Transcription:
There’s no principle more important in Judaism when it comes to death and dying than the principle of kavod hamet. Kavod hamet means honouring or respecting the deceased. That is a unique principle in Judaism that really governs the entire process and that’s why I want to talk about it because it’s important that people understand Judaism is an embodied religion. What I mean by that is we don’t negate the body in our rituals and our practice. We have sight, we have smell, we have taste, we have our bodies to touch. All of this is used throughout our lifetime to put us into connection with G-d or with the spirit or whatever you call it. You think about Shabbat candles, they are there to illuminate. We need eyes in order to experience the full beauty of Shabbat. The shofar that sounds on Rosh Hashanah, the mitzvah is to hear the sound of the shofar and I can go on and on and on. Listen, a Jewish male from the day he’s eight years old has the sign of the covenant imprinted on his body. To dispose of a body without any regard for the respect and honour due to that body negates I think that fundamental idea of Judaism that we are an embodied religion, that G-d gave us this outer shell in order to hold our soul to give us a connection to G-d. When we pass away and the soul separates from the body, to just dispose of the body or to mistreat it uselessly would be considered a negation of a fundamental way that we’re connected to our bodies throughout our lifetime. I don’t know if that is an insult to the dead because the dead can’t see, can’t feel, but I know that it is an insult to the living when they see that your body, which is the way you’ve connected to G-d throughout your life, is mistreated, isn’t given the respect that it deserves from what was hopefully a lifetime of good deeds that connected that person both to his or her fellow and to his or her Maker. That’s the principle that we follow when we insist on certain customs and rules and some prohibitions in Judaism. You asked me about cremation. So we consider cremation to be disrespectful to a person’s body because it eviscerates it totally, purposelessly really, and we have an opportunity when somebody passes away to show respect to their body. You know there’s certain ideas in Judaism like not leaving the body alone. That’s shmira, like not decorating the body, like cleaning the body very, very carefully after a person passes away, like not embalming. All these things are sort of desecrations of the body that don’t serve any purpose.