Trusting Daas Torah and a City’s Manhigim
November, 2022
This past Sunday, a member of my shul lost his sister. She was a very prominent New York physician and professor who had helped thousands of people. The levayah was packed, and many people had to stand.
I could not be inside to witness it since I am a kohen. As I stood outside in the cold rain, my mind traveled back five years, when I had been zocheh to meet with Rabbi Elchanan Zohn about this very issue. Rabbo Zohn is the head of the Queens chevrah kaddisha and one of the leading rabbanim and askanim in the world in all the practices related to chesed shel emes.He is the founder and president of NASCK, the National Association of Chevra Kadisha.
Every major city has its own chevrah kaddisha, but at times they need assistance—for example, getting a meis to Eretz Yisrael or stopping an autopsy. To whom do they turn? Most often to Rabbi Zohn or NASCK. When I was a rav in Buffalo, I often called him in moments of crisis. When I sat in that meeting with him five years ago, calls were coming in from people in cities around the country—from Muncie, Indiana, to Monsey, New York, Miami to Milan—all seeking his guidance.
Why had I requested that meeting? And what about the rain had reminded me of it?
I grew up in Toronto. Major funeral homes there are operated by the Orthodox and have a kohen room whose walls are made of glass. It is next to the room where the levayos take place, which also has glass walls. This makes it halachically possible for kohanim to feel that they are participating, and it enables a rabbi who is a kohen to lead a levayah without awkwardness.
Once, in Buffalo, a well-meaning funeral home owner built a kohen room without first consulting a rav. Suffice it to say that he spent a lot of money for nothing. I used sit in my car in the freezing Buffalo winters delivering divrei hesped through a cordless microphone.
Aside from the fact that I had no idea if it was working (and it often wasn’t), not being able to see the faces in the audience puts a speaker at a terrible disadvantage (see Brachos 6b, which states that the goal of a hesped is to elicit an emotional reaction from the family and other participants). This set-up was especially uncomfortable for the nonobservant; it was as if a bas kol was speaking to them.
In time, I gave these duties over to other rabbanim, feeling that it would be more bakovadik for the meis.
I was therefore surprised to learn that many Jewish funeral homes in New York are not run by the Orthodox. As a kohen, I am either sent to a trailer, or I simply stand outside listening to the hespeidim over a speaker. Although these homes work well with the frum and offer full Orthodoxservices, the advantage of building our own seemed obvious…or so I thought.
Last week I mentioned the danger of questioning our mesorah, and this is true for practices in kehillos as well. A rav must never make changes without speaking to those who were there before. So when a member of my shul came to me with his plan to build a frum funeral home that would serve Queens and the Five Towns, I responded with great enthusiasm but with some reservation. “We must first go to Rabbi Zohn,” I said, “and get his blessing for such a project.”
I give this congregant a lot of credit. He did not hesitate to put his business on hold for the sake of mesorah and kavod kadmonim. Indeed, he yielded to Rabbi Zohn when he was told that this could not yet be done.
Rabbi Zohn was very humble and didn’t assert any path forward. He made it clear that this man was free to do whatever he wished with his own rav. Instead, he simply pointed out that this was not the first time such an idea had been brought to him.
You might wonder what disadvantage there could possibly be in opening up a frum funeral home.
You see, all the local funeral homes provide offer Jewish burial.In addition to a taharah,they offer an alternative to cremation, R”l. Some even hire frum funeral advisors or managers to help with the frum niftarim and their families.
Now, imagine that one opens a frum funeral home and it is very successful. It has state-of-the-art facilities, a beautiful kohen room, and the assurance that everything will run k’das u’k’din. What will happen? The larger non-frum facilities will still operate, of course, only now there will no longer be a demand for kevuras Yisrael. This might result in thousands of families making unfortunate decisions for their loved ones.
Everyone agrees that l’chatchilah it would be best to have our own funeral home. But that is not the situation we inherited, and moving forward isn’t a simple proposition.
Unfortunately, cremation hasbecome popular. Some people say this protects the environment, which is silly, because cremation is actually much worse for the environment than burial. Others cite convenience, saying it is difficult to visit a cemetery that is far way—but who is going to be watching the urn in 40, 70, or 100 years? I’ve heard all the reasons.
A few years ago, I shared a story about taking a family to court when they decided to deny that their daughter was a giyores. They claimed she was still a Catholic and wanted to cremate her.
In a span of only five years—from to 2010 to 2015—the cremation rate in the United States jumped close to 10 percent. In 1979, France had a cremation rate of 1 percent; today it is 50 percent. The United Kingdom is now at 75 percent, and Japan is at 99 percent. According to CANA, a cremation society, the total rate of those who choose cremation in the United States is now close to 50 percent, and in Canada it is close to 70 percent.
To help convince someone of the beauty of kevurah,I strongly recommend a wonderful book called Cremation or Burial: A Jewish View, by Rabbi Doron Kornbluth.
As as I stood in the rain last week, it dawned on me that no two kehillos are alike, and as long as we trust in the chochmah behind what may seem inconvenient, we can share as a group in the zechusim. I turned to the kohen standing next to me and said, “You may have no idea, but our standing here is going to benefit many, many Jews.”
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