Turning Death Itself Into Life

Judaism is good at so much: Connecting us to our ancestors, providing an eternally renewable tradition, even making us wash our hands before we eat. 

But I think the part of life where our people most excel, is actually, death. Our culture and customs are world-class at alchemizing the grief of loss into a more strongly bonded community. Tragedy, which destroys tightly-knit groups more than almost anything, is turned on its head through our laws, to bring us closer together. 

When someone dies (may all our SVARA-niks live until 120!), halacha springs into action to enforce the mutual aid and spiritual solidarity we desperately need. The brokenness of the mourner is held, made public, and afforded the deepest respect. Faith, forever shaken by death, is reaffirmed in daily prayer. Tzedakah is given and Torah is learned in honor of the one who passed. In other words, death leads to people being fed in body and spirit. 

Ultimately our rabbis, who love nothing more than to flip things on their heads, seem to have accomplished the ultimate task: Through Torah, they have turned death itself, into life.  

One of the amazing practices arising out of this, is that of studying the entire Mishna during someone’s shloshim, the first 30 days after their funeral. The 30th day is marked by a siyyum, a gathering to mark the completion of this learning, which is often split up between dozens of community members, each shouldering the holy burden of studying one or more of the Mishna’s 63 books. Insights are shared, food is abundant, memories are recounted. Thirty days after death, we’ve created community, Torah and togetherness. All through one practice. A heartbreaking halachic masterpiece.

Several months ago, I received the solemn honor of studying the entirety of Masechet Ta’anit, the book of Mishna about fasting, for the shloshim of a friend’s brother. In the painful circumstances, it felt powerful to contribute my time and thought towards the ascension of his soul. And fasts are a powerful and complicated intervention in our tradition. I was, despite myself, looking forward to learning more about the halacha that underpinned them.

As I opened the first chapter, I encountered a mirror image of my community in pain. Ta’anit begins by outlining what a city should do if a calamity befalls it. Wild animals, earthquakes, and especially drought, threatened the cities of the Mishna, and the Rabbis were tasked with what action to prescribe in response. As you may’ve guessed by the context, the big one they land on is the calling of public fast days. Over the Mishna’s opening, we are given the rhythms and specifications of how to use our collective bodies to coax rain from an iron sky.

So far, so good. Fasting halacha, from the book on fasting halacha. Fascinating, meticulous, and just what I expected. But as chapter 2 unfolded, I came across a big surprise, in both what the Mishna taught, and how it taught it.

Taanit’s first chapter laid out an intricate schedule of 13 fast days spread out over many weeks, in sets of increasing intensity as the desperation from lack of rain increased. At the beginning of the second chapter, we get a description of how to do the last set of fasts, the final seven – the days where we are most desperate in our pleading for rain too long in coming.

The way those final seven fasts go is this: the ark containing the Torah is brought out from the shul into the street so that our prayers can have a direct line to Hashem, unhindered by a roof; ashes are put on the ark and on the heads of all the leaders and residents; and lastly, the elders of the city are commanded to give a drash to inspire the hearts of their people. 

Then, in a move that I haven’t ever seen before in the rabbinic texts, this Mishna gives an example drash for the elders to offer. 

I knew that the Mishna gave us material with which to make drashes (like the one I’m writing now!), but I didn’t know it ever spelled a one out verbatim. But in this case, Ta’anit gave the elders of a drought-striken city a leg up, and laid out the Torah they were meant to weave and reinterpret for their thirsty and frightened flock. Here’s what it calls them to say:

אַחֵינוּ, לֹא נֶאֱמַר בְּאַנְשֵׁי נִינְוֵה, וַיַּרְא הָאֱלֹהִים אֶת שַׂקָּם וְאֶת תַּעֲנִיתָם, אֶלָּא (יונה ג) וַיַּרְא הָאֱלֹהִים אֶת מַעֲשֵׂיהֶם, כִּי שָׁבוּ מִדַּרְכָּם הָרָעָה

Loosely translated:

“Brethren!” one should begin, “In the story of Jonah, when Hashem saved Nineveh from destruction, She didn’t spare them saying ‘I’ve seen their sackcloths and their fasting,’ instead She said ‘I’ve seen their deeds, how they’ve turned from their wicked ways.’”

The story referenced is the Book of Jonah, which we read yearly on Yom Kippur afternoon. Famously, the book’s eponymous prophet gets swallowed by a whale, inspiring key plot points in such heart-touching folktales as Finding Nemo. But the other big drama of the story is the city of Nineveh, the sprawling metropolis of the era, which was failing in the eyes of Hashem, leading Her to threaten it with destruction. By the end, the people of Nineveh repent, and the text says that Hashem took notice of their actions and communal course-correction, which inspired Her to spare them their disastrous fate.

Taanit picks up on God’s specific wording, to highlight that though the book of Jonah also includes depictions of Ninevites wearing clothes of mourning and fasting in penitence, Hashem didn’t cite those in explaining Her merciful about-face. It was only the change in peoples’ comportment that finally saved them.

The point of this sample drash is, then, that performative penance doesn’t move Hashem – only real teshuva does.

Back in our Mishna, we are shown a city exhausted by ritual. The people have done all the things spelled out in the law: they’ve fasted, said extra prayers, and gone barefoot, for weeks on end. And yet the terror continues. To explain this, our Rabbis inquire: “Have you really dealt with the core issues which brought about this calamity?” In a world where the rabbinic assumption is that communal hardships are punishment for communal failings, elders are tasked with reminding the people them that only meaningful changes in social behavior – peace being made between warring factions, social injustices being addressed, the stranger/widow/orphans of the town being clothed and fed – only these can ultimately reverse the will of heaven in the direst of times.

What this comes to teach us, I think, is that rote Judaism can only take us so far. Isaiah lays out a similar argument in the haftarah for Yom Kippur morning: “If you fast while hungry people are in your midst, Hashem will not hear you. If you leave shul to oppress the worker and stranger, all the rituals of this day are meaningless.”

No matter how much baleful pageantry we stage, regardless of the exacting manner in which we follow the law, our prophets make clear that Torah’s highest desire isn’t a world where the halachic ritual is punctiliously observed. It wants a world of justice, peace and righteous conduct. Following halacha is meant to bring people to that goal. But when the enactment of ritual and law fail to bring us to that place, simply ‘saying our lines’ doesn’t cut it.

With catastrophes exactly like the ones the Mishna describes, and others it could’ve never imagined, we find ourselves now in cataclysmic times. If there are traditionally 13 days of desperation we’re meant to observe during a crisis, my guess is that we each feel like we’re sitting around day 613 of horror and agony. We’ve torn our clothes and screamed our throats sore. But the truth is, that in historical seasons like these, that’s not enough.

During the calamities of mishnaic times, town elders were meant to remind people of that. And in this generation, I think we are meant to take on that role. 

We must make clear: Ash-donning isn’t sufficient now. Marco Rubio announced the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil with an X on his forehead for Ash Wednesday. In an era of calamity from this country to Israel/Palestine and beyond, we see that societies aren’t saved by adherence to religious law alone. Bible thumpers attack God’s children for how they dress and who they are. Arms wrapped in leather and holy text have shed blood. Prayers have been uttered in the midst of wanton destruction.

It’s our job, then, to become this generation’s elders – whether we’re gray in the beard or not – and turn the Ninevehs we find ourselves in from their wicked ways. Even if you, like most reading this drash, don’t subscribe to the idea that the world’s suffering is divine punishment for its misdeeds, our job is still to address the root causes of the suffering at hand. No matter our theological outlook, that’s the only way to bring it all closer to an end.

In the wake of one death, we’re commanded to not just mourn our brokenness, but strengthen our bonds. We feed those who need feeding. We come together at every possible interval, to show that this loss hasn’t destroyed us – it’s actually going to make us stronger. How much more so with the thousands of deaths, and the society-wide collapses we’re caught within. Whether a disaster is individual or collective, justice, collectivity, and care, are the halachically mandated responses.

That means, climate catastrophe can’t just create fear, it must improve our relationship to our earth. War can’t just lead to prayers, but the actual work of peace-making. State violence can’t just become social media likes, but a strengthening of the communal networks of safety and support we will increasingly rely on in the months and years to come.

The sample drash of Taanit 2:1 finishes with one more exegetical exhortation:

.וּבַקַּבָּלָה הוּא אוֹמֵר (יואל ב) וְקִרְעוּ לְבַבְכֶם וְאַל בִּגְדֵיכֶם

And doesn’t the prophet Joel say: “And rend your hearts,” not your garments?

Heartbreak is key. But though the rituals of mourning, like cloth-ripping, are its natural response, they are not sufficient. Hashem craves reparation. Hashem craves action. This, She makes clear, is the heavy task we’re assigned in our grief.

But together, such a weight ceases to be overwhelming. It becomes manageable, even joyful to shoulder. One person doesn’t read an entire rabbinic corpus, we each take a book to make it possible, and thus a community of learners emerges. One family can’t protect its mothers or fathers or children from deportation, but a community can. And this coming-together is not only the immediate defense we need, but the seeds of the revolution we dream of. 

Through unity and purpose, tragedy will become triumph. Together, even death can become life.

May we meet the challenge of our times with the solidarity it requires. And may every wicked path be rerouted into its righteous expanse.

The world needs more than rote Judaism. Together, we can manifest the alternative our tradition demands.