Daniel Troy on “The Burial Society”
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah
4.6 • 620 Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2017
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Death is an uncomfortable topic. It has deprived us of people we love, and we know that, ultimately, it is the one fate that awaits us all. But Jewish ritual and Jewish tradition embody a set of ideas about life, death, love, and mourning that help us confront our mortality with equanimity. For all the sorrow we feel with the loss of a beloved friend or family member, death holds lessons for life.
In the Jewish community, few confront the realities of death more directly, and more frequently, than the members of the hevra kadisha—the volunteer society that prepares the bodies of the deceased for burial. Judaism views this this ritual preparation as holy work, an act true kindness that can never be repaid.
In this podcast, Daniel Troy joins Jonathan Silver for a conversation about his time serving on his community’s hevra kadisha. Using Troy’s 1992 Commentary essay, “The Burial Society,” as their roadmap, Silver and Troy have a searching discussion about life, death, and honoring the truth of Genesis that all men and women are created in the image and likeness of God. As they explore the exacting rituals governing the preparation of the departed, Troy and Silver help us gain a greater appreciation of how confronting the realities of death can help us learn how best to live our lives.
Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as Ich Grolle Nicht, by Ron Meixsell and Wahneta Meixsell.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A note of caution to anyone listening with children, or if you're especially sensitive to a discussion about death and dying, |
| 0:06.8 | there are a few moments in the discussion that are a little graphic. |
| 0:19.3 | What happens to the body of a person who has died? |
| 0:23.6 | In the Jewish tradition, exacting rules govern the accompaniment, the purification, and the preparation |
| 0:29.6 | of the body of the deceased, the Met, for their final resting place. |
| 0:34.6 | The committee of Jewish volunteers that at a moment's notice is called |
| 0:38.6 | in to oversee this work is called a Hevra-Kadisha, a holy society, or as it's called and the essay |
| 0:45.1 | we'll discuss in today's podcast, The Burial Society. Welcome to the Tikva podcast and great Jewish |
| 0:51.0 | essays and ideas. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. Today we're going to |
| 0:54.8 | revisit the Burial Society, published in 1992 in Commentary Magazine, written by Daniel Troy. |
| 1:01.9 | Daniel's essay allows us to accompany him as he serves in a Hevra-Kadishav for the first time, |
| 1:07.5 | and it invites us to think about the gift of life in light of our mortal limits, |
| 1:11.6 | the practices embodied in Jewish law that connect love and death, |
| 1:16.6 | and what a society can look like when it takes seriously the teaching of Genesis |
| 1:20.6 | that every man and woman is created in the image and likeness of God. |
| 1:24.6 | In honoring the dignity of the human body deprived of its life, |
| 1:28.7 | the Hevra-Kadisha shows a respect and love that meets and perhaps in some ways even extends |
| 1:34.6 | beyond the kind of love shown by a parent to a newborn child. Both the newborn child and |
| 1:39.9 | the METs are helpless, but someday God willing the child will grow into his or her mature |
| 1:44.9 | powers, and indeed one hopes use that power to comfort and care for the elderly parent |
| 1:50.7 | whose own power by that time will have been diminished. But the power of the Met is no more, |
| 1:56.4 | and caring for the sanctity of the dead person's body is holy work. It's work that's done by volunteers |
... |
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