Flowing Water

The 7th of Adar and the Taharah Ritual

Dedicated to the members of Hevra Kadisha, everywhere.

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This week (Monday evening) we mark the 7th of Adar, traditionally identified as the death-day of our teacher Moshe, and a day of celebration for members of Hevra Kadisha, traditional Jewish burial societies. The latter celebration is anchored in the verses at the end of Devarim where the story of Moshe’s death is told, and an unidentified figure buried him. As the story is clear that no one knows Moshe’s burial place, and the only one with Moshe at that time was the holy One, The Hevra Kadisha members celebrate the 7th of Adar as the day when the holy One joined their ranks and buried Moshe.

Over the years, I have been privileged to offer bits of learning at these 7^th of Adar gatherings. I share here a teaching I offered at such a gathering, at the end of the first year of Covid. The first year of Covid was a difficult time for these burial societies, first of course because of all the deaths, but also because of the confusion of that year, and the fear and anxiety around what kinds of contact were dangerous and which were not, and group decisions about elements of the ritual that might be too dangerous to do in the midst of a plague. It was in that environment that I offered this teaching.

The teaching focuses on the ritual of pouring water over the body of the deceased. In preparing the body for burial, it is first cleaned and washed thoroughly, after which a ritual washing is enacted by pouring “nine (tish’ah) kabim”, a measure of water, over the body of the deceased. This is done by three people who each pour a bucket of water over the entire body, one after another, with care that the flow of water be continuous from the beginning of the first bucket until the end of the third. It was on this flow of water that my teaching focused.

This evening, I would like to think about the role of flowing water in the ritual of Taharah.

It is interesting to note that while at a technical level we often think of pouring “tish’ah kabin” as a secondary ritual, a lesser replacement for immersing in a Mikveh, regarding Taharah the halachic history is pretty clear that pouring water is the primary form, and immersing the met/ah (the deceased) in a mikveh (which is the practice in a small number of these organizations) is a later development.

We all know the physical experience of the flow of “tish’ah kabin”, beginning with the physical exertion involved in pouring it neither too fast nor too slow, the effort to sustain a continuous flow of water through all three buckets, the water that splashes off the body of the met/ah, and off the table onto the floor and onto our shoes and clothes, and the sound of the water flowing from the table down into the drain.

How do we understand the ritual role of this river of water that we create flowing over and off the met/ah?

But before addressing that question I want to begin by acknowledging the self-evident: To talk about the rituals of Taharah now, for most of us, is to talk about a longing.

It is to talk about a care-giving that we have come to love for its own sake, and which, in the current situation, we no longer offer, or offer only in a very partial way.

And of course, there is no more appropriate time to acknowledge the place of longing than on the Yahrzeit of our master Moshe, whom we have gathered tonight to honor.

Moshe, as we all remember, did not die into a great moment of achievement. Moshe died into a great longing, looking over into a promised land that he would never reach. Indeed, as the Zohar describes it, Moshe’s longing was so deep, so profound, that he merged and disappeared into the deepest desire and longing of the Divine itself.

What is Divine longing?

With your permission I will tell the story of God’s desire and longing as it is told in the tradition of Lurianic Kabbalah, which will ultimately connect to the story of the flowing water in our ritual.

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In the beginning,

which is not the beginning of time, but rather the deepest most fundamental level of our conceptions and perceptions, for this story does not happen in time,

God was Ein-Sof. Endless and limitless, the only being in existence. Nothing other than God existed, and there was no otherness to God’s being.

But there was a desire within God to be in relationship, a divine intuition that God’s endless possibilities, such as the possibility to be good, to be love, to be compassion, could only be realized with the existence of an-other, and that only with an-other, could God be both possibility and realization.

So God created, which is to say God brought about an other.

But in order for an-other to come into being, God first had to take on a boundary and limitation, to accept that there could be something that is not God’s self.

So God pulled back and allowed for an empty space that is not God.

Though this story, which does not happen in time, does not happen in space either…

But then, God let God’s endless self flow into that empty space, and fill it up, except for a thin line of nothing, left to separate the endless nature of God within this space from the endless nature of God outside this space. Imagine the space, if you will, as an empty ball, the air flowing into it filling it, separated from the air surrounding it only by a thin line of nothingness that constitutes the wall of this cosmic ball.

Thus, as we tell in the Lurianic tale, God is in relationship.

The endless quality of God outside the thin line, is in relationship with the endless quality of God inside the thin line, both existing within a boundary set by that thin line of nothingness. And in that relationship, love, and good, and compassion can be realized.

Photograph courtesy of Gary Cohen

This is the story of cosmic existence.

But it is also the story of every individual existence.

We are all of God, our being is nothing but divine light, and all that surrounds us is God’s divine light, separated only by the vessel that is our sense of self, of being and of an identity that is in relationship with all that surrounds it.

We are like a vessel of glass full of ocean water floating in the ocean, deep underwater. Our vessel is a form which both separates and connects water to water.

We are often taught to think of human life as a dyad made of body and soul. But following this story it may be helpful to understand it more as a trio - body, soul and a vessel of self that holds them together.

Our body water, our soul water, and our self, which fills the function of the vessel that holds the form for the two of them. When our time on Earth ends, the vessel ceases to exist, and body and soul flow back to the undifferentiated being they were part of before.

Kohelet offers a similar, though not identical, image of death -

“The dust shall return to Earth as it was before, and the breath will return to the God who gave it” (Kohelet, 12:7).

Death is the shattering, or disintegrating or dissolving of the vessel of self which allows both body and soul to flow back into their undifferentiated state.

There are actually ancient traditions of shattering vessels as part of the Taharah.

In Yemen they used to break an earthenware vessel as part of the Taharah, and leave the shards lying there for three days.

The Jews of Afghanistan had a unique ritual of Taharah for people who lived beyond the age of seventy which involved pouring water on the met/ah from 41 earthenware vessels and breaking each one after the pouring.

I wonder if the broken shards of pottery we put on the eyes of the met/ah do not hearken back also to those vessels.

The Shulhan Arukh rules that when a person dies in a home, all the water contained in vessels in that home and in neighboring homes should be spilled out. This practice seems to have largely been abandoned with the increasing commonality of running water and hospital deaths, but there are communities where this is still practiced.

But closer to home, the water that flows because it can no longer be contained in a vessel is the central part of our Taharah practice.

We let the water flow over the met/ah, and we acknowledge that there is no longer a vessel, no longer a self to contain it.

We let go, let it all flow back into the pure unity from which it came, and we chant - “tahor hu” – s/he is pure.

Photograph courtesy of Gary Cohen

May the holy blessed One bring healing to the world, so there is safety and life and joy.

May we be worthy of our own vessels and bring good and love and compassion into the world through them.

May we be worthy of our teacher Moshe who taught us about walking the journey through the desert, and about longing and about letting go.

And may we speedily in our time experience the realization of the verse from Isaiah which we say as part of Havdalah - (12:3) - “Draw water in great joy from the springs of salvation”.

Amen.