Why We Treat A Death With Reverence; Not Fodder for Plants

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                  

     Your children can hang the pod from their ceiling if they wish. I suppose they'll have to take the pod down and plant it in the soil where trees are needed.  

Once buried, they say, the biodegradable plastic shell breaks down and the remains provide nutrients to a sapling planted right above it.

Bretzel and Citelli believe that death is as closely related to consumerism as life. Their goal? To create cemeteries full of trees rather than tombstones, reduce waste, and create new life, like trees and plants,  out of death.

Bacteria in the soil first break down the bio-plastic, then the ashes gradually come into contact with the soil, without changing its chemical balance too dramatically.

“Because the body will purge within a year in a buried environment, the nutrients are released into the soil quite quickly, so a decently sized tree planted on top would be key. Capturing these nutrients is also important to protect groundwater,” she said.  What they are doing is turning corpses into fertilizer to grow trees.  

Abraham bought a plot of ground to bury his beloved wife, Sarah.  He didn't want the land as a gift.  He wanted it to be known that the land was his.  It had a cave on it and in that she was placed.  It became Abraham's burying ground and his children's as well.  Abraham lived in about 1948 BCE, the 2nd millennium.  It was a place of reverence.  

Why have Jews resisted Cremation?  Whatever the reasons for this new trend, Jewish teachers con­tinue to resist it. There are at least three reasons why the Jewish tradition opposes cremation: our theology, our memory, and our­ concern for the welfare of the mourner.                                                     

Funeral procession for victims of the Kielce Pogrom, Kielce, Poland 1946

Kielce in 1946 when Polish rioters killed at least 42 Jews and beat many others.

 Hatred for Jews AFTER the World War II.  Polish leaders don't want to talk about it.  They have a mythology now of them being above it all.  

First: theology. We believe we each have a soul.  In the Jewish tradition, that which was once holy remains holy, and so the body is to be treated with respect even after the soul departs. The tradition opposes self-inflicted wounds, intentional scarring, and tattoos, because the body is ours, but only on loan. Ultimately it belongs to God.

Even after death, the body is to be treated with reverence. Kavod ha-met, reverence for the dignity of the dead person, is the key to the manner in which the body is to be washed and dressed, purified and guarded until the burial. Burning the body is seen in our tradition as a desecration of what was once holy.

                                   Jewish Cemetery

                                                   

                         Another form of Indian burial.  

Indians in America have felt the same way.  Most societies have kept people out of land that is a burying ground.  It is special.  Why?                                               

A new style in getting rid of dead bodies is leaving the idea of burying people using coffins and placing in graveyards.  Now the plan is to place bodies in the soil and sprinkling with hay; turn the mixture over, and eventually plant things over it.  That's turning a body directly into the earth.  Your body is placed in a biogradable pod  that in essence can turn your body into a mixture of soil to grow a tree.  In this process, no bones are expected remain.  The person is turned into a mixture of soil.  

People asked about it feel it's better than cremating the body which is turned into ashes and kept in a jar, perhaps sitting on the mantel in the living room, doing nothing for agriculture.  Sometimes people sprinkle the ashes into the ocean or a place that the deceased enjoyed.

                                             

    Poland;  shooting Jews into a pit; stealing all their clothing first
   Some of our Jewish relatives in the Holocaust have already had this happen to their bodies.  They were shot in massive groups and their bodies were thrown into a huge pit.  Sometimes lye was sprinkled over the bodies to break down the tissue faster. This is no way to go to one's end.                                         

From reconstructed bones, scientists know what the person looked like

With this method, no more bones left of mankind.  They were in something like a blender.  

Bones of Neanderthals and homo sapiens that came later have been found  and tested.  This new method will do away with all bones.  Nothing will be left but a soil mixture of hay, human and soil, turned over and mixed all up.                        

An archaeological worker looks at the face of the linen-wrapped mummy of King Tutankhamun as he is removed from his stone sarcophagus in his underground tomb in the famed Valley of the Kings in Luxor, 04 November 2007. BEN CURTIS/AFP/Getty Images

People started treating others in Egypt, at least their leadership, buried in their own pyramid.  It was a mixture of religious belief in a world after death.  Egyptians were buried in mummies and wrapped and treated to last forever.  Today scientists can test the bones for DNA.  That means that some of these bones have lasted over 4,000 years.  

                                          

Why should we bother?  Burials can be very expensive.  There's the casket and the plot in a cemetery.  

The Jewish belief is that a burial is regarded as a basic duty to be performed for all, including criminals, suicides, and enemies.  Jewish burial practice has always been to place the corpse in an earthen grave or in a rock-cut cave.           

Often, in olden days, burial was 1st in the ground;  after the disintegration of the body, the bones were collected and placed in stone OSSUARIES and put in the family burial cave. This way there were no cemeteries.                               

In the 2nd Temple Period from 586 BCE on, tombs standing on their own and rock-cut graves, fronted by architectural facades, were common.  The practice  of constructing burial galleries underground, later exemplified at the Bet Shearim in Galilee. gave rise to the CATACOMB system adopted in Rome adopted also by the early Christians. Romans buried bodies wrapped in shrouds in catacombs of Rome. It's all underground.                         

           I'm at my Bubbie's grave, Zlata Golfdoot nee Jermulowske.  

Cremation and embalming were not Jewish customs then or now of the Orthodox and Conservative.  They bury the dead with their blood in their veins within 24 hours.  From what I've seen, the body is in a simple wooden casket and that is lowered into its pit which is cement-lined, at least in the USA that I've seen.  A burial is hastened on Fridays and on the eve of festivals.

In Israel, Jewish funerals are divided into three parts: the rending of the families’ clothes, eulogies, and burial. Family and friends usually gather in funeral halls near cemeteries to pay respects to the deceased, offer eulogies, and comfort the bereaved. They then accompany the body to the gravesite for burial.                   

Mount of Olives Cemetery in Jerusalem : The Jewish necropolis of Jerusalem has been at the foot of the mountain since the time of the First Temple of Solomon.  From 1948 to 1967, the southern part of the mount was in Jordanian hands, while the northern part was a demilitarized zone with the Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital buildings under Israel sovereignty.  After the 6 Day War of 1967, the mount was incorporated into the united Jerusalem and the university campus and the hospital were rebuilt and reopened.  the Jewish cemetery---extensively desecrated by the Jordanians---was restored.  They had taken the headstones and used them as paving material for streets.  

In Israel, Jewish funerals follow the same outline, but vary from other parts of the world in certain customs. In most Israeli funerals, there is no coffin (the body is buried in shrouds directly in the earth.) It is not customary to wrap the deceased in a tallit (prayer shawl), as is done in other Jewish communities. (If the family requests, the deceased can be wrapped in a tallit during the funeral, but it will generally be removed before burial.) Customs around the installation of headstones vary in Israel: some people unveil headstones 30 days after funerals, while others wait a year.

Everyone gets in line and each one takes the shovel and puts a scoop of soil on the casket.  When people leave, someone else from the cemetery finishes the job.  

At one time, bodies were sometimes dressed in costly garments, but this led to much abuse.  Rabbi Gamaliel, therefore, gave instructions to bury his corpse in a simple linen garment, and this became standard Jewish custom.  The body is wrapped in a shroud without any clothing, like the Egyptians did.  

Even wooden coffins were not used by all Jews.  Oriental Jews bury their dead without coffins.  The only known excavated Jewish flat cemetery of the late 2nd Temple period is at Khurbet Kumran, near the Dead Sea.

                                           

It is considered as a good deed, a mitzvah, to participate in a funeral.  With the growing complexity of the Jewish community, a HEVRAH KADDISHA (HOLY SOCIETY) was organized to provide for all the rites and details of burial.  the help read the deathbed confession, wash and dress the corpse, carry out the burial services and actual burial and provide for the special meal given to the mourners after the funeral. 

Jews aspired to be buried in Palestine in preparation for the day of resurrection.   Catholics borrowed this belief.  Jews believe is that at the end of time, the bodies of the dead will rise from their graves. Do Jews need their bones intact in order to do this?  What about the 6 million of the Holocaust who were burned to death in furnaces by the Nazis? Jewish law and tradition consider cremation as destruction of property. Jewish mysticism, or Kabbalah, also holds that the soul does not immediately depart the body. Rather, it slowly leaves the body as it decomposes; cremation therefore is considered to cause pain, even after death. Wouldn't turning the body into soil be thought of as something similar to cremation?  

We're very careful not to buy rice that was fertilized with human waste products.  I suppose acting as fertilizer for trees is less offensive.  Who's the people who will draw the line?  

Belief in resurrection was adopted by the post-exilic Judaism, particularly by the Pharisees, although rejected by the Sadducees.  The Talmud teaches belief in resurrection as a fundamental of the Jewish faith, and Maimonides incorporated it into his 13 Principles of Faith.  It's denial was generally considered as heresy until the modern period when various Reform prayer-books substituted phrases like, "eternal life" for the earlier references to resurrection.  

Although belief in resurrection seems to contradict belief in IMMORTALITY, the 2 views were combined in Jewish as well as in Christian and Moslem orthodoxy.  

From this belief came the practice of placing some Holy Land soil in the coffins of Jews buried outside of Israel, like the USA.  

                                     

ESCHATOLOGY is the doctrine of the end of days, referring to the fundamental changing of the present world by a Divine Plan at a period determined by G-d.  The eschatological world is not necessarily one that has never previously existed.  the view is sometimes advanced that on the last day the world, which was entirely good at creation and only corrupted by human deviations, will be restored to its pristine condition.

Such views were common in the ancient Orient and are found in Greek literature.  Such opinions cannot be classified in an orderly system according to logical laws of development.  A general line is nevertheless discernible in Jewish eschatology from its very beginnings in the early sections of the Bible.  

Originally people expressed their minds with such ideas after a period of suffering.  It was introduced by the great Hebrew Prophets and into their teachings with their own moral coloring which transformed the naive folk beliefs.  They had "the day of the lord", and prophets added moral content and threatened catastrophe in absence of genuine repentance: and so this special day became a day of doom.   Read Amos and you will see how it recurs in many forms and degrees with other great prophets.  

The final day was also envisioned as the great day when G-d would reform the world and reign over all people in justice. A new heaven and earth will be created, while G0d will renew His covenant with Israel and establish His throne in Zion (Jerusalem). 

      Visiting the ill is a mitzvah; we can't do this during the Covid pandemic, though

 So, the human body is sacred, made in the image of our maker, (G-d).   Since the beginning, mankind has treated it with love and kindness.  I'm just not ready to be made into fodder for plants and forgotten.

As a genealogist, this is a crime to those of us who have depended a lot on gravesite with headstones and their engraving of history; names and dates.  The census is great, but those headstones are also there where census records missed a lot of people.  What happens to that? 

                                               

 What was that movie? Soylent Green:   People went to a place on their own accord and they were put to sleep permanently with music, and then their  corpses were turned into wafers for food.  It was a  1973 American ecological dystopian thriller film directed by Richard Fleischer, and starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young and Edward G.Robinson.   We're just about there.  

Resource:https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/why-bury/amp/

https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/03/world/eco-solutions-capsula-mundi/index.html

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-aftermath-of-the-holocaust

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/jan/27/photography.museums

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

The New Standard Jewish encyclopedia

https://www.amisraelmortuary.com/preparing-the-body-for-jewish-burial

https://www.itim.org.il/en/itim-guide-to-burying-a-loved-one-in-israel/