Reflections on Taharah

Taharah / Tell My Feet I’m Coming Home

by Michelle Wirth

After my wife died, I felt moved to participate in taharah, a ritual cleansing of the remains of the deceased by people who have volunteered and trained to perform this ritual for members of the Jewish community. Mostly they happen at about 7am, before my night owl mind is fully awake.

The motions of holding a body securely for washing and dressing are similar for the deceased as well as the bedridden. In my half sleep I am with the team, with the deceased, and with the memories of my wife while she was bedridden, and after she died. I never wanted to let her go. I wanted her to go only to the care of people who could love her.

Part of the ritual is to remove polish from the finger- and toenails. I remember the run of gel tips that one winter, when I imagine cosmetology students must have visited a local senior center. If I did taharah later in the day I think I would cry for the intimacy and tenderness of washing someone's feet, the delicate focus of removing the paint they chose.

I woke up this morning. I showered. I shaved my legs and this surprised me. I removed the polish from my toe nails, and now every time I do this I wonder whether someone else will do this for me for the last time, and what polish I will be wearing.

 I put on a fresh coat of paint, the pale pink color my wife chose while we were at a salon with our friend, a bride to be. Before she was married. Before she had kids. Years before she told my wife she had breast cancer, and said, "at least it isn’t lung cancer," which was just three weeks before my wife got her own diagnosis and said, "remember when you said at least it isn't lung cancer?”

 After that coat of pale pink polish, I add a coat of sparkles. I need something to move my spirit. I turn to the music of Vinx, who brushes his hands across the skin of a drum and sings, “tell my feet I'm coming home.”

Taharah Reflection

by Zarky Rudavsky

I have been performing taharot for a good number of years now, as did my late wife.  She remarked how beautiful the tradition is, to dress the meitah in white garments, giving her the appearance of a bride.  I remarked that I saw the men transformed by the white garments as was the high priest. 

I often visit my wife's grave and sit and remember and weep.  It is a great comfort for me to know how lovingly her body was prepared by people who were close friends, who shared the same experiences with her.  Interestingly, I did not envision her dressed in the tachrichim until recently (she died over 3 years ago).  I would try not to think about her decaying body when I would visit the cemetery. 

Recently, I performed a taharah at which the meit was to be dressed in street clothes after our work was done at the request of the family.  This made me think about the beauty of the white tachrichim.   The image of my wife dressed as a bride in the tachrichim came to me, and for the first time I saw her in my mind so beautifully and lovingly prepared by her dear friends for her final journey. 

This is the image I continue to see when I visit her grave.

Washing the Dead in Pittsburgh

by Jordana Rosenfeld

Originally published by Jewish Currents and posted on the NCCK website with permission.

I NEVER THOUGHT that I would be ritually washing and dressing dead Jewish people in the funeral home across from the Giant Eagle on Centre Avenue, on Pittsburgh’s East End. That it would become commonplace for me to gently clean the bodies of elderly women with warm washcloths—lifting the dirt from underneath their fingernails and combing their hair. That I would become conversant in the best practices for putting clothes on corpses. I never imagined that I would experience genuine love for these newly departed Jews whom I’d never met. And also for the living Jews who volunteer, like me, to spend their mornings in a cold windowless room with seafoam green walls and white tile, performing the centuries-old Jewish ritual of taharah. 

There are more of us than ever before. Pittsburgh’s independent, nondenominational Jewish burial society, the New Community Chevra Kadisha (NCCK), doubled in size in the immediate aftermath of the shooting at Tree of Life on October 27th, 2018. I am one of those who joined the chevra after last year’s shooting, seeking to displace images of violent Jewish death. I didn’t know at the time that Jerry Rabinowitz z”l, who died in the shooting, and Dan Leger, who survived it, had been founding members of NCCK, but it soon felt meaningful that this was the space that many of us instinctively sought out in response to white nationalist violence. Over the past year I’ve come to see care work and forms of mutual aid like burying the dead as deeply political activities, central to American Jewish resistance to fascism. 

When a Jewish person dies in Pittsburgh, we are summoned to Ralph Schugar Chapel, the city’s only Jewish funeral home. The back of the chapel resembles a large garage; its eastern wall rolls open to allow hearses to back up to an industrial cooler like the ones at the bakery where I used to bake sourdough bread. Around the corner from the cooler is the preparation room—cold, stuffy, and small—where we find the meitah, the deceased, lying on one of two tables that look like porcelain but probably aren’t, her whole body wrapped in a sheet…continue reading