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Chayei Sara
On the Permanence of Graves Burying one’s dead—what could be a more rudimentary cultural ritual? The scene in which Abraham buys a gravesite from a Hittite for Sarah is often commented upon for the highly stylized negotiation that results in the acquisition. Scholars relate to this material as a rare glimpse of social-business history. I wish to focus on something far more basic: the very notion that burial assumes land ownership. We know very little about biblical-era traditions of burial or attitudes toward the dead. This led one scholar to call customs relevant to the ancient Israelite cult of the dead “a hidden heritage.” In an article published in the 1970s, H. C. Brichto suggested that during the pre-Persian eras—that is, before 538 b.c.e.—Jews were particularly concerned that family members be properly buried on ancestral lands. Since death was understood as a continuation of life, including retained memory, consciousness, and awareness of all that was happening with descendants, one’s afterlife was to take place where one belonged—on clan-owned lands. (1) As Jews increasingly became citizens of the world—either through forced exiles or migrations—historical circumstances forced traditional attitudes toward the dead to be abandoned. Identity along clan and geographic lines diminished. A Jew living outside of the Land of Israel might entertain as an ideal burial in the Holy Land, but practically speaking, it proved to be implausible for most living abroad. And with urbanization in the Land of Israel itself, identity had less to do with specific regions than it did with the place a family lived, whether or not it involved a historic association. Abraham’s acquisition of Machpelah, then, is packed with irony. Technically speaking, he is on the very land he has been promised, but he rightly identifies himself as “a resident alien,” making clear that nothing truly belongs to him. Nothing of this land will belong to any Jew prior to the return of the Egyptian exiles many centuries after Abraham’s lifetime. Thus, the authors, by engaging this particular story, can initiate the ideal of burial in the Holy Land—something they will reiterate through Jacob, who dies in Egypt (Genesis 47:30, 49:29–33)—but also send the signal that even Abraham had to acquire a grave for his wife in a land that was not (yet) his own. In a very profound sense, then, Abraham was like any Jew who did not have access to ancestral property. The pattern he symbolizes would become the dominant pattern of Jewish life after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 b.c.e. The fact that Abraham refuses to take land offered him for free (Genesis 23:6–9) stems from Abraham’s desire to achieve a legally legitimate and irreversible hold over his parcel. The principle underlying this acquisition is very simple, but the social dynamic will prove harsh. No social or legal convention would guarantee Jews peace in their graves in subsequent eras. The image of a gravesite, with its stone witnesses to the deceased and its tranquility, is among the most stable cultural symbols. And yet, “life in the grave” for the Jew has all too frequently been robbed of its most precious dignities. Once the Diaspora commenced, the experience of being denied the grave began. Much of our Bible conveys an awareness of the shift in fates for the living and the dead with the destruction of Jerusalem itself—the moment that defines the beginning of Diaspora. The Book of Psalms records the devastation of Jerusalem by speaking of the corpses of God’s servants strewn “as food for the fowl of heaven, and the flesh of Your faithful for the wild beasts. Their blood was shed like water around about Jerusalem, with none to bury them” (Psalm 79:2–3). The heartrending character of such narratives—whether they derive from antiquity or the Holocaust matters little—lies in the many layers at which the violation of one’s humanity is implied by such a scene. It is one thing to be killed; it is yet more horrible to imagine that one’s death is not commemorated through ritual and burial. A deep element of our humanity is expressed through how we relate to the deceased. Such rituals say less about the dead than they do about the living. The issue here is not whether burial is somehow more appropriate than, say, cremation, as a Hindu would practice it. The issue is about how a culture exercises control over this very important structure for expressing the sanctity of life. Despite the fact that Jews believed in an afterlife, and hoped death was but a temporary state, the grave needed to be permanently at peace, undisturbed, and with the remains of a corpse intact, waiting for the final resurrection. An afterlife was dependent upon the meritorious character of a person’s life, and upon a peaceful existence in the grave. Evidence regarding cemetery acquisition is rather spotty throughout ancient history. Frequently, local idiosyncrasies governed the character of transactions. In some parts of Europe and the Mediterranean region, Jews could and did buy land outright for graveyards; in other places, land for cemeteries was granted as if on a lease, and Jews paid ongoing rent on the parcels. In yet other parts of Europe, Jews were forbidden altogether from establishing graveyards. For some time, Portugal was such a place. Laws in medieval England were also severe. Some Jews arrived in England as early as the late Roman period, but it was not until 1177 that they were granted cemeteries wherever they lived. (2) Until that time, all Jews were buried in one London cemetery, regardless of where they were when they died. Jewish life in England was abruptly ended when King Edward I issued an edict of expulsion in 1290. Readmission only became permissible by law in 1656. There are consequently no remains of medieval Jewish cemeteries in England, as they were all taken over by local landowners or the church, desecrated, and reverted to common usages. Cemeteries were frequently money makers for the church or other landholders in medieval Europe. In effect, the dead were tenants in perpetuity. Frequently called “Garden of the Jews” or “Mount of the Jews” in the medieval Latin records of France, cemeteries were only rarely owned outright by Jews among the French after the Roman period. And even when they appear to have been actual “property,” the massacres and expulsions that began with the First Crusade in 1096 made the formal or legal status of cemetery ownership irrelevant. The Jews were expelled from France in 1306 by King Philip “the Fair” as part of a plan to finance a variety of projects, including warfare. In the same year he issued a variety of edicts allowing for the auctioning off of all Jewish properties, “sold in perpetuity to the highest bidder.” The charter for the Rouen auction stipulates that “houses, gardens, cemetery, lands, goods, possessions and all real estate whatsoever, which the Jews of Rouen possessed in the city of Rouen and its outskirts” were to be put on the auction block.(3) Needless to say, the edict also required that rather high auction fees and claims to rent owed on certain choice lands were to be directed toward the king. This “transference” of property was the norm in the wake of expulsions. Rarely was the cemetery treated any differently from other seized lands. In Erfurt, Germany, where Jews enjoyed a vibrant cultural and economic sojourn from the early thirteenth century, the cemetery was leveled and transformed into a granary shortly after the expulsion of 1458. Recent excavations in Erfurt have resulted in the discovery of Jewish gravestones throughout much of the old city, where they were used as pavers and as parts of retaining walls. Such stories can be repeated concerning many European regions. There were many superstitions associated with disturbing the remains of the dead—whether Jewish or otherwise. Consequently, the reversion of cemetery lands into usable property after the expulsion of Jews presented something of a dilemma. Desecration of Jewish cemeteries became almost a ritual act, along with the plundering of Jewish properties. In Christian eyes, the reclaiming of Jewish burial grounds symbolized Christianity’s victory over Judaism in life as well as in death. There are stories of gravediggers who were reluctant to exhume what they believed should not be disturbed. Wages were increased to bring about the discarding of Jewish remains, while the work itself was deemed a victory celebration over the remains of “Old Israel.” The permanence that Abraham sought by acquiring his cave of Machpelah would be short-lived. Not only is the whereabouts of this cave unknown, but it remains for us Diaspora Jews more of a symbol of the insecurities of history than of a permanent resting place. My goal, however, in raising this approach to Chayei Sarah is not to dwell on the lachrymose details of Jewish suffering even in the grave, but rather to look for a way to transcend the realities of history itself. The parashah, after all, is called “The Life of Sarah,” not “The Death of Sarah.” Dr. Susan L. Einbinder has written a powerful and moving scholarly history of Jewish martyrdom poetry in medieval France called Beautiful Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). She and other historians note that the bodies of Jewish martyrs—people who were publicly executed for refusing to convert to Christianity—were often abused and invariably discarded by the Christian executioners rather than permitted honorable burials. This strategy would prevent Jews from establishing graves for martyrs, along with all of their potential symbolic meaning. Denied these burials, an alternative approach to memorializing the lives of the murdered emerged—memorialization through poetry. Laments, extended narratives, and highly stylized poetic renderings of the events and lives of the martyrs were all composed to affirm that which the Christian executioners hoped to obliterate in denying the dead graves. “Poetry as a living, musical, dramatic performance,” writes Dr. Einbinder, “constituted a symbolic frame of reference in which central issues of Jewish identity were formulated.” (4) The literature, then, proved more permanent than any of the commemorative cemetery stones, very much as had been the case since antiquity. This very irony, that the all-too ephemeral word could serve as the most permanent marker of a life, was somehow understood by the Torah writers themselves. Here we are, at least twenty-four hundred years after they lived, and we rehearse their words, despite not knowing their identities or the location of their graves. And the same is true of every martyr whose life and death were captured in poetry. The word proves to be an everlasting mausoleum for remembrance. A Personal Epilogue Some years ago, I started researching my own family origins in Germany. This brought me to the burial places of ancestors. Some of the names on stones from the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries were no longer visible, or just barely so. Little was known of the person for whom one or another marker served as a remembrance. Contrary to what I had hoped, with each visit, standing among those many stones, I felt increasingly empty. I wondered: Did it matter that these were “relatives,” since I knew nothing of them? A pivotal experience proved to be a visit to one particular cemetery that had me saying Kaddish and placing a pebble upon a stele that turned out not to be that of an actual family member, but someone with the same family name. There grew this tension between that silent stone and my search for a symbolic framework for remembering ancestors that could contribute to our identity as Jews and as a family. I related to those poems and narratives discussed in Dr. Einbinder’s book as far more profound and effective than any fading obelisk on the other side of the globe could ever be. But they, of course, were highly charged, dramatic renderings, dedicated to recording the plight of those who were victims of history’s most traumatic forces. Most of those I wanted remembered were common people, ancestors, but not extraordinary in any particular fashion—either as individuals or in terms of their life experiences. I began searching for a contemporary medium to achieve my goals. Such a medium presented itself one day when I was flipping through an old family photo album. Many of the images were fading. To prevent them from being lost, I started digitizing photographs and restoring them. Some images dated back to the 1860s. I began writing brief narratives for each image, drawing upon remembrances of older family members and various documents at my disposal. In doing research, I discovered that many more members of my family were registered in the databases of Yad Vashem than we had realized. The place and date of their deaths—and tragically, the circumstances—were made known to the present generation. For those family members, my task grew particularly urgent. I felt that if I did not do this work, my own children would have no recourse to this family history, and no personal connection to this historical tragedy. The research led to birth records, and using the Internet, I was able to write to small towns in Switzerland and France and Germany to learn about immigration dates, jobs held, even apartments rented. Slowly the photographs are being digitized and brief transcripts attached to each and every one. They exist on a Web site as clusters of zeroes and ones, in some sense, perishable with the flick of a switch, and yet more permanent than any stone could ever hope to be. Most likely, Jews of the Diaspora will emulate Abraham for millennia to come, buying gravesites for their beloved with the hope of creating a permanent and tranquil resting place. But if history teaches us anything, it is that graves provide a false sense of stability. It may not be an expulsion that denies the next generation access to its deceased, but the mobility factor that dominates our era, where families are dispersed thousands of miles from where they spent childhood, and from where they bury their dead. If we are to find meaning in remembering, if we are to create identity through connections with the past, it will be incumbent upon us as individuals to create vehicles for remembrances. For the time being, the most permanent medium is made up of bits and bytes. And while in the medieval world the creation of a lament or a poem of remembrance required a scribe with rarified skills and knowledge, today the ability to create “a symbolic frame of reference” for future generations is in the hands of every individual.
(2) See Norman Golb, The Jews in Medieval Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 7, n. 9. (3) Golb, The Jews in Medieval Normandy, p. 561. (4) Susan L. Einbinder, Beautiful Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 171. (Return) David H. Aaron received his doctorate from Brandeis University and ordination from the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati. He is professor of Hebrew Bible and History of Interpretation at HUC-JIR, CIncinnati. His most recent book is Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue (T & T Clark, 2006). You can contact him at daaron@huc.edu. |