Burning Ego
By Asher Keren
Israel is a place of truth, which means that it can also be a place of great lies. All of these lies serve the truth; they are transparent, much like a stress signal sent out from a drowning ship, calling for help, begging for recognition in order to heal. When Jews stray from the organic matrix of Judaism in the Land of Israel, they generally do so by cultivating alluring ideologies that call to and trap their prey like the Sirens of Greek mythology. Those caught in the trap become spokesman and personal examples for lifestyles that betray their fellow Jews living in the Land, because Jews cannot live lies in the Land of Israel. The Land itself spews them out, causing suffering and damage to all. No lie can sustain life in the Land of Israel; only truth. This is the message of our Prophets and the profound matrix that connects Jews with the Land.
The latest lie to take false root here is the use of crematoria to burn dead bodies, instead of traditional burial. Civil burial, rather than religious burial, is perhaps not a lie in and of itself, but rather a distortion. The burning of bodies, however, is an out and out lie. The lie is not a lie because of the association with the crematoria of recent history. This too is only a distortion, a sign of disassociation with history and with our collective Jewish pain, but it is not in and of itself a lie. Lies are deeper, penetrating the unique Israeli template that defines who we are as Jews in our Land.
The 'idea' that one may choose to reduce himself to wind blown dust after death is powerful, alluring in its premise that we actually have a right to do with our bodies as we want. Humans have rights, we are told, and this is true. But we are not told that humans do not have full rights to do as they please, which is also true. If we did, we could easily justify suicide, self flagellation, cannibalism (if the dead deemed it proper) and any other rite that depends on the assumption that our bodies are simply that, individual debris without a touch of Godliness, without a hint of holiness, without an intimation of connectedness to others and to the Land.
The assumption that our bodies are ours solely is equal to the assumption that we are God. It is no longer 'God gives and God takes, but rather 'We give and We take'. Placed in these clear terms, the lie would be rejected by most Jews, but lies are never placed in their elementary terms, they are couched in language so beautiful and even 'logical' that their fractional nature is masked from full view.
All lies are partial truths and when people pass by the Sirens called individual rights, self determination, pluralistic choice, personal fate and death as the ultimate endpoint, they betray other partial truths such as human bonding, life - and death - as a gift from God, the great historical chain of being, the organic life giving sustenance given to the earth provided by burying the dead, and the basic human need for the living to visit the deceased.
Only a culture of ultimate egoism could allow for a person to die as if he had never lived, with no firm and guarded ground for his parents and his friends, his colleagues, children and grandchildren to visit. Only a culture that stresses not that we are God's creatures, but rather our own disposable creations, could fathom the use of crematoria. As if a page torn from history, crematoria deny those that follow to visit those that came before. This defiance is not merely emotional denial; it is historical denial. Graves are a record of a people that lived and breathed, fought and studied, fashioned culture and practiced agriculture, of sinners and saints and kings and judges. Graves are a sign that we were here, in the Land of Israel.
Were all of the above partial truths not important, then crematoria are a right that every individual may choose. But these latter considerations are important. They bind us to our past, to our family, to our tribe, to our Land and confirm that our rights, while important, are not primary, not in a world created by God. And so, we are faced with a lie that teaches us a great truth. Jews that connect to the matrix of God, history and the Land will persevere. Those that do not will be gone with the wind.
