Sermon – A Eulogy, or a Hesped?

Written by Rabbi Hannah Kingston — 19 September 2022

Over the past week, as we have watched the grandeur of the operations surrounding the Queen’s death play out across the country, there has been a question on my lips. Who eulogises the Queen at her funeral? And where an earth do they begin?

 

The Venerable Liz Adekunle, former chaplain to the Queen, spoke on Radio 4’s thought for the day yesterday. She spoke about a person’s ‘resume virtues’, the chronological accomplishments that appear on a CV and tell the story of life’s achievements. She compared these to ‘eulogy virtues’, the things that people might say about you when you die. Although your resume virtues tell a part of your story, of who you are in your life, it is not your qualifications, but your interactions, how you make people feel, that truly speak about who you are as a person. These eulogy virtues are harder to measure but easier to witness.

 

The many parts of Queen Elizabeth that make up her eulogy virtues can be found in the stories told by many people. This is why, our Alyth journalists told us on Thursday, the obituary in the Times was written not by one journalist, but by many, over a series of years.

 

The moment of telling someone’s story at their funeral is arguably the most important part of the procedures. We are taught in Midrash (Kohelet Rabbah 12:13) that ‘when someone passes from this world, God says to the angels, “Go, see what the people say about them”’ because as Elie Wiesel famously wrote (in his 1966 novel, The Gates of the forest), “God created [hu]man[s] because [God] loves stories.”

Our tradition is one deeply rooted in stories, we are a people of the book after all. As our recently deceased and much loved former Rabbi, Rabbi Dow Marmur wrote in his book, ‘Choose life’:

We are not commanded to believe, but we are commanded to remember. Without memory there can be neither continuity nor identity.

 

This idea of the power of memory, of its importance in forming who we are as a people, is shown in this week’s parasha. The Israelites are just about to cross into the land of Israel and we are continuing Moses’ final speech, almost a eulogy of his own life.

 

We hear the words “My father was a wandering Aramean…”

 

This retelling of history, familiar to many of us from our Passover Sedarim, is found in a moment of offering, when you bring the baskets of your first fruits to the high priest. It begins the prayer the Israelites were commanded to give alongside their sacrifice. But this prayer was not constructed with any of the format we are familiar with. It was not a moment of beseeching God, or giving praise. Rather we are instructed to offer a story, our story, where we came from, where we’ve been and why we are here.

 

It is a story that belongs to each of us, a story of our journey to this point, rooted in our shared ancestry, the wandering Aramean. It is a story of twists and turns, moments of wandering and moments of settling, moments of growth, moments of joy, moments of sadness.

This sentence demonstrates the power of words to paint a picture and conjure a memory, to cast our mind back to stories that spread through generations. When someone dies, the words we say should trigger just this reactions in us. So, how do we begin to tell the story of someone who was loved and cherished?

 

When a public figure is eulogised, the media has a tendency to refer only to the things that people admired about the figure, in keeping with the tradition of not speaking ill of the dead. The word eulogy comes from Greek words meaning ‘high praise’ – therefore a traditional eulogy is a celebration of someone’s achievements in life.

 

But what a eulogy may miss in its lack of nuance, is the delicate balance of human life. For no person lives a life of pure good, there is always a mix of good and bad, experienced in different ways by the people in interaction with the deceased.

 

Therefore, the Jewish tradition of hesped, is slightly different to that of a eulogy. The word hesped comes from the verb ‘lispod’ – to lament. This slight distinction from a eulogy means that a hesped is meant to be an honest account, acknowledging the good and the flaws of the deceased. In this honesty, it becomes a moment to truly express our grief and our loss, the things we will miss and the things that we learnt.

 

 

The first account we have of a Hesped is found in Genesis 23, when Abraham buries Sarah. We read:

Sarah died in Kiriyat-Arba, in the land of Canaan, and Abraham began to lament (lispod) and weep (v’livkotah) for her.

 

The mitzvah of hesped is then carried out at the death of Jacob, Samuel, Saul and Jonathan, reiterating that telling the deceased’s story through an act of lament is part of our religious duty when someone dies. These biblical accounts of the first hespedim, teaches us that everyone deserves a hesped, regardless of the deeds they committed in their life time. This reflects the belief that every human life is to be valued.

 

And just as Abraham laments for his beloved wife, so too are we encouraged to lament for those we grieve. A hesped, unlike a eulogy, is not always delivered by a professional because the purpose of a hesped is to represent the unique role that a person played in the world – a life that changed the world just by being part of it. Families are encouraged to give a hesped in which they talk openly about the ones they loved, revealing the true character that you only learn about a person through really knowing them. Giving a hesped is seen as one of the greatest mitzvot we can do in a lifetime.

 

Further a hesped should be interwoven with the grief of the mourners, for it is taught in the Shulchan Aruch:

It is a great mitzvah to eulogise the dead appropriately. And the mitzvah is to lament the dead with words that break the heart

The lament we write for our loved ones should bring the dead to life so that people will learn from them. A Hesped should be full of stories that summon memories, not just recalling their death, but their life so that they can continue living on through those they left behind. And those who deliver it should not be afraid to summon laughter, because laughter is healing, or tears, as a mode of release.

 

So as we move toward this moment in the history of our country, a funeral that future generations will read about in their text books, I feel for the person tasked with writing the eulogy for Queen Elizabeth II.

 

For I would not want to be the person eulogising the Queen on Monday, carrying the burden of pressure to write an official report, celebrating only the achievements, and writing an account of ‘high praise’, that does not truly reflect her essence, but her ‘eulogy virtues’.

 

But the great mitzvah of lament, of writing a hesped filled with stories, of bringing a person to life, that I would like to do.

 

The Sunday Times wrote ‘Millions cannot even recall a time before Elizabeth was on the throne’ – the eulogy will tell the story of the Queens history, of her public image. The hesped would recall instead their grief and their stories, the truth about the interactions she had and the impressions she made on the people who loved her.

There will be a time, in all of our lives, where we are tasked with writing the hesped for a person we love. May that hesped be an outlet for our grief, a gift to help us process and to recall the ones we loved. May it tell the truth, the good and the bad, so that tells the true story of the ones we miss, the life they crafted through their and choices. And ultimately, may we go on living, and may the stories of those we loved go on living beside us, so that we can continue to learn from them and grow with them