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April 22, 2005/Nisan 13 5765, Volume 57, No. 34
Honor the dead in the Jewish way
Torah study
RABBI JORDAN E. GOLDSON
Parsha Achrei Mos, Leviticus 18:2-3
Each year, as I ponder the meanings of Pesach, I try to feel what it must have been like for our ancestors in Egypt.
This year, I accomplished my task when I saw a documentary on television about the treasures of King Tut. I recalled seeing the exhibit some 25 years ago, and how I was impressed by the magnificence: a golden casket, a sculptured death mask, carved gems and ornate utensils of all sorts.
Yet it depressed me to think that these beautiful objects had been made to be buried. Placed in the tomb of the Egyptian king, they remained hidden away for 3,000 years. Why? The ancient Egyptians believed that the pharaohs were immortal. Their bodies died, and their spirits journeyed to another world, where they continued as gods. Objects made of gold or precious stones were left to be enjoyed by the returning spirit.
When I read in this week's Torah portion the verse, "You shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt," I was sure that this was one of the practices to which it refers. Moses and his generation saw an entire civilization built on death. They must have been appalled by the lives of thousands of slaves who were worked to death by heartless taskmasters so that the vanity of Pharaoh could be indulged. Hence the Torah forbids copying the practices of Egypt. It forbids burying food or gold or jewelry with the dead.
This ancient confrontation with the Egyptian cult of the dead undoubtedly had a continuing influence on Jewish beliefs and practices in connection with death and life after death. Students of the Bible have remarked on the puzzling absence in the Bible of any developed doctrine of immortality, of life after death. What we find in the Torah is not ignorance of the idea of "life after death," but a deliberate ignoring of the entire question. The ancient Hebrews rejected the only concept of immortality they knew, the Egyptian concept of life after death, because it represented a continuation of the unjust Egyptian social system.
At a later date, however, some time between 400-200 B.C.E., the belief in olam ha-ba (the world to come) and tehiyat ha-metim (the resurrection of the dead) developed in Judaism. This did not represent an acceptance of the unjust status quo of Egypt, nor of its theology. To the contrary: the Rabbis were faced with the challenge of how God, whom they firmly believed to be a just God, could have created such an unjust world. And they concluded that since God was just, God must have made man immortal, and that justice was only postponed until after death, when on the Day of Judgment the wicked would be punished and the righteous rewarded.
Judaism opposed the waste of resources that characterized ancient Egypt, where an entire civilization was harnessed to the making of pyramids and mausoleums. Our ancestors prescribed that the dead be dressed in simple linen shrouds and buried in simple caskets. They taught that building elaborate monuments to the dead was wasteful, "copying the ways of the land of Egypt." The proper way to honor the dead was to help the living by giving charity to the needy and supporting the study of Torah, which is the Etz Chayim, the Tree of Life.
We might admire the treasures of King Tut. But when it comes to dealing with death, we must remember that we Jews have left Egypt. Instead of copying the practices of the land of Egypt, we should honor the deceased in the Jewish way.
Rabbi Jordan E. Goldson is the spiritual leader of Temple Kol Ami in Scottsdale.
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