This past shabbat, we studied parashat chukat, a momentous Torah portion featuring the death of Miriam, prophetess and Moses’ sister; the Israelites lashing out at Moses because of their hunger and thirst, and Moses, in turn, striking a rock rather than ordering it to bring forth water, as God had commanded, leading to his now infamous punishment of not being able to see the journey through to the promised land; and the death of Aaron, Moses’ brother and High Priest.
Even the name of the portion, chukat, invokes heavy themes, referring to the ritual law of how one purifies one’s self once one has come into close proximity with the deceased.
Perhaps no other parashah more centrally confronts the Jewish—and humanity’s—encounter with mortality than this one.
So, what is the teaching in this? In part, I believe, it is to accentuate that encounter. To ready ourselves for it. To invite the thinking and the experience that death is part of the complete picture of life. As Rabbi Isaak Klein observes, “Jewish tradition prescribes that when death occurs, those present, and those who hear it about, should say Barukh Dayan Ha’emet, ‘blessed be the righteous Judge,’ thus affirming an awareness that God’s governance of the universe includes death no less than life,” citing Rabbi Ben-Zion Bosker for the observation that, “Man is mortal. He abides in the world for but a limited time, and then his sun sets, and his breath departs from him. But his mortality does not necessarily degrade him… Death, in its own grimness and terror, has a positive aspect in the scheme of divine providence. For death is the price of life.”
This is not to deprecate the fear and anxiety associated with death, both ours and our loved one’s. We studied a midrash (rabbinic expansion) of the Torah portion where Moses wrings his hands as follows: “Moses said to Aaron, ‘Just think, Aaron, my brother, when Miriam died, you and I attended her. Now that you are about to die, I and Eleazar [Aaron’s son] are attending you. But I—when I die, who will attend me?”
We all have questions about this-stage-of-life’s closing chapter, even that prophet who was supposed to have embodied the utmost in spiritual equanimity. (As it turns out, according to the midrash, The Holy One responds and says, Moses, “I will attend you,” an implication perhaps being that each of us receives that attendance from the Holy One at our passing.)
But it does invite us to open ourselves to that inevitable arc of life, and to recognize our tradition’s openness to it and to the structures, like shivah (seven days of intense grieving), shloshim (thirty days of the next stage of grief), and the mourner’s kaddish, that help us to take stock of our relationship to life and death.
Judaism is without a doubt the tradition that says “choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19), while at the same time being a tradition that recognizes the inherently intertwined nature of life and death and the spiritual salience of formulating a relationship to death and to loss. May we continue this holy work.
