Death, Marriage, and Orthodox Judaism

Abandoning Eden is having a bit of a hard time dealing with her father's religiosity following his mother's death. This reminded me of some of the frustrations I've felt over the years regarding deaths and other lifecycle events in the Orthodox community.

Once, I attended a funeral of one of the most loving, cheerful, generous, and entertaining men I'd ever known. Even as he got older and less well, at a time of life when many people become cranky and irritable, he went out of his way to make people smile. One of his children got married when he was quite elderly and having trouble moving, but the way he got out there on the dance floor and put on a show for the kallah (bride) and crowd was something I'll never forget.

During the eulogies at his funeral, I was dismayed to hear nothing about his kindness, good cheer, or overwhelming generosity. All of the speeches were about how religious he was and how devoted to learning Torah. Those things were also true about him, but they didn't reflect what he was like as a human being and I was sad to know that what had been to me his most unique and affecting qualities were not even related to the enormous crowd that attended.

When my paternal grandfather was gravely ill, there were some tough decisions to make regarding his end-of-life care. Instead of coming together as a family and deciding what we thought was best, my father started calling around to find an available rabbi to tell him what halakha (Orthodox law) demanded in this situation. This may indeed have been what my grandfather would have wanted, so I cannot criticize my father's actions, but it felt inappropriate somehow to entrust the most personal of decisions to a man who was a stranger to us, who based his advice on an impersonal interpretation of halakha. This was before I had realized that I was an atheist and I clearly remember thinking, "This is too important to start worrying about halakha stuff." I think that was the first time I realized that I was no longer an Orthodox Jew on the inside.

Even some of the traditional Jewish gestures that had the potential to be meaningful were robbed of their authenticity by the focus on the letter of the law. For example, while I can clearly see the meaning and importance of a symbolic action like the rending of clothes, the fact that the mourners donned old suits, carefully ripping them according to specific instructions, made the action formulaic rather than moving or cathartic.

I found the practice of sitting shiva itself to be profound and psychologically helpful to the mourners. They were forced to face their grief and they were surrounded by people who loved them for an entire week. The adherence to formula raised its head here only when people were leaving, when all repeated the same sentence, rather than using their own words: Ha-Makom y'nachem et'chem b'toch sha'ar aveilei Tzion v'Yerushalayim. May God console you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

That was my father's shiva experience, but it isn't everyone's. A family friend was a convert, who was unable to sit shiva when his father died because his father was not Jewish. Others lost family members a day or two before a Jewish holiday, which cuts the shiva period short, sometimes to less than a day. These, too, I think, are example of the focus on formula taking away from meaningfulness.

At some weddings, too, I've been disappointed in the importance given to the religious over the personal. At one wedding of a dear friend, I wouldn't have even known whose wedding it was if I'd walked in off the street. My friend the groom walked down the aisle (having fasted all day) with unspeakable solemnity, reciting tehillim (psalms) under his breath. The Rabbi sped through the ketubah (marriage contract) in Hebrew, a few distant relatives I'd never met before gave religious speeches in English and Yiddish (a language few in the crowd understood) and the brachot (blessings) were muttered under the chupah with no explanation or elaboration given to the attendees, as is usually done in less right-wing services.

There were few if any smiles and no genuine joy that I could detect during the ceremony. Part of this was no doubt due to the fact that the groom and bride had not known each other very long, as is customary in more right-wing Orthodox circles. It appeared that they were painstakingly engaging in some religious activity wholly unrelated to notions of love and the joining of lives.

During the reception, there was separate seating and dancing for men and women. I could tell that many of the dancers were having fun, but they did not seem to be participants in the wedding of a close friend so much as random yeshiva boys out having a good time.

Make no mistake, I have attended Orthodox weddings that were full of joy and love and Orthodox funerals that were meaningful and heartfelt. It's not that Orthodox ceremonies necessarily miss the point, but that in some of the more right-leaning ones, so much attention is paid to the elaborate rituals and assuring that everything is done perfectly according to halakha that the big picture is almost completely lost.

At least that's how it seems to me.