Because I am a rabbi, people ask me all sorts of religious and not-so-religious questions. “Rabbi, is my six-year-old child too young to take to his great-grandmother’s funeral?” “Rabbi, do you know a way to make pizza that would be acceptable to eat on Passover?” “Rabbi, can my son’s bar mitzvah ceremony be on a Saturday evening so that our guests don’t have to wait around all day until the party?”
Those are all good questions. But nothing – no amount of seminary or post-seminary education, no amount of collegial conversations or extra-curricular reading – could have prepared me for the question that a congregant asked me in the wake of the September 11 disaster.
“Rabbi, I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan,” she said. “My windows are covered with the grime that has drifted uptown since … you know. I need to clean my windows, but I’ve got to believe that there are ashes of the dead in that dust. It doesn’t seem right to just have the windows cleaned. What do I do?”
What does this wondering Jew already know, even as the words of the question leave her mouth?
She knows that Judaism views the human body with reverence. She has seen the horrific scenes of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel gathering the mangled scraps of bodies that terrorist bombs have torn apart – and they pursue this seemingly morbid quest because people are made in God’s image, and everything of us is precious. My wondering Jew knows that the sanctity of the body lingers after death, way after the body has been reduced to its elements. Judaism frowns on cremation, and yet the ashes of the dead are routinely buried in Jewish cemeteries.
She knows something else. Yes, the American rabbi, version 2001, is often a master of ceremonies and an administrator. And yet the traditional role of the rabbi always wins out. That role is as teacher with a life embedded in a wisdom tradition, as someone who hears questions and who uses a millennia-old tradition to find answers.
But my questioner, alas, has grabbed me in the synagogue lobby right after services, and I am on my way to visit someone in the hospital. I don’t have the time to repair to my book-laden study, much less to write to a Jewish legal authority and ask the question. Perhaps her answer is buried somewhere in the piles of questions that Jews asked the last time we encountered sacred ashes – questions about how the ashes of Holocaust victims should be buried.
Out of somewhere, my answer came out. “This is what I would do,” I said. “Use a paper towel to wipe the windows clean as much as possible. Then put the paper towel in an envelope, take it to a Jewish funeral home, and ask them to bury it the next time they do a funeral.” She nodded and thanked me for the advice – and that is precisely what she did.
There’s a Hasidic saying: “If you want to find a spark, sift through the ashes.” As we continue to sift through the ashes of September 11, there are sacred sparks. That woman’s question was a spark. She reminds us that religion matters more than we had ever thought. Religion is about real, get-your-hands-dirty questions and tentative replies.
Some of my colleagues are silently yelling: “How can you answer a question like that on the fly? You must go to the texts! You have to find what others have said about this kind of issue!”
Guilty as charged. And I still do not know if I gave her the right answer.
But there are times when we consult a different kind of Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law). It is a multi-volume tome that is found within the sacred library of the soul.
At those times, the answers to the things we do not know emerge of their own accord, from between the letters of words already written on a faded inner parchment, and with more to teach us than the things we think we know.
Jeffrey K. Salkin is senior rabbi of The Community Synagogue in Port Washington, New York, and the author of five books on spirituality and everyday life, including Putting God on the Guest List: How to Reclaim the Spiritual Meaning of Your Child’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah.