By Rabbi Ben Kamin
OCEANSIDE, California — His parents are as pious and kind as they are broken and devastated. Yesterday, on Valentine’s Day, I helped them bury their 31-year old son, who died from a drug overdose. The scene at the burial field was hopelessly painful—a mother cried out from the abscess of her betrayed womb. A father girded his loins and shoveled mounds of dirt into the terrible hole of his legacy in a mixture of rage and faith.
Traffic flowed by the cemetery as good folk frolicked on an exceptionally summer-like day in Southern California. They were on their way to the beach, they exchanged flowers and chocolates, and they prattled about love and tenderness. They were indifferent to the crucible of love that broke the earth as David (not his real name) was laid to rest.
His family rabbi refused to officiate so I was called in. (This is a function of the alternative pastoral institute I maintain called ‘Reconciliation: The Synagogue Without Walls.’) My presence was a privilege and a sacred responsibility but I should have not been contacted. The rabbi, presumably a learned man, would not abide by the afflicted family’s inability to bury their son within 24 hours of his death.
Really? Who can possibly demand of a devastated mother and father to regroup from the horror of their son’s death and organize a funeral within the next day? This is not to mention that the young man died in another state and there were the gruesome matters of travel, identification, and the coroners’ protocols. And we don’t all live in ancient Judea or in proximate European shtetls anymore, for the love of God. Family and friends must travel from far distances to arrive and put their arms around the stricken. Are ancient rituals more important than today’s sympathy and compassion?
But it gets worse. The rabbi, a classic fundamentalist locked into spiritual rigor mortis, was possibly judgmental about the nature of David’s death. It is impossible for me to contain my despair and rage about such—and similar—injunctions of our religious institutions. Is this what God wants? Are ordained clergy really expressing divine intelligence when they invoke such nonsense or are they perhaps revealing their own insecurities?
Yet there is more. The rabbi—who has been trusted and revered by this poor family—was also concerned about the “Jewishness” of the suffering mother. This upstanding woman, who maintained her composure and held her husband together till the grave site unleashed her terror, converted to Judaism a long time ago. Apparently, the rabbi was not convinced she is Jewish and thereby offered an egregiously racialist conclusion that he could not be stained by association. Exactly when this family needed him more than at any other moment in their lives.
Is it any wonder that so many Americans have been jaded, hurt, and deserted by the organized faith communities? Is there no shame in these clerics who must know, somewhere deep under their lofty robes, that people need love so much more than they need law.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below must be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the U.S.)