David Roberts (1796–1864) was a Scottish painter who in the late 1830's traveled extensively in the Levant and Egypt documenting "Orientalist" sites in drawings and watercolors. Among Roberts's paintings was a massive 1849 work, The Destruction of Jerusalem.
Many scholars of the Bible and ancient Judaism prefer to focus exclusively on ancient texts and the world that produced them, refraining from engaging with the implications of their work for contemporary religious life. James L. Kugel has never been one of those scholars.
Among the many bones its various enemies pick with the Jewish state, one has been much in the news lately: bones, very dry bones, residing in cemeteries both real and imagined all across the country.
Ta'anit Esther, the traditional fast day preceding Purim, will be observed tomorrow. In recent years it has been designated as an international day of study, reflection, and calls to action on behalf of agunot, literally "anchored" or "bound" women.
In biblical and talmudic law, a marriage is dissolved upon certain proof of a spouse's death or upon the granting of a divorce (get) at the husband's discretion. Each of these halakhic requirements can leave a woman languishing for years, tortured either by her husband's uncertain fate or by his malicious will. Though technically the term agunah is reserved for the former condition, it has also come to stand for the latter.
The suffering these laws can cause was recognized by the Mishnah and Talmud themselves, which created exceptions and allowed for compelling a recalcitrant husband to grant divorce. Leading rabbis offered whatever leniencies they could, and reputations were often made on an agile jurist's ability to free an agunah from her chains. Yet the essential requirements of halakhah remained in place, in fatal collision with basic, God-given instincts of justice and compassion.
In modern times, these legal strictures came to be felt all the more acutely as, thanks to economic and political pressures, men were on the move in unheard-of numbers, and as traditional communal authority waned along with its ability to sanction wayward or missing husbands. Writers dramatically depicted the agunah's plight as a powerful indictment of traditional society; women themselves became increasingly resistant to the demands of the law. Yet still the requirements held.
In contemporary Israel, where marriage and divorce are in the hands of the chief rabbinate, the often extreme stringency of the ultra-Orthodox has engendered new waves of protest and criticism, but also innovative measures to deal with the problem. These include prenuptial agreements proposed by moderate rabbis working with women scholars of the law. A resolution of the agunah problem, once and for all, may be the ultimate test of halakhah's ability to find, or recover, its moral voice.
In the Hebrew calendar, Sunday February 21 is the seventh day of Adar, the date traditionally marking the death of Moses on Mount Nebo, overlooking Canaan, alone with God.
The Lord's personal oversight of Moses' interment, in a place "unknown to this day" (Deuteronomy 34:6), inspired the rabbis of the Talmud to praise the act of burying the dead with dignity as an expression of true (because unrecompensed) kindness and indeed of imitatio dei, the injunction to follow God's ways. So it is that the seventh day of Adar is designated by tradition to honor the institution of the Hevra Kadisha, the "holy society" whose members see to it that the dead are appropriately "purified" by being washed, clothed in shrouds, and bidden farewell with prayers and blessings.
While various Jewish burial practices date to antiquity, "holy societies" first took shape in the Middle Ages, but they did not assume organized form until the 17th century. Thanks in part to the growing influence of Kabbalah, Jews sought to turn the experiences of death and deathbed repentance—and, they hoped, eventual resurrection—into occasions for deeper union with God. This effort to spiritualize mortality would subsequently give way as modernity began increasingly to move the experience of death from the home and community to the institutionalized settings we know today. In the New World, the hevra kadisha, along with landsmanshaftn, served for a time as a means of keeping touch with an earlier, more intimate identity.
In our own age, many holy societies have fallen on hard times. In Israel they are mostly the province of the ultra-Orthodox; an offshoot, Zaka, has created a unique fusion between the religious and the military ethos. By contrast, for some American Jews today, the hevra kadisha has come to exercise a renewed appeal as a meaningful mode of confronting the experience of death and mourning with an insistence on the divine image inscribed in the human person until the last.
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