On death, religion, and the interfaith family
Everyone seems to like John Lennon's wistful ballad "Imagine". I admire a lot of its sentiments, but I always flinch at the words "imagine no religion", which equate the entire enterprise of religion with war and prejudice and the rest of the awful things Lennon is imagining a world without.
A friend of mine from Seminary who has gotten rather soured on religion lately echoed on Facebook this morning the sentiments of writer Dan Brown that "the world will be just fine without religion and that it is heading that way quickly.".
I disagree with the idea that the world would be better (or even "just fine") without religion.
You see, the woman I call my "adoptive grandmother" died recently. And because of my religion, I had a few pre-built ways to cope with this.
Now, before you jump to conclusions, I do not mean that I had a canned set of handy beliefs about the afterlife that made it possible for me to say "she is okay now" or "it's okay, her spirit is still with us," or some similar cliche that would let me handily wrap up my grief and quickly move on. I find that kind of spiritual response to death to actually be anti-helpful: we, as humans, need to grieve.
No, what I mean is that my religion has met me in my grief and supported me as I walked through the grieving process. It gave me things to say in those moments when words wouldn't come and things to do at a time when there seems to be nothing helpful to do.
I had a prayer book to pull out, with a mourner's kaddish to say, a yizkor service to pull a couple of memorial prayers from, and a handful of meditations on death and life to mull over when my mind was numb with shock.
I had two rabbis who called me on separate occasions (for which, to both of you, my sincerest and deepest thanks) to check in on me and make sure I was as okay as a person can be at such a time, and to let me say a few incoherent words about my "grandmother" and how I was handling her death, to remind me to support my mother on one hand and to remember to express my own grief on the other (I tend to retreat into a sort of stoic place of emotional reserve when confronted with death -- maybe because all of the deaths in my family so far have required me to "be there" for my mother and sister and so I just don't allow myself much space to have my own reactions) and, most of all, to make sure that I was hearing a real person's voice expressing concern for me at a time when I needed to hear that, which is a rare gift in this day where all-electronic communication is fast becoming the norm. Heck, there are some days when I get more words from my wife by text message than I do by mouth - it's just that kind of life we are living.
I had a yizkor (memorial) candle to light a little bit later, which I brought to work with me so that I have had the light of my "grandmother's" soul here to keep me company all day.
I have a Shabbat service this Friday to stand and say kaddish during, and then many other small ways to remember my dearly departed one throughout the coming year and the years to follow.
Yeah, I'd say that there are some times in our lives when religion still has some wisdom to inject into our lives that secular society does not. And, if I may say so, I think Judaism is particularly good at helping us handle the deaths that come into every life.
But that doesn't mean everything is smooth and perfect.
My "grandmother" is not Jewish, and neither is my mother. That means that my "grandmother" was cremated, rather than buried, as is increasingly becoming "the thing to do". My father was cremated, as were his parents before him, and my mother wishes to be cremated when she dies.
This poses a problem for the Jew in me, because there are many meaningful moments in the Jewish responses to a death that happen at the graveside. I had no grave in which to bury my father in the first place, no soil to shovel onto his body to reach closure, no tomb to visit on my father's first yarzeit for the uncovering of the tombstone, no grave to place a smooth stone on from time to time. And, if all goes as currently planned, I will have none of those things when my mother passes either.
My mother will not be sitting shiva either, though I intend to make her let us do her cooking and give her a rest this weekend when we visit. But if she is at all like most non-Jewish people in our culture, she will not understand the need to sit and grieve. She will try to bury her grief in a pile of busy-ness. It's what my whole family did when my dad died, after all. Why should this be different?
People say that holidays are the big issue for inter-faith families: how do you manage celebrating Christmas at one house and Hanukkah at another? Wishing one person Happy Easter and another Chag Sameach? Will the kids be confused?
But we've got that down. No, the toughest issue for inter-faith families that I've run into yet is the toughest issue for humanity in general: death.
When my mother passes (God forbid that it happen anytime soon, of course, but everyone must go at some point in time), will my sister understand my desire to go to shul to say kaddish? My need to take a week, shiva, to just grieve before we start taking care of all the post-mortem family business? Will anyone be there to give me one of those little black ribbons to tear and pin to my lapel? Will the (presumably Methodist) memorial service speak to me at all?
When I die, who will say kaddish for me? Will those I leave behind give me a Jewish burial? Will my sister, my mother if she is still around, be bothered by all the Hebrew? Will they need to have another memorial for my Christian relatives? And would that be a bad thing?
I keep coming back to one thought: all of our death-rituals honor the person who is deceased, but they are for the living. And maybe we each need to grieve in the way that speaks to us. And if that means they pray for me in Hebrew and the gravesite and then again in the Methodist Church, well, hey -- it never hurts to be remembered more than once, does it?
So I will remember my "grandmother" in my own, my Jewish, way, and I will offer what I have to my Christian family to help them grieve the best they can in their ways. Because bringing my family together is really what my "grandmother" would have wanted.
And bringing people together is, ultimately, one of the things that religion is all about.
A friend of mine from Seminary who has gotten rather soured on religion lately echoed on Facebook this morning the sentiments of writer Dan Brown that "the world will be just fine without religion and that it is heading that way quickly.".
I disagree with the idea that the world would be better (or even "just fine") without religion.
You see, the woman I call my "adoptive grandmother" died recently. And because of my religion, I had a few pre-built ways to cope with this.
Now, before you jump to conclusions, I do not mean that I had a canned set of handy beliefs about the afterlife that made it possible for me to say "she is okay now" or "it's okay, her spirit is still with us," or some similar cliche that would let me handily wrap up my grief and quickly move on. I find that kind of spiritual response to death to actually be anti-helpful: we, as humans, need to grieve.
No, what I mean is that my religion has met me in my grief and supported me as I walked through the grieving process. It gave me things to say in those moments when words wouldn't come and things to do at a time when there seems to be nothing helpful to do.
I had a prayer book to pull out, with a mourner's kaddish to say, a yizkor service to pull a couple of memorial prayers from, and a handful of meditations on death and life to mull over when my mind was numb with shock.
I had two rabbis who called me on separate occasions (for which, to both of you, my sincerest and deepest thanks) to check in on me and make sure I was as okay as a person can be at such a time, and to let me say a few incoherent words about my "grandmother" and how I was handling her death, to remind me to support my mother on one hand and to remember to express my own grief on the other (I tend to retreat into a sort of stoic place of emotional reserve when confronted with death -- maybe because all of the deaths in my family so far have required me to "be there" for my mother and sister and so I just don't allow myself much space to have my own reactions) and, most of all, to make sure that I was hearing a real person's voice expressing concern for me at a time when I needed to hear that, which is a rare gift in this day where all-electronic communication is fast becoming the norm. Heck, there are some days when I get more words from my wife by text message than I do by mouth - it's just that kind of life we are living.
I had a yizkor (memorial) candle to light a little bit later, which I brought to work with me so that I have had the light of my "grandmother's" soul here to keep me company all day.
I have a Shabbat service this Friday to stand and say kaddish during, and then many other small ways to remember my dearly departed one throughout the coming year and the years to follow.
Yeah, I'd say that there are some times in our lives when religion still has some wisdom to inject into our lives that secular society does not. And, if I may say so, I think Judaism is particularly good at helping us handle the deaths that come into every life.
But that doesn't mean everything is smooth and perfect.
My "grandmother" is not Jewish, and neither is my mother. That means that my "grandmother" was cremated, rather than buried, as is increasingly becoming "the thing to do". My father was cremated, as were his parents before him, and my mother wishes to be cremated when she dies.
This poses a problem for the Jew in me, because there are many meaningful moments in the Jewish responses to a death that happen at the graveside. I had no grave in which to bury my father in the first place, no soil to shovel onto his body to reach closure, no tomb to visit on my father's first yarzeit for the uncovering of the tombstone, no grave to place a smooth stone on from time to time. And, if all goes as currently planned, I will have none of those things when my mother passes either.
My mother will not be sitting shiva either, though I intend to make her let us do her cooking and give her a rest this weekend when we visit. But if she is at all like most non-Jewish people in our culture, she will not understand the need to sit and grieve. She will try to bury her grief in a pile of busy-ness. It's what my whole family did when my dad died, after all. Why should this be different?
People say that holidays are the big issue for inter-faith families: how do you manage celebrating Christmas at one house and Hanukkah at another? Wishing one person Happy Easter and another Chag Sameach? Will the kids be confused?
But we've got that down. No, the toughest issue for inter-faith families that I've run into yet is the toughest issue for humanity in general: death.
When my mother passes (God forbid that it happen anytime soon, of course, but everyone must go at some point in time), will my sister understand my desire to go to shul to say kaddish? My need to take a week, shiva, to just grieve before we start taking care of all the post-mortem family business? Will anyone be there to give me one of those little black ribbons to tear and pin to my lapel? Will the (presumably Methodist) memorial service speak to me at all?
When I die, who will say kaddish for me? Will those I leave behind give me a Jewish burial? Will my sister, my mother if she is still around, be bothered by all the Hebrew? Will they need to have another memorial for my Christian relatives? And would that be a bad thing?
I keep coming back to one thought: all of our death-rituals honor the person who is deceased, but they are for the living. And maybe we each need to grieve in the way that speaks to us. And if that means they pray for me in Hebrew and the gravesite and then again in the Methodist Church, well, hey -- it never hurts to be remembered more than once, does it?
So I will remember my "grandmother" in my own, my Jewish, way, and I will offer what I have to my Christian family to help them grieve the best they can in their ways. Because bringing my family together is really what my "grandmother" would have wanted.
And bringing people together is, ultimately, one of the things that religion is all about.
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