Sermon: Mourning in a time of Coronavirus

Written by Rabbi Josh Levy — 18 April 2020

And Moses said to Aaron, and to his sons…, “Do not bare your heads and do not tear your clothes, lest you die” (Leviticus 10:6)

One of the most challenging aspects of the very strange narrative of Nadav and Avihu is its approach to loss and mourning.  Faced with these horrific deaths on a day which was supposed to be one of great celebration, the opening of the tabernacle, there is a strange absence of grief.  In response to the death of his sons, their father, Aaron, is silent.  Commentators struggle with this response.  The charitable interpretation is that he is struck dumb, paralysed by what he has seen.

Meanwhile, though, their uncle, Moses, with a task still to fulfil, first resorts to theology – rarely welcome at times of deep loss – and then, with their bodies removed, he instructs the mourners that they are not to mourn.  He tells Aaron and his remaining sons that they may not carry out the normal mourning practices, ‘lest they die’.  Again, commentators across the generations find ways to explain Moses’ instructions.  Yet it feels to us a terrible thing – to deny a father, to deny siblings, the right to mourn as they wish.

In fact, we have come to know how terrible it is.  Because we now live in a time in which illness, bereavement and mourning have also been turned upside down.  Our natural instincts – to be with those we love, to gather and to hug – are one of those core aspects of human life that have to be suppressed in response to the threat to life we currently face.

The coronavirus has led to some extraordinary, difficult choices in the area of death and mourning.
Last week, for the first time in the UK, parts of the Muslim community introduced saff-burials, the digging of one long grave, with individual demarcated spaces, to allow multiple burials in quick succession, with a single imam reciting the prayers for each individual in turn.

Faced with similar practical challenges, the dayanim of the Orthodox Bet Din took the step of opening cemeteries, and asking their rabbinic staff to work, on what they consider to be the second day of Yom Tov.  While clearly permitted in halakhah – in Jewish law – this very unusual step speaks to the fact these are not normal times, reflecting the enormity of the challenge that Burial Societies are currently facing.

The challenges are not just ones of scale.  All religious communities are also grappling with how to carry out our ritual after death, denied as we are the freedom for our normal practices of funerals and mourning.

Across the Jewish world, including in our own movement, the requirement for tahara – the process of ritual purification of a body after death, carried out by a chevra kaddisha – was suspended early in the current crisis because of the potential risk to the amazing volunteers who normally carry it out.

And all religious communities, and indeed secular authorities, are facing challenging questions about how to carry out funerals when gathering of mourners, friends and family, is not possible.  Many communities are struggling with who counts as a mourner, which member of a family can be at a funeral and which not, how to limit mourners in an honourable way.   Our own Progressive movements made a decision – in line with the initial advice issued by government, and reflecting a Jewish legal principle, Lifnim mishurat hadin – that it is right to go beyond the letter of the law – especially in areas of Pikuach Nefesh, in which preservation of life supersedes all other obligations – to carry out all funerals over zoom.  The intention was to thereby remove difficult choices about who qualifies as a mourner; to reduce the risk to cemetery staff, officiants – many of whom themselves are in vulnerable groups, and most importantly to mourners themselves; as well as to address the horrible new reality that many of those who mourn are themselves unwell, vulnerable  or in isolation.

It was not – of course it wasn’t – a straightforward decision.  Yet, in the main, these Zoom funerals have worked well.  As one mourner put it, in a letter of thanks: “Of course I wanted to go, with every fibre of my body, but this rule allowed me to put head over heart, stay safe, and pay my tribute in another way”.   But there is no getting away from the fact that we cannot mourn as we wish.  Like Aaron we are, metaphorically, struck silent.   As mourners, we have to do our mourning online – online funerals, online shiva prayers – not able to cry together.  We know that this is not the same, not enough.  But it has to be enough.  Only after all this is done will we be able to mourn together, with memorial services and yizkor, as in our portion, “All the house of Israel will mourn”.

Until then, just as we all find ourselves, metaphorically like Aaron, so too as rabbis, we find ourselves taking the role of Moses, commanding that normal ritual is not possible, ‘lest we die’.  For the first time after years of reading this story, I am able to empathise with what must have been his pain in giving that message.

And, of course, our collective mourning has also been deeply affected.  This year’s Yom HaShoah will be very different to that which anyone imagined.  Normally a hugely important event in the life of this community, it too will be carried out only over zoom, together with other Reform communities in the UK.  Our own community Shoah Book of Remembrance – a beautiful, living work of memory – will this year go unopened, the stories of those affected will go unread.  Especially this year, that feels like an incredible loss.  Until a few weeks ago, I was due to be on a plane at 7am tomorrow morning to Hamburg, representing the memory of my grandfather, accompanying the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen to the commemoration of the liberation of that camp.  Just one moment of personal and collective mourning lost in the broader wave of losses we have all encountered.

Perhaps, in the story of Nadav and Avihu, though we can also find a hint of consolation, something more positive.  In his reading of Moses and Aaron in the face of their loss, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks offers this: “It is almost as if we are present” he suggests, “At the birth of an emotional configuration that will characterise the Jewish people in centuries to come. Jews are a people who have had more than their share of suffering. Like Aaron, they did not lose their humanity. They did not allow their sense of grief to be dulled, deadened, desensitised.  But neither did they lose their capacity to continue, to carry on, to hope… Like Moses, the Jewish people found the strength to continue, to reaffirm hope in the face of despair, life in the presence of death.”

In the story of Nadav and Avihu, Sacks finds an example of Jewish resilience.  Across the span of Jewish history we have experienced trauma and we have survived. Our stories are full of examples of resilience in the face of loss and challenge.

In the face of our own complex mourning; in the face of the terrible challenges that we all now encounter; in the face of the subversion of loss and bereavement with which we today have to struggle, may we be able, like Aaron and Moses to find the “strength to continue”.  May we find within ourselves, the stores of resilience that generations of Jews have found “to reaffirm hope in the face of despair, life in the presence of death”