EPISODE 4: Sacred Society

0:00A lifelong New Yorker and Observant Jew, Isaac Pollock spent his career in international marketing, cloak-trotting from Melbourne to Hong Kong to Damascus. When he traveled, he had kind of an unusual routine. When he finds out that someone has, in fact, died, he knows exactly what to do. Isaac is part of a secret society of sorts. We have a WhatsApp group, and I respond with 15 minutes. Isaac leads a Heverkidesha, a Jewish burial society that services two New York city synagogues. I've been biking in New York City all my life. I back to the cross-town of the 186th of Lexington, like going on a 86th stop. And today when I'm there in 10 minutes, I haven't bikin' the last couple of months because I have some knee surgery, but I'm okay. And he parks his bike at a funeral home. Either Riverside Memorial Chapel on 75th or Plaza Memorial Chapel on 92nd.

1:03I tell people, jokingly, don't die Christmas week or during the day of Pesa, nobody's around. But you can't plan it. You can walk down the street and get hit by a car. And you know, it's, we don't know. We take it as it comes. Isaac dedicates his time volunteering with people who just died, ensuring that their bodies are ready to be buried according to Jewish tradition. A process called Tahara, also sometimes Tahara. It involves a bodily cleansing, a ritual cleansing, dressing the person in burial shrouds and physically placing the person in the casket. When Isaac gets off his bike, he joins this secret society of sorts, a sacred society. Their work is quiet, solemn and deliberate. We may chat, but we're not going to talk about old debate's lost scores or, you know, something like that. A year ago, the words hever could each have meant nothing to me. But I wanted to know more about how Jews think about death

2:05and what it can teach us about how to live more meaningful lives. So I went headfirst down this rabbit hole, meeting people like Isaac who told me about how they spend their free time. Here's what I learned. The Hebrew Bible establishes honoring the dead as a guiding principle. Centuries later, the rabbis of the Talmud detailed some of the Jewish burial rituals still practice today, like dressing the body in simple burial shrouds, so that rich and poor would be indistinguishable in death. As for the first formal Jewish burial societies, like the one Isaac leads, they are thought to date back to 16th century Europe. The work of the Hever Kadisha is to ensure that dead bodies are ready for burial according to Jewish tradition. Its volunteers guard the body. That way, it's never alone, from the time of death to the time of burial. The volunteers also prepared the body with great care to be buried as quickly as possible, sometimes within 24 hours. What it actually feels like to do this work?

3:07That's something I wanted to know more about. So I went on a quest learning more about Hever Kadisha and the people who volunteer their time in them. And the more I learned, the more I found people who felt like they were experiencing life differently than I did. They were lifting their gaze and showing up for communities, looking mortality straight on. As I learned, the thing they're looking for in their own lives might be the same thing I am too. From my Jewish learning, this is Showfar So Good. Episode 4, Sacred Society. The End. So Isaac Pollock has done nearly a thousand ta'hara's, ritual purifications of the dead. If we're considered experts in our craft after 10,000 hours, he might just fit the bill. But Tandy Gustin, who lives in Montana, is just getting started.

4:10And I actually grew up in a Presbyterian church and then during lockdown, converted basically to Judaism in a reform synagogue. My husband grew up Jewish, very secularly Jewish, did have a bar mitzvah. But as I was converting, I was way more Jewish than him. As a convert, she was figuring out where she fit in Judaism. The religion, the culture. I don't know how to play majong yet. You know, that's part of my conversion, I'm sure. When I found this world, if ever, Kadeeshah, I was like, that's my mitzvah, that's the one that fits me. She works as a nurse anesthetist in the operating room. And before that, she worked in the trauma ICU as a nurse. That sounds creepy, but I'm familiar with the physicality of death and dying.

5:11I always say I'm uniquely equipped for this mitzvah. And I found it, which was, gosh, to find what you feel like is your calling. I mean, you can probably relate to this. It just feels like, yes, this is it. She's well-suited for the job. And not just because it requires handling dead bodies. To me, this job requires the deepest level of empathy. And that starts before Tandy and her have Rekadeeshah, including the group's leader, or Roche, even entered the same room as a dead person. It happens outside. Out front beforehand, sometimes we'll say a prayer. Often, our Roche, I love it when she does this, she'll read the obituary. And if it's a synagogue member, they'll talk about, yeah, I knew her. She was this, she was that. And these are people I don't know. So that, to me, is just so meaningful. Traditionally, close relatives of the deceased don't do their tahara.

6:13Also, men traditionally do tahara for men and women for women. Though a lot of people I talked to told me that their Havr-Kadeeshahs are developing burial society rituals for non-binary people too. And as soon as they get in the room with the mate or mitzvah, the man or woman who died, they bring the highest level of respect and dignity. Then the first thing we do when we get in the room is we apologize for any wrong doings that may happen during this process. Anything we didn't do perfectly, please forgive us, you know, we're doing our best. Then we get started. Always with the utmost respect for the mate, keeping her face covered, never reaching over her body, just basic ways to honor her. Some people believe the soul is actually still hovering in the tahara room. That when we die, there's not an immediate separation of soul and body. Of course, the mateah can never say thank you, which is why this preparation for burial is the

7:17ultimate gift. It's one of the reasons this is considered, if not a secret society, a very discreet one. This is the ultimate vulnerability for a person who's died. The grieving family is also vulnerable. So when it's over, many Hebrkhidisha's don't share who was on the team in the tahara room. This is Srik Wifchnewski, the executive director of Kovod Vinuhum, which trains Jewish burial societies. And so there's like that component where we don't want to embarrass them, right? There's a saying like you're not supposed to look upon someone who can't look back at you. The tahara process is extensive, weaving ancient traditions in a way that seems both highly specific and very profound. Srik described what it looks like when these people from all over often with vastly different life experiences, maybe even different interpretations of what actually happens after we die, get together to carefully maneuver a dead body and clean it physically and

8:20virtually. And the meita is going to be on a table. And we as a team are really splitting up tasks and the tasks involve preparing the garments that we're going to dress the meita in, which are called ta-h-r-ikhim, and they're white linen garments. You can use linen or cotton the idea is that it goes back to the earth, right? So it's nothing that has any metal on it, nothing of synthetic materials, no zippers, no buttons, nothing like that is on it, filling buckets with water. We use water twice. We use water for the first washing, which is a a cleansing washing, a physical cleansing. So we're cleaning under the nails, we're cleaning all the body, making sure that there's no dirt, no makeup, nothing left on the body, right? And then we're cleaning, which is also blood or fecal matter, anything like that. That's the physical washing. Then comes the spiritual purification. They fill containers with water, dip boards in the water,

9:26and place them under the meita. Then they pour continuously, amounting to about three buckets of water. And while we're pouring, this is a moment of transformation, and we say, ta-h-r-ah-hi or ta-h-h-ru or ta-h-h-ah-hi, depending on the gender. And this is this moment of spiritual transformation. The transformation closes a circle of sorts and prepares the person who's died for whatever comes next. Maybe it's something of a circle. Like we come in in waters and we leave in waters. And so there's this Jewish kind of groundedness that echoes this really beautiful poetry, where we were completing this full circle that allows us to then begin again, which is really for the living. And the hands, the little hands that are doing this work are people who might know us, right? There are people who love us who might have known this person, who might love them.

10:32And the idea that that is not given to someone else, or the idea that this is from within our community, that this is how we show up for one another, that this is a core piece of that, that is so, to me, so deeply moving, such a call to like why we would all want to have that. Sometimes the word to whore is translated loosely to something that's pure. But Sri told me that sometimes doesn't quite do it for her, the focus on purity. Instead, she offered wisdom from one of her teachers, Nina Rubin, who interprets it instead as being spiritually whole, or spiritually vulnerable. She teaches that we come into this world whole, but life cracks us open, whether through illness, death, loss. When we're alive, we have our own ways of finding wholeness. We go to therapy. We immerse ourselves in the mickva.

11:33If it's me, I go for a run. We find ourselves over and over and over, as many times as it takes. We're constantly breaking open and coming back and breaking open and coming back. And then when we get to the end of our lives, right, in our own death, we no longer can bring ourselves back to wholeness. And there's this beautiful teaching that the tohara, this ritual pouring, this gift from our community, is this final restoring to wholeness on our way out. That means it's our community that ultimately makes us whole. Maybe that's why tohara needs to be done by more than one person at a time, working together. I'm oversimplifying here. There's a lot to it. But the matat is dressed in shrouds. And then there are knots. Traditionally, two people twist the knots and one person ties them. And there's a very specific way the knots are tied. Then the body is moved carefully, respectfully, into the earroan or casket. Tanty again. I've heard us called the last responders,

12:37where the last person to see her face, we close the earroan, cover her face, close the earroan, and then we apologize again. For anything we may have done imperfectly, it was not our intention, our intention was to honor you. Then they wash their hands in deep grief. Tanty's Hevra Kadeeshha calls this circle time. They go out in the lobby and they just talk. And in the ta'hara sometimes you're like, it's hard to tell is this meaningful for you? You seem whatever you seem. And then afterward and evidably, there are these profound statements or experiences people have had. You just never know. Imagine trying to thank someone for that. I'm the winner here. We'll be right back.

13:45As I started hearing about different people's experiences with Hevra Kadeeshha, one thing became very clear. In some cases, the people who do them are vastly different from each other. Some, like Tanty, come from a background in healthcare. Others do something entirely different for a living. They might fall across generational lines, political lines, and Jewish denominational lines. In some cases, they are relative strangers to one another when they enter the ta'hara room. But here's what we all have in common. We're all gonna die. I imagine it's hard to be part of a Hevra Kadeeshha without thinking about your own mortality. Martian Miller became intimately aware of that when she started training other people in the Providence Road Island area. They learned about the different steps. Washington Body, the prayers and knots, and they're getting quite good at it. Last night, we was our second time the women's team had went out and we were so much better than the first. You know, we, it's very sacred space and most of us are not around dead people very much. And they're kind of a surrogate

14:53for your own death, you know? And it really strikes you quite, quite powerfully. Not just having to confront what it might look like for you to be on that table, dead in such a vulnerable state, though that's part of it too. The Devora who's sitting on that table is going to be Martian Miller and that is so evident to me in that moment that my own death is not abstract. It's as real as hers. And that's not something that I think about all that often, you know, it's way back there. And this makes you bump up right next to that. It sounds like a valuable exercise because it's not just thinking about your own death. It does something to the way you're thinking about being alive. I'm terrified of death. I'm terrified of losing the people I love. I'm curious about what it's like to die. I am too. Actually think about

15:54it all the time, though it's not so much the dying as it is what I'm doing with my time here. If I'm doing it right, Marcia, like me, feels a little ambivalent about being Jewish. She has questions about God and religion. And volunteering with the Hebridesia is one of the things that fills her taste. She plays pickleball and takes ballet lessons. This isn't it. But it's one of the ways she relates to being Jewish. I wonder if it's because she's on the hunt for something. The same thing I'm looking for. And I think what happens, Kate, is you sometimes feel very alive when you're done because things become very clear. After the first Tahra, I did, I had some people coming over for dinner that night. And I was, I caught these beautiful bowls I love on a sleeve and they both broke and shattered. And you know, I thought, I don't hear you.

16:57It's just, it just not that it, but it's like I've just been sitting for an hour and a half with this dead person. And these bowls are beautiful, but I very much appreciate having this chance to do this for someone else to wash their body. It's for them, but it's just as much for me. I need it very much. Back when Isaac joined a Heverkidesha in the late 1970s, he'd never even seen a dead body. But he found he had an act for this. I find I hate getting needles, but I have no problem handling body parts. Early on, he started trying to learn more about Jewish burial practices, how they evolved, what they mean. And it's worth saying every religion has its own burial and morning traditions. Some vastly different from Jewish ones and some actually quite similar. Islam, for example, also calls for washing and shrouding the body and for a burial that is quick and modest. According to Isaac, faith traditions around death and mourning are essentially our

18:00way of lassowing the most confusing parts of being alive. I don't know what to tell you. The less we understand something, the more we try to understand it through tradition, as if to tell us we have control. And the two areas where we have the least control is the two things that every culture struggles with and has many traditions is sex and dying. And you look at the dying part and the less we understand it, the more we want to make it ours, the less we understand it, the more rules we make about it. And those rules give us a sense, oh yeah, I know what we're doing. This is the rule. The less we know about something, the more we ritualize it. And that makes us part of the community to take it a step further. I suppose my fixation on death isn't all that novel. We're all kind of trying to make sense of this binary between what it means to be alive and what it means to not be.

19:01So we take on these traditions over and over, trying to make sense of that. Marsha again. And we live in a culture that there's almost no rituals left and you see the power of them, like it brings you to your knees. But some rituals we can't perform alone. As a religion, we hold caring for the deceased as a core value, comfort to the living. And that's where it's take away. This is all about deep care. And I think that the not knowing of what comes next allows us to be so present here, rated forces us to think about how am I showing up in a daily way. And I think our end of life traditions are as much for the living if not more so than this for the dead. We continue here. This is what holds us and binds us together when I think of the word belonging. We try to make whole again and again, even as life cracks us open over and over.

20:04Maybe this is a way of finding wholeness. And our way of reminding ourselves that someday we may also be the recipients of this deep care. Like we belong to this tradition that doesn't end with the death of a person. Like it continues on. The story absolutely continues on because of the hands that hold that person at the end. And then are there to accompany the mourners right into this next phase and to ensure that they will rise again and be part of the community and will be able to move forward in their life incorporating this grief. This is how we belong in community. We show up in the joy and we show up when things are really hard. Isaac recently turned 75 years old. This work is both very physical and I can imagine emotional too. I have done 862 to Harris. I've been thinking about a year and a half. I'll reach a thousand.

21:08And then that will be a, that'll be time to go on, right? On one of those nights he told me about where he hops on his bike and wheels down to the funeral home. He normally finishes up after a few hours and then hops back on his bike. I come home and very often, you know, if it's been difficult to harm, I'm very sweaty. You know, we move the body and this is I take a shower. And very often I have a shot of a vatja to drink lachayim to the life of this person. He's always been a natural of this. He's not squeamish and he doesn't take the emotional parts of the job home with him. Actually, he says it makes him better. I am equalized to somebody cuts you off in traffic, you know, you're cursing, you're going to have it, etc, etc. When I did there, I do it the higher I said, by all means, cut me off. I just buried a 40 year old man or a teenager or a child, cut me off. My day is different. I can't stop thinking about this. What it must be like to be biking down Manhattan's Busy

22:08Street's one minute and impure silence with a dead body the next. How that must change the configuration of your heart because it forces you to bump up against the recognition that this is finite. I think about that expression, Momento Mori. Remember, you must die. A reminder, not to depress you, but to remind you that every day is an opportunity. To me, that means every day is another chance to get it right. And to grow deeper into the person I want to be in this world. To be part of something. To be less scared and to relax into this life, understanding that each unpleasant moment, every car that cuts me off in traffic, is all part of this finite existence. If we could all remember that, we might enjoy this whole thing a little more. So far so good is a podcast for my Jewish learning, a division of 70 Faces Media. It's written and

23:25produced by me, Kate Mishkin. Gabrielle Berkner is our story producer. Fact checking by Rehelle Scheinerman. Sound design and mixing by Jonathan Shiflett of Studio Phonic. Music is composed and performed by my mom, Nant Schwartz. The song you're listening to is called Swirls and Eddies. It was written and performed by Grace Corsi as part of her debut album, Downriver. Grace Ja Gel is our art director. Ami Eden is the CEO of 70 Faces Media. And Rebecca Phillips is the publisher. Show Far So Good was originally developed in the Jewish Writer's Institute Digital Storyteller's Lab, and produced with support from my mododies fund. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week.

24:33A simple reminder to make space for the music. I want to go slow, slow, slow, reach down and touch the flowers. Let go, let go, let go, throw all my doubts downriver. I'm learning to surrender. I'm trying to reflect so I stand at the water stage. But the pool gets muddy.

25:34The water plays no mind. It just changes shape. It is swirling in. incomparable from singing. Bride is a bigger story.