

Red Buttons, Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas — and rooted 

hard for Sandy Koufax (even as we privately kvelled 

in the memory of the grand accomplishments of the player 

and the man named Hank Greenberg, who, I later found out, 

had attended the same high school as I did).

My father didn’t make a big deal about religion,

never spoke about his European youth, and called me

Chaim (never once using my American name).

It wasn’t till my own old age (sixty years after he

found his forever home in Jewish Heaven)

that the wisdom came to me to comprehend

my Jewish-Yiddish name.

He had escaped the hell of his Polish ghetto and

had married a Latvian beauty of a similar escape and,

after they thought they were done filling our home

with loving girls, ten years later, I appeared, a son, 

to be loved without condition, a son who somehow 

represented life, a promise of the continuation, 

not so much of our Jewishness but of our name 

and our mystical — more than mythical — connection 

to Moses and David and our new heroes of the decade 

of my birth, with names like Herzl, Ben-Gurion, 

Eban, Dayan, Allon and Meir.

We Jews know well how to survive and thrive.

We understand the holiness and the value and vitality of life.

Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y. with both a B.S. in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.

The telephone call I wish I could answer on Shabbat

by Steve Lipman (Forest Hills, NY)

I miss my mother’s telephone calls on Shabbat, which is an unusual statement for an Orthodox Jew to make. Talking on the phone, as any Torah-observant Jew knows, is forbidden on the Jewish day of rest, for a combination of halachic reasons. 

Ordinarily, I honor the Sabbath in the traditional way, not driving in a car, not using electronic devices, not writing, etc. And by praying our established tefillot, in shul, and, since Covid, largely at home, and by eschewing phone calls until a period of a few years that ended, unfortunately, a year ago.

Mom, in various assisted living and rehabilitation institutions in the Houston area, was aging rapidly, physically and mentally, as she passed the century mark, and calls from her on Shabbos kodesh became a reality.

I let Mom and my siblings know that if I saw one of their numbers on my cell phone’s caller I.D. on Shabbat, I would answer the call. I didn’t need to ask a rabbi for a psak about such an apparent violation of halacha; common sense dictated that honoring a parent (Dad had died two decades earlier) took precedence over any other consideration. 

Maybe Mom was having an emergency; maybe she needed to talk; maybe, in her fog of dementia, she had lost track of what day it was (though not shomeret Shabbat, she was always respectful of my observance, and would not try to reach me on Friday night or Saturday or on a chag). Maybe one of my sisters, in touch with Mom, had some need to speak with me.

In any case, if I saw that one of them was calling, I would pick up. Similarly, I faced this challenge of what to do or what not to do on Shabbos when I visited her a few times a year – in her apartment, or in a health care facility — and she would need me (support staff were not always available) to do a task I would ordinarily not do, like turn a light on or off, or get her some food from a refrigerator whose light was likely to go on.

I usually “erred” on the side of what would keep Mom comfortable, or not upset her. I trusted that G-d would understand. 

Jewish law and Jewish ethics were clearly on my side. Says Maimonides (Mishneh Torah, Sabbath 2:1):

“Where there is doubt whether or not the Sabbath laws must be violated on a [sick] person’s behalf, one should violate the Sabbath laws on his behalf, for the Sabbath laws are suspended even when there is merely a question of danger to a person’s life.”

When I went to a friend’s home for Shabbat, I would inform my hosts in advance of my policy so they would not be surprised in case they saw me on the phone between candle-lighting and Havdalah. No one objected or questioned my priorities. None of my friends, whose ages ranged from their 40s to their 70s, second-guessed me. Many of them had – or had had – elderly parents. My friends understood.

I always set the phone’s ringer loud enough that I would be able to hear it wherever I was. Not that I looked forward to a phone conversation on Shabbat … or to the reason, probably a matter of a health emergency, for Mom or a sibling calling me. But my conscience was clear. Usually, time permitting, I called Mom and my sisters before Shabbat to make sure that everyone was OK. Relieved, I knew it was less likely that my phone would ring within the next 25 hours or so.

Of course, if I saw that one of my family members was trying to reach me, I would be more alarmed. Had something happened? As Mom kept aging, things did happen. Falls. Ambulance trips to the ER. Other unpleasant events.

Fortunately, this happened infrequently. Mom and my sisters figured that whatever happened could wait until Saturday night or Sunday morning to inform me about it. Besides, I was several hours away by plane – what could I do, even if there was an emergency?

Not that my phone was always silent. Like most people in our in-touch age, I would often receive calls from sources worthy and unworthy – folks seeking my monetary donations, reminding me of the need for blood donations, trying to sell me insurance or offer me a loan. And so on. After a while, I began to recognize some of those callers’ phone numbers and area codes. Those calls, of course, I did not answer. Or acknowledge. Even during the week.

As for the calls I did answer on Shabbat or yom tov … not too many, thank G-d. Mom would call – not frequently – because she needed to talk. Because something had upset her; at her age, with her deteriorating mental condition, this could be predicted. Because she hadn’t looked at a calendar. Because she wasn’t aware of a holiday like Shavuot. Because …. the reason didn’t matter. If I recognized Mom’s phone number on my caller I.D., I spoke with her. I didn’t rush her. I didn’t necessarily remind her of the day’s sanctity; if I did, she would apologize for the call. Ditto if one of my siblings, very infrequently, called. Their psychological health, their need to share Mom’s condition with big brother, trumped all other considerations.

When the calls, always brief, ended, Mom and my siblings always felt better. I knew I did.

Mom died a year ago; her secular yahrzeit is on August 6. She was 104. In her last year or so, she became too weak, too hard of hearing, too confused, to use the phone. She didn’t answer when her phone rang and certainly didn’t make any calls. I knew then that I would not see her number on my caller I.D. when my phone rang on Shabbat.

And, of course, I haven’t seen her number during the last 12 months.

And I won’t again.

I miss seeing her number.

Steve Lipman was a staff writer for The New York Jewish Week from 1983 until 2020.