This week’s Torah portion, Emor, begins with a dead body. No it is not a murder mystery. Rather it is there for a different reason – to teach the priests about what they should do when they are confronted by a corpse, namely they should stay away. In what may seem the cruelest rule in all of Torah, a High Priest is not even allowed to attend to his father or mother’s funeral.
If you are a normal priest, you can attend your parents’ and siblings’ funerals, but not your spouses. I actually appreciate these rules. Not for their actual content, but because they provide guidelines for what to do when there is a death in the community.
When someone close to you dies, the hardest time frame is the most immediate. What do you do when your loved one is no more, when their soul has left the body?
For days, if not weeks or months, you, and those around you, have been trying to care for the person, attending to that person’s every need, trying to help that person have as good a death as possible. And, suddenly they are gone. All that fighting, and struggling is over.
What now?
It is in that moment that you need someone to call to tend to your loved one’s body, to prepare their remains for a funeral. It is in that moment I often get called. But, more important than me, is a funeral director, and locally we are blessed with two amazing Jewish funeral homes, Amherst Memorial and Mesnekoff Funeral Home, led by their amazing directors, Mitch Steinhorn and Jay Mesnekoff. At all hours of the night they get called and they respond.
You know who you shouldn’t call? – a High Priest. And, that’s okay. In that liminal moment we need to be as clear as possible about next steps. Thankfully, as hard as it is, this week’s Torah portion gives us clarity when we most need it.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex