Even in the 1940s, my mother said, Helen was still a griner, a newcomer. She came green, stayed green, and died green, when green was still uncool. My mother’s favorite Green Helen story is about movie-going: At the RKO Keith’s, in Flushing, the two roommates would buy tickets and a box of nonpareils, watch a newsreel or two about the war, then take in a double feature. Later, over dinner, Helen would retell the newsreels in Yiddish for Sadye and Morris, who had stood all afternoon selling white blouses and black slips. But when it came to the features, her retellings were all her own. It was all one story, the break between films merely another intermission. An afternoon split between Yankee Doodle Dandy and Mrs. Miniver would be told as a sweeping epic of a tummler who grows up to be summoned to the White House, where he meets with Roosevelt while bombs are falling over the Minivers huddled in their shelter, who emerge to daven in their ruined church and potchke with their roses. Jimmy Cagney dissolved into Greer Garson; wisecracking hoofers wore stiff upper lips. To Helen, the movies were chaotic and unpredictable, no more or less, say, than getting on a train at Sochoczew and off a steamer at Castle Garden, or moving from Abie’s to Reizl’s to Sadye’s. Life was like that.

Perhaps for Jews life has always been like that, fractured and disrupted. We tell ourselves that Jewish life comes in cycles: from sunset to noon to nightfall; from harvest to frost to spring lambs; from birth to brit to bar mitzvah to marriage to (your middle-aged milestone here) to death. But most of the time life doesn’t feel cyclical. It’s rent by gap years, layoffs, and divorces. The pale, freckled faces that depart bear no resemblance to the bald, pink-mouthed strangers who arrive.

Take Simchat Torah morning, when Jews everywhere run circles around the Torah, rejoicing that ends turn into beginnings. We’re here for the double bill, and it’s all one story, this triumphant story of ours. V’zot habracha, we chant, this is the blessing of God’s man, Moses, bidding farewell; bereishit, we continue, in the beginning. Our technicolor Torah is an epic of blessings, a feature fit for God to watch in his heavenly balcony, over and over again.

I think about Helen, and I think, life isn’t like that. Torah’s not like that. It’s more like this:

God’s news for Moses has not gone down well: You will die on the mountain, and you will not enter. It must be a pretext, thinks Moses, it’s outrageous. He implores the earth and the heavens, the sun and the moon, the stars and the planets, to take up his cause, but for naught. The earth turns over; stars twinkle and blink. Surely the sea will plead for me, O Sea!, Moses thinks, but his roar is lost in the crashing waves. When Israel supplicates for Moses’ life, the angels Zakun and Lahash, in latex gloves, snatch up their words.

It’s not life he’s jealous of; it’s the land. Moses tells God he’ll go as a nobody. “No way,” says God. “You’re royalty.” I’ll dig a cave under the Jordan, Moses says; “No way,” says God. “A crossing’s a crossing.” At least let my bones go up, like Joseph’s, Moses says. “At least Joseph called himself a Hebrew,” says God. “But you? When the daughters of Jethro called you Egyptian, not a peep. No way. I’m putting my money on Joshua.”

God’s made up his mind; the countdown begins. “Six hours to live!” says God. I’ll live as a beast, says Moses; I’ll prey and scrounge. “Forget it,” says God; “that’s five.” Then as a bird, picking at rags and sipping at puddles, says Moses; silence, except for the angel Michael, weeping. I’ll defer to Joshua, I’ll be taught by him, says Moses. “Make me believe it,” says God. “That’s three.” Not even a hand or a foot? asks Moses, incredulous. “Don’t be ridiculous; that’s two,” says God.

He’ll try what always worked before; quote God back to himself. You have said, says Moses, I singled you out by name, and you have, indeed, gained My favor–but God cuts him off. “Been there, done that,” says God. “One more.” In the hour of his death, Moses’ soul wails brokenly, as only souls can. His thirsty soul, which marched through the desert when other souls soaked in the hot tubs of Gan Eden, his faithful soul that never grumbled and never looked back. “No,” cries his soul, “I won’t go, I can’t,” but Moses can’t stand the crying. As soon as he says, “There there, go rest, dear soul,” she’s in a kimono, flitting to heaven.

Then God knows: Never again would there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses. Never again, face to face. Never again, the bargaining and bullying, the wrath and forgiveness, the turning away and turning back. Never again, to be held in the cleft of pleasure, in Moses’ eye, showing far more than God had intended, than God thought he should.

Then it comes to God: He will sit on a rock and grieve for seven days.

And while he grieves it returns to him, the radiant face, in darkness and wind, in a welter of soot, in whelming waves. “Let there be light,” he says, and there is light. He tastes it now, the bitter water Moses turned sweet, and he gathers the waters into a sea. In each eye of the shepherd, a burning bush, “a great light for day and a lesser for night.” A tiny ark adrift in the Nile, “let the waters swarm.” Moses, a father of sons, and he brings out trees and fruit and seed.

In his ear, the plague of buzzing and bleating—gnats and goats, frogs and cows, oxen and sheep—so he makes them all, those who crawl and those who creep.

Through his mind flows a river of blood; he makes hydras and krakens.

From a leprous hand, drawn out of a cloak, from scabs and boils, he fashions flesh, smooth and firm, a shoulder, a calf, a buttock, a breast, and makes them one and one.

Six days, and the heaven and earth were completed, and all their array. He sits for one more day, and holds the new world close and still, as if Moses, too, had made it.

This is what I once told a congregation, at a festive Simchat Torah dinner, that the creation of the world was God’s shiva for Moses. It was not what they came for, and out of step with the klezmer and the schnapps and the candy apples. But they’d gone on to decaf, and they sipped and considered. Afterward, one polite man said I was “idiosyncratic.” Well, my middle name is Helen. Let’s say I’m Helen, my grandmother, in the middle, which is just where the endings are, though Helen never seemed to notice.

Esther Schor is a poet and professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of Emma Lazarus, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters Series.

Why didn’t we eat at home the way her Hebrew School teachers had told her Jews should eat? And what did Jewish law have to do with her adolescent concern for the welfare of animals? The grandchild remembers what the son never learned, says a Yiddish proverb. “I wasn’t raised that way,” I told my daughter. “I don’t have a good answer. But here’s something that might help.” We sat down together to read Michael Wyschogrod’s essay “The Revenge of the Animals.”

That was before I met Michael in 2007 and well before I had the honor to edit his contributions to the monthly journal First Things. Lord Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, told me that Wyschogrod had produced “the closest thing we have to a systematic theology.” Born in Berlin in 1928 to Hungarian-Jewish parents, Wyschogrod and his family escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, fleeing to New York, where he attended an Orthodox yeshiva, Torah Vodaath. He studied Talmud with the great Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, while writing a dissertation on Kierkegaard and Heidegger at Columbia University. He is one of the last of the great European-Jewish scholars who mastered both the Jewish religious sources and the corpus of Western philosophy. What mattered to me at the moment, though, was his little midrash on Genesis.

Kashrut is a stumbling block for modern Jews. Rational defenses of the dietary laws ring hollow—for example Maimonides’ claim that kashrut promotes health (“Anyone who thinks that kosher food is healthy has never had Shabbat dinner at my mother’s house,” said Harlan Wechsler, the rabbi at Congregation Or Zarua in Manhattan). I was too modern to observe mitzvot simply because the Torah said so—like the German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig, about whom I had published several essays, my attitude toward much of observance was, “Not yet.”

Rational argument about kashrut falls short, but I was ready to hear a biblical argument, especially now that my daughter had called me on the carpet. And so we read Wyschogrod’s commentary together. Christians saw the serpent in the Garden of Eden as Satan, he began, but that never occurred to the rabbis of antiquity. The snake was only the cleverest animal of the many God made to try to keep man company, for, as it says in Genesis 2, “it is not good for man to be alone.” But “for Adam no fitting helper was found.” And then God made Eve. “Only woman is the proper companion of man,” Wyschogrod argued, but “animals are also companions although less than fully satisfactory ones.”

“What does that have to do with eating animals?” my daughter interrupted. That was where Wyschogrod was heading. Genesis tells us that even if the animals are not as close to God as are we, neither are they so far from him. The Torah is the first document in history to evince concern for the welfare as well as the sentiments of animals; domestic animals must rest on the Sabbath, and an ox must be allowed to eat the grain that it threshes. To kill and eat them is a grave matter; we have no rational calculus by which to weigh the human requirement for nutrition against the trace of the divine in animal life. That is why Jews may consume meat only with supernatural sanction, under restrictions imposed by God himself. God, Wyschogrod offers as an afterthought, probably would prefer us to be vegetarians.

My daughter and I agreed that we would consume no more non-kosher meat, and we would separate it from dairy. Some months passed before it dawned on me that I had migrated to the inside of Judaism, rather than pressing my nose against the window and looking in. I did not take the leap of faith across the chasm toward Jewish observance, to be sure: I was pushed by a stern-faced 14-year-old. Still, the world felt different afterward: I ate meat less frequently, and with a sense of awe at the God who rules over life and death. First one does, then one understands. The hard part is to understand enough to start doing.

Judaism is a religion of the body, Wyschogrod teaches. God chose Abraham and his descendants in the flesh, and it is in the sanctification of the body of Israel that God finds a home on earth, he wrote in his masterwork The Body of Faith. In his most controversial argument, he draws a parallel between our belief that God’s indwelling (Shekhinah) resides in the flesh-and-blood people of Israel, and the Christian idea of incarnation—the belief in “the indwelling of God in Israel by concentrating that indwelling in one Jew rather than leaving it diffused in the people of Jesus as a whole.” This raised eyebrows in some parts of the Orthodox Jewish world, for the idea that something like incarnation is found in Judaism is an uncomfortable thought.

By the late 1980s, Wyschogrod had become an important figure in Jewish-Christian relations. Against the prevailing sentiment in the Orthodox world, he argued forcefully for a theological dialogue with Christians, not only because he respected his Christian counterparts—above all the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth—but also because he believed that understanding the Christian belief in incarnation cast a clarifying light on the sanctity of the physical, bodily Jewish people. He became something of a cult figure among young Christian theologians, but he remained somewhat remote from the Orthodox Jewish mainstream. He is now appreciated as one of Orthodoxy’s most important and original thinkers.

By uncovering this parallel between Judaism and Christianity, Wyschogrod drew the line of division all the more brightly. Christians believe that God was present in the flesh of a single Jew; Jews sanctify their flesh through the mitzvot. It is the act of sanctification, not the belief, that defines our practice. As Franz Rosenzweig said, Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but they cannot know it for sure; but the existence of the people of Israel is a physical fact.

Jews who undertake a return to Jewish observance begin with a spiritual hunger and—if they succeed—arrive at the practice of Judaism. We do not return to Judaism from nowhere, but rather from the ambient Christian culture in which we live. The centrality of belief and the sovereignty of conscience are the hallmarks of this culture, and Jews who grew up at a distance from Judaism inevitably look at Judaism through a Christian lens.

Wo es sich christelt, da judelt es sich auch, in Heinrich Heine’s word-play: It says more or less, “Where Christians do something, Jews do the same,” but with the onomatopoetic sense in German of “tinkling” (christeln) versus “doodling” (judeln). A rationalized rather than a lived Judaism comes down to doodling. Judaism that emphasizes “ethical monotheism” against “ritual observance,” and rejects or qualifies the chosenness of Israel, really is mainline Protestantism with a tallis.

Judaism without commandments never made sense to me. If you observe the injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself” because it comes from God, why not also observe the commandment in the next verse not to wear cloth woven of two kinds of material? And if these don’t come from God, where do they come from? No surviving school of philosophy claims to derive any system of ethics—let alone “love thy neighbor”—from reason. Even if we think that ethics can be deduced from reason, why do we need the Torah? Or if we believe that altruism is an evolutionary adaptation, why should ethics have anything to do with Judaism? If “love thy neighbor” is not a divine commandment, and if it is not a logical deduction, then what is it? For semi-affiliated Jews, it’s the residue of a faith to which formerly observant Jews of an older generation have a sentimental attachment.

There is a great gulf fixed between “ethical monotheism” and traditional Jewish observance, which demands that we accept God’s will rather than our own criteria of judgment. As Wyschogrod notes, just that was the sin of Eve and Adam, who ate the forbidden fruit in order to acquire autonomous knowledge of good and evil. Such knowledge is what the philosophers promised from Plato to Kant, but failed to deliver; philosophy walked out on ethics in the 19th century and never looked back.

The trouble is that Jews who grew up surrounded by Christian culture do not know any way to act except according to their own autonomous criteria of judgment, yet the exercise of autonomous choice undermines the spirit of Jewish observance. How do we get there from here? One answer is Chabad-style outreach: Just perform one mitzvah, then another. We won’t harangue you; little by little, you’ll get to like it. I respect this approach, but it would not have reached me.

Wyschogrod reaches out in a different way.

Conscience, he explains, is not historically a Jewish concept. Conscience can tell us to do precisely what we shouldn’t. Christians place great emphasis on conscience, but that can lead to perverse results; he cites the dictate of St. Thomas Aquinas that if a man believes that “to omit fornication is a mortal sin, when he chooses not to fornicate, he sins mortally.” The secular reading of conscience is even more troubling. Heidegger tells us that conscience has nothing to do with ethics in the first place; it is our inner voice telling us to be authentic (which might explain why Heidegger’s Nazi party membership never troubled his conscience).

Judaism asks us to follow not our own conscience, but rather God’s commandments. What makes us accept these commandments? In the past, Jews may have kept the commandments to conform to community standards, but this no longer can be the case when only a minority of Jews keep the mitzvot: “It is much more probable than ever before that a Jew who remains faithful to the covenant in this day and age is acting out of conscience instead of social conformity,” Wyschogrod writes. “The Judaism of our day can no longer dispense with conscience as part of our theological arsenal.”

The solution, Wyschogrod maintains, is to acquire a biblical conscience—and here he draws on Karl Barth, who taught direct engagement with revelation. Jews can bridge the chasm between autonomous choice and divine command “by exposing conscience to those events and documents which constitute the record of Israel’s relation with God.” We cannot separate the Torah from our national life of the past 4,000 years and the lasting belief that God loved us and made us his inheritance. We answered that love by accepting the means God gave us to sanctify the quotidian, bodily life of Israel. The Jewish conscience, he argues, is “developed by the tradition of revelation to which the people of Israel are witness and without which Jewish conscience is impoverished and isolated, cut off from its source of historic sustenance.”

And that is why the little essay “The Revenge of the Animals” gobsmacked me: It impressed upon me that the “narrative” and the “legislative” parts of the Bible, the “ethical” and the ritual,” the ineffable mystery of life and death and the rules of the kosher kitchen, all are woven into one seamless fabric. We stand in fear and trembling before the terrible mystery of death; our fate, said Solomon, is the same as the beasts’, for all is vanity. In such matters, philosophical rationalizing leads to nonsense or madness—in the extreme case, to Peter Singer’s infamous claim that a healthy pig has more right to life than a crippled human infant. Judaism instead provides a supernatural answer to the mystery: God gives us means to sanctify our physical life on earth and therewith the promise of eternal life.

Eating is more important than prayer, remarked Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. There is no direct instruction to pray in the Pentateuch, which tells us plainly, “You shall eat before the Lord.” It takes work to learn to daven, but it was harder for me to learn how to eat—to live like a Jew rather than just sound like one.

Sometime later, I worked up the courage to invite Michael to dinner. He chose kosher vegetarian.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor at First Things magazine and the “Spengler” columnist for Asia Times Online.

• David Kimche, a longtime Mossad member who rose to Foreign Ministry Director General, and who in later life backed the two-state solution and J Street, died at 82. [Laura Rozen]

• They’re planning a major-studio, 3D version of the Book of Genesis. Title: In The Beginning. Adam and Eve will be blue (just kidding). [Jewcy]

• Three suspects in the theft of Auschwitz’s “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign pleaded to up to three years’ jail-time. [Krakow Post/Vos Iz Neias?]

• The Egyptian government will fund restorations of local synagogues. [AP/Haaretz]

• Elinor Burkett, the Golda Meir biographer who made a Kanye-like splash at the Oscars, took her new schtick to Letterman (go to the three-minute mark). [ArtsBeat]

Some notable pieces from the Spring 2010 number:

• Tablet Magazine book critic Adam Kirsch reviews 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, a new novel from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who is also the author of Nextbook Press’s Betraying Spinoza (got all that?).

• Hillel Halkin—author of Nextbook Press’s brand-spankin’-new biography of Yehuda Halevi—considers a new American Orthodox siddur.

• Ron Rosenbaum discusses Bob Dylan as an explicitly Jewish figure.

• Michael Weingrad interrogates why, amid a sea of Christian allegories, there are few if any good Jewish-inspired fantasy novels.

• Harvey Pekar and Tara Seibel offer a graphic review of comic artist R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis.

Jewish Review of Books
A Jewish Journal of Ideas is Born [Forward]

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Ricky Gervais on The Book of Genesis [Effect Measure]

I guess I just wondered why he did this project. >>

Having spent a year reading the Torah portions themselves, often in light of current events and other immediate concerns, this column will now attempt a different, more desperate task, considering the postscript in light of its point of reference. The Torah portion, the parasha is—to borrow a phrase from Phillip Larkin—the elsewhere that underwrites the haftorah’s existence.

And could there be a greater elsewhere than Genesis 1:1? “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Definitive. Defining. What else remains to be said?

This week’s haftorah, taken from the book of Isaiah, provides a fascinating meditation on that seminal act of creation. The same Lord who, in the beginning, spoke to command light into existence, now concerns Himself with a more concrete theme, His people.

“I am the Lord,” He says. “I called you with righteousness and I will strengthen your hand; and I formed you, and I made you for a people’s covenant, for a light to nations.”

It’s an odd construction, that. Just what does it mean to call someone with righteousness? And, chronologically speaking, wouldn’t the Lord first form a people, and only then call them, with righteousness or otherwise? Doesn’t the act of creation, the subject of the first chapter of Genesis, precede all else?

An answer, intriguing and difficult, appears later on in the chapter. In stark contrast to John—who famously declared that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”—Isaiah puts a more mute spin on things. “I was silent from time immemorial,” he quotes the Lord as saying. “I am still, I restrain Myself.”

Isaiah’s God is wordless. The prophet, unlike the apostle, understands that the word of God, mighty as it is, is secondary to the awesome, shattering force that human beings possess, that singular strength that, in some sense, puts them even above the Lord himself, the power to simply declare that they do not believe in God. The Word, in other words, means nothing if nobody’s listening. Isaiah himself riffs on this theme: “There is much to see but you do not observe,” he reports the Lord’s words, “to open the ears but no one listens.”

In this impaired universe—one inhabited by people, perfectly flawed as we are—the act of creation, the forming, can and must come after the call to righteousness. Our God—the still, the silent, the restrained—did not make us so that we can obey. He called us into righteousness first, setting before us His moral and spiritual ideals, and only then formed us. It’s a sequence that necessitates choice: first we are shown the path, and then given our bodies, our spirits, and our minds, all the faculties we’ll need to choose whether to walk with God or to refuse Him.

What makes the Jews a light unto the nations, then, is not, as some renowned scholars have suggested throughout the centuries, some inherent quality, some divine spark injected, from Adam onwards, into each Jewish soul. Rather, it is the ability, if not the obligation, to make up our own minds. We have no savior; we must save ourselves. More than the chosen people, the Jews are the choosing people, presented by God not with a definitive account that leaves no room for interpretation but with a calling to do the right thing and the capacity to reject that very calling.

If the prophet were around today, in the age of constant cable news, he might have put it this way: God reports, we decide. Thank the Lord, then, for the haftorahs: As great as the Torah is, when we’re faced with such crucial decisions, every additional bit of information help.

Meantime, have a look for yourself at Crumb’s version of Eve, who looks a mite like Crumb’s wife, Aline.

Word Made Fresh [Bookforum]

Aboard Noah’s ark, some of God’s creatures won’t get with the program.

Written by Stephen Levinson and Joel Moss Levinson. Animation by Ed Mundy. Illustration by Mike Herrod. Music by Craig Hillelson. Sound engineering by Jesse Novak. Featuring the voices of Bob Balaban, Aaron Bleyaert, Jonathan Katz, Jess Lane, Jesse Novak, and Tami Sagher.

Ensconced as we are in small apartments in large apartment buildings, we only hear our neighbors when they’re being too loud too late at night, only see them when we groggily bump into each other when picking up the morning paper at our doorsteps, only know a handful of things about the men and women who live right next door, sometimes not even their names.

But everyone in the building in which I live, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, knew Keith Charles.

If you’ve been watching television or frequenting Broadway in the past four or five decades, you, too, probably knew Keith. He had the kind of unobtrusively handsome face that got him cast on one soap opera after the other, usually as a doctor, a cad, or a crisp combination of both. He had the sort of voice that put listeners at ease, just deep enough to inspire confidence and just playful enough to suggest mischief. He had the quality of grace that allowed him to gingerly hold his own against the great Lauren Bacall in Applause, the Broadway stage adaptation of the classic film All About Eve. He was never a star, but he was a damn fine actor, and for 50 years he made every production he ever took part in a little bit more interesting.

To us, however, Keith’s greatest role was neighbor. He took pleasure in cultivating the puny flowerpots outside of our building, spending hours raking and tilling and planting. When an elderly tenant would approach, Keith would drop his hoe and lend a hand with grocery bags or a walker. When a small child would come running by, Keith would invent some impromptu game designed to amuse. He was often performing, making funny faces and launching into impersonations, but he was always sincere in his affection and concern for all of us in the building.

In July, Keith passed away after a long illness and we, his neighbors and friends, were left with a brownstone that now seemed eerily quiet without his voice and oddly empty without his smile.

I thought about Keith this week, reading the parasha that tells us of Jacob’s death. Mustering his last thrusts of strength, the patriarch sits on the bed and summons his children to his side. What a scene that must’ve been: the ancient Jacob, 147 years old, convening his clan, the fathers of Israel’s 12 tribes, for a final farewell. And yet, as he begins to speak, Jacob acts in an unexpected way: selflessly.

As this column has already explored at some length, Jacob was never one to put the wellbeing of others ahead of his own; for a fair idea of the man’s general attitude towards his fellow men, just ask his brother, Esau.

Nor is our patriarch known for being timid: whereas his grandfather, Abraham, talked to God, Jacob expanded the boundaries of the relationship between man and deity and spent a jaunty evening physically wrestling with one of God’s angels.

And yet, as he draws his last breaths, nothing remains of Jacob the feisty, Jacob the self-centered, Jacob the strident. Instead, he speaks solely about his children and their future, expounding to each son on his strength and to some on their sins. He expires having told his boys how proud he was of them, how bright their futures, how much each one mattered as a man in full.

But there was more to this deathbed farewell: in his last lecture, Jacob created a community. From Shimon, he told one son, would come schoolteachers. From Judah, he confided in another, leaders and kings. Sailors from Zebulun and farmers from Asher and judges from Dan. As the brothers listened, a single thought must have presented itself to each one: they needed one another, could only thrive if the judges and the farmers and the kings came together, each doing his part to create a nation and a people.

Shortly after reading this week’s parasha, I attended a memorial service for Keith held by his wife of 44 years, the composer Nancy Ford. Dozens of neighbors huddled together in Nancy and Keith’s apartment. Lou, our long-time mailman, came from Brooklyn on his day off. And everybody had a story to tell about Keith. My favorite was a short anecdote, told by Nancy herself: Keith, she revealed, kept a short list on his desk, writing down the name of each neighbor and a few details that would help him carry the conversation and put people at ease. He would write down names of neighbors’ relatives or friends, mark recurring topics of conversation, note if one of us was particularly fond of a certain restaurant or had a distinctive hobby. And when he met us, he could easily ask after our aged aunt he’d only seen once, years ago, or about our favorite Italian joint up the block, or about that movie we were so taken with a while back. And we would be delighted, because we knew he genuinely cared, that he loved us for our quirks and idiosyncrasies, that he took the trouble to know each one of us as his or her own person.

In his life, then, Keith Charles embodied the very same lesson Jacob only learned on his deathbed, which is that a group of people, even if they are brothers or live right across the hall from each other, stand a much better chance of coming together and forming a community if someone, some benevolent patriarch, someone confident enough to wrestle with angels or with Lauren Bacall, takes the trouble to get to know them, to be kind, and to care.

As you read this column, 2009 will have dawned in all its glory. Quite likely, it is already Friday or Saturday, and you, I hope, have had the chance to tear off the last of your hangover’s thin webs, to write down those new year’s resolutions, to bid adieu to the holiday season, and to prepare for the somber and serious times ahead.

Serious and somber: If you’ve been a regular reader of this column, you surely know that such are not usually its prevailing moods; this space is generally reserved for lighthearted meditations on the week’s Torah portion, preferably with a lacing of profanity or a dab of debauchery. But as the year ends and a new one begins, I’d like to offer a very short meditation of a very different nature.

This week’s parasha is an uplifting one. It is about a family coming together: After finally revealing his true identity to his estranged brothers, Joseph happily reunites with his aged father, moves the entire clan down to Egypt, and facilitates their prosperity and happiness. The rest is history: The brothers begat multitudes, the whole Hebrew nation, the ancestors of us all. And none of this, we are told, would have been possible without one man’s mercy: Had Joseph not taken pity on his sinful siblings, the sons of Israel would have most likely perished in a starved and stricken Canaan.

Let us now, however, think not only of Joseph and his brothers, but of Tahir Balousha and four of her sisters, who died in their sleep this week after a bomb caused the corrugated asbestos roof of their Gaza home to collapse on them.

There is an excellent chance, dear reader, that as you read the previous paragraph, you found yourself armed with a ready response. Perhaps you rolled your eyes and wondered aloud why I failed to mention the terrorized children of southern Israel, living in the dark shadow of Hamas’s rockets. Or maybe you summoned a healthy dose of outrage and muttered something about peace, justice, and the need for restraint. It is even possible that you lost all interest at the mention of anything so overtly and flagrantly political.

If you can, though, put all of these emotions aside for a moment. The deaths of the Balousha girls—Tahir, 17; Ikram, 15; Samer, 13; Dina, 8; and 4-year-old Jawahar—have nothing do with your convictions. You may consider Israel’s recent strikes on Gaza blessed and essential or vengeful and futile, but please let’s not think about any of that right now. For just one more minute, stay with me while I ponder the fate of the Baloushas, and what it has to do with this week’s parasha.

As the bomb went off, another sibling, 16-year-old Imam, was sleeping next to her sisters in their tiny, crowded bedroom. Imam didn’t hear the explosion, she later told the press; she simply woke up when the ceiling started collapsing. “I just woke when the bricks fell on me,” she said. “I saw all my sisters around me and I couldn’t move.” In the next room, the family’s two babies—one-year-old Muhammad and Bara’a, a baby girl just 12 days old—suffered a few injuries but survived. Anwar, the father, was also wounded in the explosion. When he finally made it to the hospital for treatment, he was turned away; it was too crowded.

I suspect you may be fighting an urge to resort to whatever set of political talking points to which you subscribe. I know I would. But that would be missing the point, ignoring the very lesson that the brave and noble Joseph so eloquently teaches us this week: Grace is independent of context. Forgiveness is free of facts. Compassion has its own way of shaping reality. And if we want to be good and thrive, we must possess all three in abundance.

And so, as 2009 rolls in, let us continue our political arguments. Let us bring up facts and figures in support of our beliefs. Let us be rational and dedicated and engaged. But let us also remember that on the other end of every policy, of every persuasion, of every idea, there are people whose lives and whose well-being we must take into consideration. We may not end up changing our minds, but we would at least know that our decisions are informed by that greatest of all qualities: the quality of mercy.

Having barely had a chance to explore the reasons for and consequences of the catastrophe, our earnest journalists turned their attention away from the bland boardrooms of Wall Street and towards the living rooms and bedrooms of the Upper East Side, where, they dutifully reported, all was not well.

“Divorce Takes the Economy Into Account,” read one headline in The New York Times, suggesting that a fair share of the city’s nuptials were following the stock market into hell because, like the market itself, they were never based on much more than a simple calculation of profit and loss. Divorce lawyers regaled reporters with tale after tale of loveless marriages held together by sterling stock portfolios, of yearned-for separations awaiting signs from Ben Bernanke, of couples plotting the dissolutions of their marriages while keeping one eye forever trained on CNBC. Not to be outdone, Time Magazine summed it all up nicely, making sure it rhymed: “Recession and divorce… go together like carriage and horse.”

To us hopeless romantics, the thought that true love may be diluted by dollars and cents is unbearable. But the Bible, as it so often does, saw it all coming, and this week it delivers a much-needed bit of relationship advice: money matters.

Suze Orman couldn’t have said it better herself. Had the perky priestess of personal finance been around back in the day, she and Abraham would have likely had a lovely chat; like Suze, Abe knew that every solid relationship should be based first and foremost on a sturdy balance sheet and only then on fickle emotions.

It is not coincidence, perhaps, that, this week, the Bible presents us with its first-ever account of a real estate transaction”Abraham purchasing the field in Machpelah as a final resting place for Sarah and himself”followed closely by the first-ever account of a shidduch, importing Rebecca as Isaac’s bride. Abraham has his priorities straight: first land, then love.

When he sends Eliezer, his most trusted servant, to look for a bride in the happening town of Nahor, he makes sure the man has camels, silver and gold and garments, delicacies for her brother and gifts for her mom. And Eliezer himself is a savvy pitchman: of all of his master’s many virtues (the father of much of humanity? God’s BFF?), he describes Abraham to the potential bride’s family much like a CEO might present a company to its annual shareholders’ meeting: “And the Lord blessed my master exceedingly,” boasts Eliezer, “and he became great, and He gave him sheep and cattle, silver and gold, man servants and maid servants, camels and donkeys.” With a shtick like that, what Nahorian mother wouldn’t kvell?!?

For that matter, Abraham’s insistence on a Nahorian maiden is another brilliant stroke of level-headedness: there are, of course, many lovely ladies in Canaan, but the Old Man knew just how much trouble these cross-cultural marriages can be. The last thing he wanted was foreigners for in-laws, a bit ironic considering the fact that he himself was the first foreigner in history, the first man on record to leave his homeland and settle in a strange land. When it comes to his son, however, Abraham wants the bride to be a daughter of his native Nahor, Becky from the block.

By the time the lovely lady rides into town, and catches Isaac’s eye with her great beauty, business has been taken care of. Money was exchanged, a financial future secured, cultural compatibility guaranteed. No wonder, then, that it takes the book a mere few lines to report that Isaac married Rebecca and loved her. It’s that simple. Unlike those poor saps in Lehman Brothers and their spouses, the two kids in Canaan had little to worry about.

Herein the column ends, not with bang but with a whimper. As much as Abraham’s wisdom appeals, and as much as our patriarch could teach us about entering into relationships not with the deafening roar of romance but with the measured tones of any reasonable transaction, I cannot, in good faith, agree. The mind applauds Abe’s practicality, and yet the heart decries the coolness of it all.

Devoid of inspiration, then, I searched elsewhere for thoughts about love and marriage. And found ‘em in the most obvious of sources: Britney. The recent divorcee, who appears naked in her new music video, managed this bit of romantic rumination in a recent interview with MTV.

“I think I married for all the wrong reasons,” said Ms. Spears. “Instead of following my heart and, like, doing something that made me really happy…I just did it because…for just, like, the idea of everything.”

Forget about camels or 401(k)s, bracelets or municipal bonds. When it comes to love, I’m with the old Britney: it’s all about the idea of everything.

Liel Leibovitz is the author, most recently, of Lili Marlene: The Soliders’ Song of World War II. To put it mildly, he lacks the temperament for the rabbinate.

Instead of adding to the choir, let us pause for a moment to mourn the passing of a few staples of the electoral season. There will be no more morning consultations with the statistical svengalis of fivethirtyeight.com; no more frantic conversations about voter turnout, or absentee ballots, or bellwether counties in Indiana that have never before failed to presage the identity of the president.

And, worst of all, no more Joe the Plumber.

By now, any introduction of the bald-headed celebrity is unnecessary. The unwitting Joe, a man so inept at expressing his own thoughts he challenged television viewers to call in and help him decipher what he himself had meant by a recent inflammatory statement, was largely perceived as the embodiment of Republican folly, a purported Everyman who, upon light scrutiny, was revealed to be not just ignorant, but inane.

But as disastrous as John McCain’s eager affiliation with Joe the Plumber turned out to be, the senator’s political instincts may not have been as dull as we think. A candidate now famous for lurching from strategy to strategy, McCain might have hit on the oldest trick in the book: no one stands out more than an ordinary man.

This is especially true for us Jews. Ordinary, unremarkable men and women have been among our heroes since at least 1812 B.C., when the original regular Joe appeared on the scene: Abraham.

While any comments belittling the father of our nation and the ancestor, arguably, of a large swath of humanity may appear gratuitously blasphemous, there is a mystery at the heart of this week’s parasha that is too great to ignore: why was Abraham chosen?

Just last week, reading about Noah, another man singled out for a divine covenant, we were told that the builder of the ark was “a righteous man” who was “perfect in his generations” and who “walked with God.” Little wonder, then, that when the hard rain began to fall, Noah was selected as humanity’s last, best hope.

But Abraham? Nada. As this week’s parasha begins, we’re told that the Lord speaks to him and tells him to leave his home and embark on history’s longest commute. But the Bible never bothers, as it did with Noah, with anything by way of exposition: we know very little about Abraham (or Abram, as he’s called before God gives him an extreme, divine makeover), and even less about why he, of all men, was chosen.

Sure, Jewish theology later addresses this topic, inventing legend upon legend in an effort to portray Abraham as a prodigy, a singularly devoted smasher of idols and performer of miracles. But that came later, hundreds of years after the Bible was reportedly written. And as every novice television screenwriter will tell you, tacking a complicated back story on to a character so late in the show is often a sign of a ratings crisis.

Nor do we get to see Abraham’s heroic side as his story unfolds. Sure, there’s the whole business with the sacrifice of his son Isaac”who, in this parasha, is yet unborn”but overall, the man we meet is as ordinary as anyone we may see on TV. We might call him, I don’t know, Abe the Herder.

Throughout the parasha, Abraham falls into mishap after mishap. There is, for example, a hilarious case of mistaken identity involving him, his wife, and the King of Egypt. There’s some rowdy romance with the maidservant Hagar. And there’s even a bodily act as graphic as anything we’re likely to see on cable television these days, the cutting off of the tips of the…anyway.

But it’s in Abraham’s very ordinariness that his significance lies. Unlike in other religions, our main guy is nothing special. He’s not God, or the son of God, or even the dude who walks with God. He’s an average Joe. He’s just like us. And unlike contemporary politicians who claim a similar mantle, Abraham rises to the occasion, becoming the first Hebrew and the father of monotheism.

When we read his parasha this week, therefore, let us not seek Abraham’s flaws but sing his praise. Let us find inspiration in his story, and believe that if a man like him received the ultimate divine honor, so, perhaps, can we all. And let us go easy on the poor, hapless Joes, no matter their shortcomings. Who knows, one of them may surprise us some day.

Liel Leibovitz is the author, most recently, of Lili Marlene: The Soliders’ Song of World War II. To put it mildly, he lacks the temperament for the rabbinate.

Wait, scratch that.

This week, the Bible is actually more depressing—and eerily more pertinent—than anything you’ll find on TV or online.

Since it may have been a while since many of us pondered the events that unfold in Genesis 6:9 to 11:32, here’s a very brief synopsis: God, furious at the world’s wickedness, instructs Noah, the only righteous dude around, to build an ark, load it with two members, male and female, of every species, and prepare for the flood. Forty very wet days and nights later, the flood finally ends, and God enters into a covenant with mankind, setting all sorts of helpful rules prohibiting murder and cruelty and such and promising, in return, never again to pull off any more diluvian stunts. Noah, thrilled to be on dry land, plants a vineyard, partakes of the wine and, like so many of us at one point or another in life, passes out on his bed, naked and drunk. Ham, his son, sees his father naked, while Ham’s two brothers, Shem and Japheth, refuse to look, covering Noah in cloth instead. Ham is cursed. Fast forward a few years, and the descendants of Noah, feeling frisky, build a very tall tower in a town called Babel. Angry at their vanity and ambition, and wishing, perhaps, that he’d never made that promise about no more floods, God confuses the tongues of men, and instead of speaking one universal language as they had before, the children of Noah now speak in many dialects. What they had there, presaging Cool Hand Luke by a couple millennia, was failure to communicate.

How is any of this relevant to our pre-election week? Ignoring the obvious metaphors—Wall Street as another tower of avarice, say, or the melting of the polar ice caps as precursor to a modern-day flood—this week’s parasha arrives just in time to teach us two very important lessons.

The first has to do with racism, a concept that can often trace its roots to the very Torah portion in question. While Genesis 9: 20-27 makes no overt reference to race, the story as it was told in subsequent centuries and in different cultures painted Ham’s face black, tying together sinfulness and servitude and providing a mighty, divine justification for oppressing the dark-skinned people of the world. As recently as a few decades ago, this so-called “Curse of Ham” was all some white Americans, including some influential ministers, needed to justify slavery and segregation.

Most likely, readers of Nextbook will find such bosh utterly laughable. But as we discuss the Bradley Effect—the concern that potential voters conceal their racial prejudice from pollsters but reveal it come election day—we may do well to remember the Ham Effect: the possibility that racism is resilient because it is effective at manipulating anything to its advantage, succeeding even in cementing a biblical story in which race is never mentioned into a concrete theological base from which to launch a millennia of violent racial assaults. Even if, come November 4, America elects its first black president, we must never assume that the forces that transformed seven verses in the book of Genesis into a divine justification for oppression are done trying.

But if Barack Obama took some time off this Shabbat and dropped by a shul in, I don’t know, maybe Florida, Ohio or Pennsylvania, it is likely that the portion of the parasha that would most appeal to him would be the part that comes later, the bit about Babel and its tower.

After all, a candidate whose political fortunes turned forever as a result of his 2004 Democratic convention speech about a united America would surely revel in a vision of a united humanity. And the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia may find much to regret about the fact that God’s chosen form of punishment was not another flood—promises are promises—but the creation of many disparate tongues, a lingual lashing that kept people separated and confused.

And while the flood usually receives top billing—the disaster to end all disasters—it is, I believe, the tower that’s the real catastrophe. Think about how sad a story it really is: the only time in which we see humanity coming together as one to collaborate on a joint project, and what they choose to do, like Donald Trumps of antiquity, is say “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name.” If this is unity, God sighs, it’s best to keep them apart.

This, of course, is no hopeful message for election week. And as Jon Stewart has so diligently shown us, the descendants of the ancient bickering Babelers are alive and well on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. But the parasha doesn’t close on this sort of downer: just as the portion draws to an end, at the tail of a long genealogy of Shem’s offspring, it gives us a glimpse of a man who would come to play a very major role: Abraham, who we’re told is already en route with his family to Canaan, the soon-to-be-Promised Land.

And so it goes: from flood to dry and holy land, from curse to blessing, from men losing their common language to the man who will soon find common language with God. In other words, this week’s parasha is about change. And hope. I wonder where I’ve heard those words since.

If they can do it, why can’t I? Sure, they’ve spent years in rabbinical school studying the Torah, but I’ve spent hours, maybe even days, watching TV, playing video games, and reading blogs. When it comes to popular culture, I think it’s safe to assume that God, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, is on my side.

Welcome to “Blessed Week Ever,” a weekly drash written by one of the least likely Torah commentators you’ll ever meet.

This Shabbat, as synagogue-going Jews open the ark, I will turn on my Mac and play a new game called Spore. Created by Will Wright, the gaming guru who designed the Sims”the popular series of games that allow players to create and control small universes of virtual people”the game’s objective speaks to the central issue at the heart of this week’s parasha: the question of creation. In Spore, the player creates his own microcosmic organism, and then manipulates and tweaks it throughout a complex evolutionary process. Seeing one’s little virtual darlings grow from pixilated specks to spacefaring aliens, Spore‘s players get the satisfaction previously reserved only for He who, in the beginning, created the heavens and the earth.

But while the game allows us the heady pleasure of playing God, it’s also more than enough to demonstrate just how far we really are from Our Father Which Art in Heaven. For God, creation is no biggie: some dust off the ground, the breath of life, and voila”Man. For Man, however, creation is slightly more difficult. Indeed, all subsequent human history, arguably, has been little but an attempt to replicate that most splendid of God’s miracles: making something out of nothing.

Consider the past few weeks alone, a time in which markets all over the world, like cows on a slaughterhouse conveyor belt, have been gawking at their own approaching doom with quiet desperation. The reasons for the meltdown, naturally, are many and complex; but at its heart there seems to be one common cause: Things fell apart because we’ve become increasingly apt at creation.

We created an economic infrastructure that encouraged people to borrow fortunes they couldn’t possibly pay back in order to acquire real estate they couldn’t possibly afford. And we created an emotional environment in which debt-based living was gently encouraged. We have created, in short, an alternative reality, one in which coarse and mundane things like balance sheets and bottom lines, things that told us that we could not be who we truly wanted to be but only who our bank accounts enabled us to be, were simply not welcome.

Judging by the sullen faces and somber tones of the men and women discussing the financial crisis on television, we’ve learned our lesson well. But that, alas, is highly unlikely: after all, the current collapse was born of the same mindset that spawned the Dot-com crash of the early 1990s, the war in Iraq, and most presidential campaigns since at least 1988, a mindset that too often conflates perception with reality, and that joyfully confuses our meaning with our means.

Here, for example, is what an unnamed senior aide to President George W. Bush told journalist Ron Suskind in 2004: reporters, the source said, as well as other critics of the administration, are “in what we call the reality-based community,” a community occupied by saps who believe “that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” That, the aide continued, is “not the way the world really works anymore.”

Such ontological juggling, of course, would have been unthinkable even a century ago, when the markets still greatly depended on our ability to produce actual goods, and life, for the most part, was largely observed firsthand rather than through the prism of all sorts of media. But now that so many of us make our livings off of ideas”inventing new kinds of subprime mortgages, say, or plotting political campaigns based more on imagery than on issues”we can transcend the inclement world we inherited and somehow force our way back into the Garden of Eden.

There is no use, then, in beating our chests and promising, in op-eds or on CNBC, that we will never again get ourselves into needless wars or financial freefalls. We will. It’s our nature; we haven’t changed much since the first man and the first woman bit into the apple and willingly exchanged bliss for wisdom and happiness for self-awareness. Mindless happiness was never enough for us; what we wanted was to know as much as the Man Upstairs.

And so, it seems, we’ve internalized the immortal words of Dusty Springfield: nothing is forever. Instead, all we want is a brief respite, a few years here or there during which we can actually believe that a small Internet startup delivering gourmet pet food might make us rich overnight, or that a lush estate with a private creek might be ours to own, or that a failed politician with a feeble mind might lead us to glory. Even though we know we’re headed for a fall, we don’t care all that much: we make the same mistakes again and again, knowingly and gleefully, because, like God, we, too, want to create our own universe, even if we realize that our creations are deeply and truly flawed.

The call came when I was cooking dinner, which surprised me. Bad news usually comes in the middle of the night. My good friend Drorit’s daughter, Tal—one of my youngest son’s best friends—had been in a car accident. By early morning, she was dead.

The next day, an hour before Tal’s funeral, I rode my bicycle to the cemetery of our village on the Mediterranean shore in the Western Galilee. Everything was gloomy and gray: the sky, the sea, and the dismal task that lay before me. I’m a member of our village’s chevra kadisha, the burial society (the literal translation is “sacred society”). We perform the tahara, the washing and dressing of a dead woman for burial. About two hundred families live here, so I usually know the deceased. Most of the time the women are elderly, and while I feel somber doing their tahara, I sense that the women are at peace, surrendering to their fate. But now I faced performing this rite on a 17-year-old girl.

I began to wonder why I even agreed to this difficult volunteer job in the first place. I guess it began because of my own search for a meaningful Jewish life and because of a woman I’ll call Michal. A former ballet dancer, she had lived with James Taylor, hung out with the Beatles, and soared through the 1960s until she landed as a born-again Jew. I met her in the Long Island suburb where I lived for two years beginning in 1989. My parents, first-generation Americans, had raised me in that suburb—in fact, in that very same house. And while they had given me a sense of Jewish pride, they had passed on the idea that Jewish rituals and traditions were old-world superstitions. Now I found myself spiritually hungry. My father had passed away a few years before; I had three small children and a fourth on the way. I wanted to give my children a deeper sense of Judaism than the one I grew up with. I decided to check out a modern Orthodox synagogue nearby and I was struck by how warm and welcoming its members were. Then I met Michal, who began to serve as my spiritual mentor, proving that you could be hip and savvy and also a Sabbath observer. When she told me she was a member of the local chevra kadisha, I was intrigued. Michal explained that performing a tahara for a dead woman was the greatest mitzvah, the holiest deed one could ever do.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because the dead can never thank you.”

A tahara, then, was hesed shel emet, a one-way act of true kindness. The rite appealed to me, but living in the suburbs did not. I had wanted to live in Israel since visiting the country on a tour when I was 16, and so I moved here with my family in 1991, before I had the chance to join Michal’s chevra kadisha group.

Jewish tradition has stressed the importance of a proper burial since the Biblical account of Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpela to bury his wife Sarah. How Sarah and the other matriarchs and patriarchs were buried is a mystery. In Genesis, when Jacob summoned his son Joseph to his deathbed, he requested, “Deal with me in kindness and faithfulness. Please do not bury me in Egypt.” Joseph heeded the second part of his request and did not bury Jacob in Egypt; he did, however, embalm his father, an Egyptian practice that never caught on among later generations of Jews. Ironically, one of the first clear-cut references to what the ancient Jews did with their dead comes from the Gospel of John, who described how Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus’ body and “wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.” (The spices were a mixture of myrrh and aloe, but John doesn’t elaborate on their use.)

By the 16th century, the Shulchan Aruch, or Code of Jewish law, contained instructions on how to properly treat the dead. According to Rabbi Maurice Lamm, author of The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, membership in the chevra kadisha was always considered a privilege. Rabbi Elchonon Zohn, director of the National Association of Chevros Kadisha, says that in pre-World War II Europe membership in the chevra kadisha was passed on from father to son as well as from mother to daughter. So many people coveted membership that when new members were needed, they were chosen by lot or by secret vote. But in America, Zohn says, by the 1950s, non-Orthodox American Jews had begun to leave the care of their dead to funeral parlors, most without tahara options. “It became a very unpopular hesed,” Zohn says, “with only a few older people performing the service.”

In the 1970s, a Conservative congregation in Minneapolis created a stir when it started a chevra kadisha. (Rabbi Arnold M. Goodman, part of that group, describes the experience in his 1981 book A Plain Pine Box: A Return to Simple Jewish Funerals and Eternal Traditions.) There are no statistics on how many chevra kadisha groups now exist in the United States, but Rabbi Zohn says that in the past twenty years “there’s been a real movement toward being involved with chevra kadisha work, even among Reform and Conservative Jews, young people, and professionals.” The 10-year-old website Jewish-funerals.org, which features guidance for those starting a chevra kadisha as well as information about funeral traditions and organ donation, is visited by more than 120,000 people a year, according to its editor, David Zinner, executive director of Tifereth Israel Congregation, a Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C. Interest has sparked an annual North American Chevra Kadisha Conference that is now in its sixth year.

A few years after I moved to Israel, my friend Michal suddenly died. That same year the rabbi of our village asked me to join the chevra kadisha. By then, living in Israel had chipped away at my enchantment with religious fundamentalism. I still attended Sabbath morning services, kept kosher, and made traditional Friday night dinners, but I had begun driving on Saturday because, given a six-day work week, it was my family’s only day to visit friends in other places. Volunteering in the chevra kadisha was a way to honor Michal’s memory for all she had taught me. I also wanted to give something back to the residents of the seaside community I now called home.

I performed my first tahara on a woman I never knew. Throughout the ritual, I felt jittery and uneasy. I worried I’d do the wrong thing, move her body the wrong way. I took shallow breaths, partly out of fear and partly because I was wary of inhaling the stale, sour odor of the dead. As soon as the tahara ended, I stepped outside the burial house and breathed in deep. I was standing in the cemetery but I was still flooded with a sense of relief. I had returned to the realm of the living. The following morning, I went to the village synagogue and sat—randomly, I supposed—in another section, in a seat I had never sat in before. I looked down and saw the dead woman’s name: it had been her seat. It seemed like a divine act of synchronicity, a sign that being part of a chevra kadisha was something I should continue to do.

When a woman dies, the rabbi contacts one of the chevra kadisha members. She, in turn, calls the other women. As soon as I find out I have to do a tahara, I feel humbled. Whatever I was going through during the day—standing too long on line at the bank or celebrating a just-published short story—suddenly loses significance in the face of death. I change out of my usual pair of jeans and put on a patchwork skirt and a plain black shirt that I’ve set aside as my chevra kadisha clothes. I could wear any clothes to do a tahara, but I wore this skirt and shirt during my first tahara and after that, they seemed charged with a different purpose. My friend Ann, another American immigrant and chevra kadisha volunteer, says that she also has a set of chevra kadisha clothes. “That outfit is like a uniform,” she says. “It represents what I’m about to do. And it’s important that I can take it off afterwards and go on with my life.”

The village’s one-room burial house sits in a corner of the cemetery. It is a simple stone house, built in the 1950s. The cement walls are barren but for a small sink and faucet. The tiles on the floor have faded so much over the years that nobody can tell what color they once were. Several empty coffins stand upright in one corner, empty and ominously ready. When the chevra kadisha members arrive—a minimum of four women is required by Talmudic law—we greet each other quietly. Even if I’ve been in the midst of a spectacular day, I feel thoughtful, somber, focused. We don disposable latex gloves and white cotton lab coats—donated by a nearby hospital—that are kept in the burial house. And although only one or two of the chevra kadisha members are religious, we all wear scarves or hats as a sign of respect.

The dead woman lies on a marble slab in the middle of the room, covered with a sheet. Her feet face the door, as is the custom. First, we gather in a circle around the deceased and one of us says a prayer, asking God to help us perform our task with “loving kindness and with truth.” Then we get to work. With the sheet still over the dead woman to preserve her dignity, we carefully inspect the body, removing all bandages, hospital tags, and jewelry (I once gently plucked a gold Star of David necklace out of a dead woman’s closed hand).

As at a Seder, the order of the tahara is precise. We are required to use nine kavim of water (twenty-four quarts) and, beginning on the right side, we pour water on her head, her neck, arm, the upper half of her body, the lower half. We do the same on her left side, then her back. The tahara is really a woman’s last mikva, her final ritual bath. To borrow a Christian term—which was borrowed from the Jewish idea—this is her ultimate kosher baptism.

After patting her dry, we take off her nail polish, trim her fingernails, and brush her hair. We don’t add any makeup. Finally, we dress her in the tachrichim, the linen burial shrouds, which are grayish beige. There are no buttons, zippers, or pockets.

In other parts of the world, dirt is imported from Israel in recognition of the idea from Genesis that “dust you are and to dust you will return.” In our village, one of us simply scoops up some dirt from outside and sprinkles it on the deceased’s closed eyes. Then we cover her with the head shroud, followed by the pants, bunching them up at the bottom as if they were a pair of loose linen stockings. When I slide my hand into the sleeve of the shroud-shirt to pull the woman’s arm through, I’m reminded of dressing my newborn babies. But a dead woman’s skin is stiff and cold. I’ve never gotten over my discomfort at touching a dead woman’s skin, maybe because it represents all of death’s mystery. We loosely tie three sashes without knots to hold the shrouds in place and say a prayer, asking the dead for forgiveness if we unintentionally disrespected her in any way.

This is the ritual if a woman dies peacefully. But Tal, my son Ari’s friend, had been in an accident and her body was splattered with blood. Since blood is holy, a part of the body, it must not be washed away. We couldn’t do a tahara for Tal. It was terrible not being able to do this last rite and give her some kind of closure, so we stood in a silent circle, not sure what to do next. Tal was a vibrant, lovely teenager. She had been Ari’s close friend since nursery school. Her little sister was Ann’s daughter’s best friend. All of our lives were intertwined and losing her so senselessly, so young, felt unbearable. We stood there, speechless, in tears. Seeing Tal like that was more than I had bargained for when I joined the chevra kadisha.

“Her mom just asked us to cut some of her hair,” I said. My voice sounded ripped apart, like a shirt collar that has been torn right before a funeral, as a traditional sign of mourning.

Carefully lifting the sheet, Ann cut off some of Tal’s long, earthy-blond curls.

“Is that enough?” I asked.

“It will never be enough,” Ann whispered.

We unfurled a crisp burial sheet and let it float down around Tal. Yet we lingered, not ready to say good-bye. Then we lifted her into the coffin. Tal had studied dance, she had been graceful and lithe, but it took all our strength to raise her. I remembered Michal’s husband telling me the same thing after Michal died in their home. He said, “The dead are always heavy because the soul has gone and it’s the soul that carries the body.”

I believe that the soul carries the body. As the Lubavitcher Rebbe explained, you can hold a wooden chair in your hands and feel that it exists. But if the chair is burning, you can’t hold the heat and energy that is created from the fire. No substance really disappears, he said, it is transformed, and the same holds true for our souls. I might have drifted away from an Orthodox way of life, but the Rebbe’s concept is proven to me again and again during a tahara. The work fills me with a sense of the inexplicable and the divinely mysterious. A sense that what we do in our lives reverberates, somehow, even after our deaths; and that what we do for the dead has power and resonance. A sense of my place in the chain of Jewish history. And a sense of being gratefully, utterly, miraculously alive.