Writer's Block: R.I.P
Oct. 29th, 2011 10:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphias[Error: unknown template qotd]
Take any parts that anybody can use, and use 'em. Take the rest, put it in a kittel, and have someone sit with the body reciting psalms. Ideally, someone who knows me and wants to do that, and would find it comforting to do so. That probably means having my body wrapped in a shroud BESIDES being in a kittel, because, having removed any and all useful bits, I expect the remainder wouldn't be very pretty -- no embalming, no neatening up my corpse, so just wrap it up so that it's not disturbing to anyone.
Quickly get the word out that I'm dead, so that anyone who wants to be there can hear about it and get to the funeral, then put the remains in as cheap a pine box as possible. Bury it in a Jewish cemetery with a fairly traditional ceremony, and then, hopefully, I'll have lived a life such that some people will be moved to say kaddish for me over the next eleven months.
Take any parts that anybody can use, and use 'em. Take the rest, put it in a kittel, and have someone sit with the body reciting psalms. Ideally, someone who knows me and wants to do that, and would find it comforting to do so. That probably means having my body wrapped in a shroud BESIDES being in a kittel, because, having removed any and all useful bits, I expect the remainder wouldn't be very pretty -- no embalming, no neatening up my corpse, so just wrap it up so that it's not disturbing to anyone.
Quickly get the word out that I'm dead, so that anyone who wants to be there can hear about it and get to the funeral, then put the remains in as cheap a pine box as possible. Bury it in a Jewish cemetery with a fairly traditional ceremony, and then, hopefully, I'll have lived a life such that some people will be moved to say kaddish for me over the next eleven months.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-30 12:38 am (UTC)"The kaddish is a prayer that praises God and nowhere mentions death or mourning. Yet, over time, it has become the central ritual associated with mourning." (Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, A Book of Life, pg. 449)
Rabbi Reuven Hammer, in his commentary on the new Siddur Sim Shalom (a Conservative prayerbook), suggests that the honor of saying the Kaddish was given to mourners. Over time, it became associated with mourning.
So (this is just me here), it looks like what happened is that a particular prayer became associated with mourning, and by this point, hey, it's a tradition. It's also got some rather good points, from the standpoint of helping mourners. You can only say the Kaddish with a quorum of 10 Jews. (The liberal movements count women in this, but that's another point.) So, for the mourner to fully participate, there need to be 9 other people. This leads to the custom of having people visit the mourner at the beginning of the mourning period (shiva), and also encourages the mourner to leave their home and be with other people afterwards.
As far as afterlife goes, the El maleh rachamim prayer, also associated with mourning, is a bit more explicit about afterlife stuff.