OMISSION OF COMMITTAL SERVICES

QUESTION:

A custom is originating in certain western congregations to change the form of the traditional funeral service. There is no funeral service in home or chapel before the body of the dead is removed, either for interment or cremation. At the cemetery (in the case of burial) there is no service at all. On the day of burial, or sometimes a few days later, a memorial service is held. This memorial service is the only funeral ritual that is observed. Is this custom justified by tradition? Should it be encouraged?

ANSWER:

IT IS NOT TOO suprising that such a custom can arise nowadays. There is, in many quarters, a desire to simplify the entire funeral ritual and to have less and less contact with the dead. The old tradition of the family sitting shiva, seven days of mourning, and then following thirty days of half-mourning and, for a parent, a full year of partial mourning—all this is being increas-ingly set aside. Many now receive the consolation of their friends in the funeral parlor. This is, in itself, basically unobjectionable, except that in some families it supplants the shiva entirely and leads to the neglect of the whole ritual of mourning.

The avoidance of any chapel or burial ritual at the time of death will easily lead to further avoidance. If the bereaved do not participate in any cemetery ritual at the time of the funeral, they will certainly not visit the grave in later times; and if such visitation is consolatory, as it must have been, since the custom is prevalent, then these bereaved are deprived of that consolation too. And as for the departed, the bitter lament of the Psalmist is fulfilled: “I am as forgotten as are the dead from the heart” (Psalm 31:13).

The new mood of the avoidance of contact with death and bereavement may or may not be harmful. It is, of course, for the psychologists to decide whether or not this constitutes a running away from an inescapable reality. After all, the complete Jewish ritual of mourning, the full Orthodox ritual, is meant to avoid exaggerated or unmeasured grief: “The law is to diminish mourning” {Moed Katan 26b). On the next page in the Talmud it is stated that if a man mourns immoderately, God Himself rebukes him and says: “Are you more merciful than I am?” In fact, it is stated as a law in the Shulchan Aruch {Yore Deah 389:5) that when a man’s friends rebuke him for excessive mourning, he should cease his mourning ritual. Thus it is clear that our tradition has in mind a fixed, and therefore limited, ritual of mourning and the avoidance of excess. This certainly seems to be psychologically sound. The bereaved face the fact of death, do honor to the departed as tradition requires, and when the ritual is finished, the mourner, having thus expressed himself, can now be consoled and go on with the business of living. It is a question, therefore, for psychologists to decide, whether a bereaved person who avoids all ritual of mourning does not suppress his own grief thereby and actually delay his consolation.

As far as the tradition is concerned, the present laws and customs are the result of the evolution of various observances. Originally there was a special ritual at the very moment of death. The law was that whoever was present when a person died had to make a tear in his garment (keriah). This was changed because it was feared that the people present at the bedside of a dying person (especially if they were not relatives) would want to avoid tearing their garments and would therefore go away and leave the dead to die in loneliness. So for that reason the keriah was shifted either to the graveside or to the funeral service. So the various prayers (“Blessed be the righteous Judge . . . ,” etc.) which were originally said at the moment of death in the presence of the man just deceased were, likewise, moved to the funeral service or the graveside.

Just as these rituals (tearing the garments and the prayers) were always to be in the presence of the dead (first at the moment of death and later at the service), so, too, the eulogy is to be in the presence of the dead (see Yore Deah 344:12 and 17).

So definite was the tradition on having the various rituals in the presence of the dead that even in the case of sinful people the ritual was carried out. Basically the law (stemming from Semachos) was that wicked people, those who abandoned the community and those who committed suicide, were to be given no ritual at all (eyn misaskin, “We do not engage ourselves with them”). But even in the case of these individuals the law gradually changed, and we are required to bury them, of course, and provide Kaddish and shrouds. See the references on this particular matter in Recent Reform Responsa, pp. 118 -19:

The strictest of all codifiers is Maimonides (“Hilchos Avel”) who says that there should be no mourning rites, and so forth, but only the blessing for the mourners. The Ramban, in “Toldos Ha-Adam” says that there should be tearing of the garments. The next step is taken by Solomon ben Aderet, the great legal authority of Barcelona (thirteenth century) in his responsum 763. He says that certainly we are in duty bound to provide shrouds and burial. Later authorities, as for example, Moses Sofer, in his responsa, Yore Deah 326, says that we certainly do say Kaddish; and further, he would permit any respectable family to go through all the mourning ritual, lest the family have to bear innocently eternal disgrace if, conspicuously, they failed to exercise mourning.

Thus it is clear that our Jewish tradition was rather insistent that a definite amount of ritual be carried out in the presence of the departed. Of course a memorial service in the absence of the body of the departed is proper and traditional in a case when the body is lost at sea or for some other reason cannot be found. Nor is there any objection in the tradition to a memorial service taking place after the funeral, especially in the case of honored scholars, when it was a tradition to hold memorial services in various cities, therefore obviously in the absence of the body. Also, at the end of the thirty days of mourning or on the anniversary of the death, such memorial services were held. But all these memorial services were never meant to be a substitute for the actual funeral service at the time of death.

As to the question we have raised above, namely, whether the avoidance of these rituals is sound psychologically, we may now say rather positively that the observance of these rituals is psychologically sound. A recent book by Jack D. Spiro, entitled A Time to Mourn, states the following (p. 114):

Expressing Grief. Through various laws, the mourner is required to remind himself of the death of his loved object, not only for the purpose of facing reality but also to help in giving vent to his feelings. Mourning is basically an affective process which operates to relieve the tension of frustrated love impulses. But it does so only if the mourner is capable of expressing the related emotions. As Lindemann points out, one of the most serious obstacles to accomplishing the work of mourning is that “patients try to avoid the intense distress connected with the grief experience and to avoid the expression of emotion necessary for it.”

When an emotion is denied expression, it is not destroyed but only pushed down into the unconscious. The pressure builds up and may manifest itself in some disguised, unwholesome form. By giving vent to the affective tension caused by the frustration of his love impulses, the mourner moves on his way toward severing his emotional ties to the deceased. The dynamic energy itself, which had been consumed in the love relationship, seeks satisfaction. Through the expression of grief this energy is used, thus bringing emotional relief to the mourner and gradually allaying the affec-tive force of the love relationship. The mourner thereby becomes capable of detaching himself from the deceased.

It is evident, therefore, that this new practice of avoiding committal services entirely, or avoiding the family presence if there is a committal service, is contrary both to tradition and to sound mental health, and should, therefore, be discouraged.